In the physical world, a body is likely to disintegrate (often explosively) after it absorbs a certain amount of heat. But in Kenya, although something has been “hotting up” every day ever since the creation, no amount of heat has ever shaken us.
We remain as serene and majestic as the rocks of Kiboswa. Open any news page of the Nation or the Standard and — as surely as the sun sets in the west — you will find a headline affirming that the rivalry between this and that political party “hots up”.
It is thus miraculous — and merciful — that nothing ever reaches the “heat limit” and explodes.
Literally, to hot up is to acquire (more) heat. But, metaphorically — as in politics — it is to make or become more active and more exciting.
This poses grave problems for the news merchant.
For the headline is the outer covering which, by its freshness and beauty, attracts the would-be consumer into a story’s inner goodies.
If you cover your merchandise in the same old tattered material every day, who will buy it? If every morning, your headline on Kenya’s politics is that things have “hotted up”, where is the news? For news is what a commercial newspaper is in the market for, and headlines are its stickers, posters and puff.
That is why every headline must be both accurate and attractive. Ali Zaidi of The EastAfrican — the most imaginative East African headline writer (in English) I have ever known — shows that this is where the power of the headline lies. If it is not true and realistic and yet also creative and racy, the headline writer has failed.
The point is that if the same thing or phenomenon “hots up” every successive day, then “hotting up” ceases to be news. Indeed, since it never reaches the upper limit at which the heat conductor should explode, it cannot help sell the news item beneath the headline.
Thus to make “hotting up” the major point of your headline is like announcing in a page one “splash” banner that “the sun rose this morning”. It is like the reporter who — when I worked on Dar es Salaam’s Daily News in the early 1970s — one day quoted the government minister concerned as “revealing” that Christmas would fall on December 25 that year.
Nevertheless, given Kenya’s ethnic bigotry, political things actually do “hot up” daily. The point, however, is that each “hotting up” has a different socio-moral content which is what the reporter ought to “nose” his story with and the sub-editor ought to identify and specifically highlight in his headline.
It doesn’t help if you change “hot up” to “heat up”, as the Nation did on February 14, when it said in a headline: “Cord woos Asians as battle heats up”. No, I am not familiar with this other verb. To
heat also means to make hot or warm (either literally or, as in politics, only metaphorically). But it does not take the preposition “up”.
heat also means to make hot or warm (either literally or, as in politics, only metaphorically). But it does not take the preposition “up”.
philipochieng39@yahoo.com
credit: nation.co.ke
credit: nation.co.ke
