Repetition shepetition

Somebody told me ninety per cent of all communication is the same seven thousand words; a pack covering distance, with conjunctions and prepositions holding the line, the Eastern Europeans and Africans of the language world. Now and then a different noun takes the lead, sometimes just because the flashy nouns are tired, or prone on the side of the road having their cramps massaged away by eager writers. Take emergency, currently in pole position.

We might be denying him the adulation he once inspired but our latest besieged dictator can take solace in the fact that we are still walking the line laid out in newspapers across the globe in November 2007: Musharraf Declares State Of Emergency. We might even be taking it too literally.

In October of last year, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared an ‘energy emergency’. This kept the ‘polio emergency’ company in the headlines. And since, in June, the UN had already pointed out we had a ‘food emergency’, when a magazine did a story on the water crisis earlier this month they titled it ‘Pakistan’s Other Emergency’. To avoid confusion, a column that ran in the same magazine about an attack on an Express News van that left three people dead was dubbed ‘An Express Emergency’.

Then, last week we read Bilawal Bhutto was 'promulgating a cultural emergency' in Sindh. The heritage of the province was under threat, he said, while announcing the Sindh Festival, it was an emergency. I wonder if he — and others using it as a linguistic boomerang — knows that the word emergency, derived from the Latin emigere, to arise or bring to light, denotes an element of the sudden. An emergency, dictionaries tell us, is a situation that is not just serious and dangerous but also unexpected. That is probably why our political leaders hesitate to use the word in connection with current events. To declare a ‘Taliban emergency’, they feel, as if the waves of brutality coursing over us snuck in when we weren’t looking, might be too disingenuous for a population as bloodied as this to swallow.

So, considering our familiarity with the word, Bilawal Bhutto has clearly been away from Pakistan for a long time if he thinks shouts of emergency will move us. This is a country where, if someone knocked on a door and shouted ‘Emergency!’ the person on the other side would say, ‘Emergency who?’

When we had column space in Pakistan for simpler things, there were many about the ‘education emergency’ too. I once heard someone working to combat it compare the education emergency to the man in the burning cinema who remains in his chair thinking he will wait till the rush to the exit subsides. His charred corpse is discovered fused to his chair the next morning of course. Fool, thinking he could outflank an emergency.

I chose the word outflank because somebody also told me that in Australia and New Zealand an emergency is what you call the reserve runner in a horse race.

Perhaps that is what the bored orderlies under neon EMERGENCY signs at private hospitals who would turn the unphotogenic poor away thought, in my youth. This is not a stable so tether your personal disaster elsewhere. Cases would be directed to one of the city’s large public hospitals. Then some judge ruled that no hospital could ‘refuse emergencies’. In the private hospitals, emergency now is what family clinic used to be. And in the public ones, when there is a bomb blast the hospital declares an emergency in the EMERGENCY.

Pronunciation matters too. If you say ‘EMERgency’, your educational slip shows. If you say emergency like the white people do, you went to private school.

Children are slowest to catch on. They toss meaning and phonetics with abandon. Most will still say, ‘It’s an emergency!’ when they really have to go to the bathroom. It is only a matter of time before we see parents snorting their derision into some hapless child’s face. “Call this an emergency? This isn’t an emergency. I’ll tell you what an emergency is. I remember when we had proper emergencies. Emergencies that could kill you. Emergencies with teeth and claws that ate nibbles like you!”

The child will shift leaf-like from foot to foot, wondering whose puddle of fear it is he is standing in.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 26^th, 2014.

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