The drama that characterised the House of Representatives’ investigation of the Niger Delta Development Commission last week has some grammar components.
While the encounters between the lawmakers and different stakeholders presented some of the contradictions that have kept the region – as well as the country – paralysed, they also threw up some grammatical issues that we can all learn from.
In their presentations, the actors used some expressions that are deficient. I am not talking about the slip of the tongue, to which people are prone especially when faced with tension, the type of which even ignited fainting on the part of a key official of the commission. I am not keen on the fact that a lawmaker described the allegations against the NDDC leadership as ‘homogenous’ instead of ‘humongous’, while he also said something like ‘memorandium’ instead of ‘memorandum’.
The first and now most popular expression from the proceedings is ‘off the mic’. The statement repeatedly came up, and we don’t really need to mention the name or names of those who uttered it and the other errors we are discussing today. Who said what is not the most important thing, but the error and correction are. Of course, we must recognise that the saying ‘off this’ or ‘off that’ is a common one. It is, however, wrong because ‘off’ is not a verb.
If there is any context in which ‘off’ comes as a verb, it is in the American slang, to off someone, which means kill him or her. Consider:Yet, apart from the fact that it is a peculiar informal usage, it does not conform to the context we are discussing. Other wrong variants of the statement include ‘off the engine’, ‘off the gen’ and ‘off the radio’. This thus underscores the fact that, like the lawmaker particularly chanting ‘Off the mic’ in Abuja, a lot of us are also guilty one way or the other. To right the wrong, you have to go for the phrasal verb with ‘off’, meaning a combination of a verb like ‘switch’ or ‘put’ with it.
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