THE EDITOR, Sir:
I READ (with a great deal of amusement) Professor Hubert Devonish's long-winded essay (Sunday Gleaner of January 20, 2002) on the wonders of formalising Patois and how this will enhance everybody's rights and nobody will be discriminated against ever again because they can't form even the simplest of phrases in English.
Considering there have been already over 100 murders since the start of the year, which includes a couple of massacres, along with numerous other problems and government scandals currently being faced by the nation, this is the best our supposed intelligentsia can do. This then (as Churchill would have said), is UWI's finest hour! A diatribe on how we would go about a timely, costly exercise in futility to apply syntax and grammar to Patois so important in the general scheme of things.
Do Lord, with all we have to put up with in Jamaica, please spare us from the over-abundance of educated idiots, nutty professors and Carolyn Cooper clones. Dr. Cooper's (yet another Doctor) idea of a shining example of Jamaican manhood is 'Ninjaman' (who was invited to speak at that noble institution I understand).
But of course, with 20+ children with umpteen baby mothers and in Ninjaman's words, "but is ongly di lass pickney me really deal wid" (well, that's nice for the other 20 kids isn't it?) wouldn't you all agree his words of wisdom, in drooling Patois (but of course, this is UWI after all) are just what we all need to hear?
I am, etc.,
M. TURNER-SMITH
Kingston 8
