Philip Ochieng'
3 May 2008
column
Quoting the President, the Standard reported that military operations would continue around Mount Elgon " until all criminal elements have been routed out " Like all of us, Mwai Kibaki is quite apt to utter such malapropism.
Malapropism is the unintentional misuse of a word by confusing it with another like-sounding one. The word is derived from the French phrase mal a propos, anglicised as malapropos, where (as an adverb) it means "inappropriately" and (as a noun) "something inopportune".
Gave currency
But it was Mrs Malaprop - a character created by Richard Sheridan (in a delightful theatre piece called The Rivals, who gave currency to this term. Mrs Malaprop just could not open her mouth without pouring forth a string of "malappropriate" words.
But, as usual, the President's English was unimpeachable. Indeed, in speech, the President was blameless. It was the reporter who, in his written form, could not distinguish between Mr Luke Lookalike's verbs to route and to rout, and these from to root.
"Routed out" is, of course, possible. But it depends on the infinitive from which you derive your past tense "routed". Is it from "to rout" or from "to route"? The first one - pronounced like "row-t" - has two meanings.
The first is "to hollow", "to gouge" or, as some animals do with their snouts, "to dig into the ground" and, figuratively, "to search with a toothcomb" or "to delve into books". In this sense, to rout can take either "out" or "up".
Clearly, however, the President could not have wished to "rout out" or "rout up" any criminal, that is, to dig them from the ground or search for them like a needle in a haystack or research them in the library.
The rout is also "to defeat utterly" or, consequently, to cause to flee in confusion. Here, rout takes no preposition. So, once again, the President could not have "routed out" any criminal.
But to route (pronounced like root) is to put on the road or to plan a path for (as we do for our rally drivers). "To route" may also mean "to show the door" (as we do to our university rioters).
In speech
Sure, the President wanted to show the criminals the door out of society. But only in a manner of speaking. At any rate, to route does not take a preposition. Therefore, once more, Mr Kibaki could not have "routed out" any felon.
That leaves us with only one possibility among our look-alikes. To root is to embed (as in the soil), to take root, to begin to grow, to establish, to make effective. To be rooted is to be firmly embedded (in the soil and, figuratively, in a cause).
The opposite of to root is to uproot or to root out. And this, precisely, was what the army tried to do to the Mt Elgon criminals - to uproot them, to remove them, root and branch, from the social soil. He wanted them rooted out "
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