By
Obododimma
Oha
The Igbo have some
interesting folk theories about discourse. One of such is expressed
idiomatically as “Ita okwu eze (were
ekwu)” (literally, testing words with one’s teeth before uttering them).
You would ordinarily the teeth have to do with speech and with people. Quite a
lot! These local people, in the first place, do not have to sit in a phonetics
class before knowing that the teeth may be primarily designed for chewing or
for nutrition, but also functions as modifiers of the stream of air escaping
from the body, from which we found sound-related signs of communication. The teeth are actually made to interfere with
the air as the owner of the teeth and custodian of the escaping stream of air
wishes. Talk of prison break! But the stream of air is not your prisoner,
though. You first of trapped it through
inhalation, and now you are exhaling, allowing the air to escape!
Testing one’s word with
one’s teeth is not the same as chewing one’s words. The latter is a distorting
meant to defraud through discourse, or maybe the person had an accident and is
suffering from some kind of aphasia! That one is chewing one’s words can be as
a result of speech defect or temporary hold-up in the speech, maybe from an
emotional problem or loss in choosing the right word. Whatever maybe the case,
the person is held up, is hesitating, stalling, and waiting to make the right
word choice. If the person makes a mistake in the choice, this may be retracted
and the speech repaired with a better choice. Psycholinguists call this
“self-repair.”
But if one is testing
the word options “with one’s teeth,” that gives us a figurative idea of
conscious selection; the speaker has not yet made any mistake in the utterance.
The person is making judgments, weighing the situation, just like a newly acquired chick hanging one of its legs to
study the homestead first, before putting it
down. Studying your movements and your faces to know whether hostility
is written on them! Is the testing of the words with the teeth not a way of
saying that the speaker must have what sociolinguists would call communicative
competence? Part of what the person is checking is the context of the
interaction, the person being addressed and the nature of the relationship with
the addresser, the appropriate or inevitable medium of the exchange, etc. It
could be on Facebook and somebody has replied a post in an annoying way,
showing even total ignorance of what one has written. Maybe the responder did
not even have the patience and humility to read the entire update. Further, the
responder may not even be human; the responder may even be a virus designed to
make you squander your time arguing endlessness! OK; the entity may be human
but the update does not know this entity or may not have had previous
interactions with the bug! Since the trouble maker is unknown to the updater,
the latter would naturally take into consideration this unknownness and tread
cautiously in the relationship before responding. That certainly calls for ita
okwu eze.
If the responder is a
human virus, the updater even has greater cause to test words with the teeth,
for they cannot tell where the debate
would lead and what in reality they are. There is life after Facebook
netizenship. Maybe we will meet in mall. Maybe the person you will need to to
and meet the same person you are attacking ferociously in his or her office,
live! And you just need help! Yes; there is life after the faceless netizenship;
so, you need to test your word choice with your teeth!
One important issue
that comes up in this checking of one’s word choice with the “teeth” is the
analogy contained in the idea of the reading of text as a “consumption” of the
text. The text is perceived as food! Yes; why not? The reception of the text is
through the ear (and in case of visuality) through the eyes, followed by
processing, in which the brain is actively involved. The processing would
involve some sort of sorting out, rejection and acceptance, substitution,
comparison with previous messages, etc. Let us say that there is an
intrapersonal communication that has to be settled first, before the interpersonal
in which an entity tries to “feed”
another through some “sharing.” So,
processing a text is a consumption of the text.
Another angle that
bothers me as someone who consumes texts all the time from students’
assignments, Facebook updates and comments, twitter, WhatsApp, etc is that this
consumption may entail diarrhoea, constipation, insomnia, restlessness, and all
kinds of psychological disorientation. We do not often think that teachers or
examiners, as readers of writings, may feel frustrated or angry because of what
we have written for them to read. They are still human beings with emotions!
So, no matter how they are enjoined to be impartial and led by their marking
guides to maintain uniformity in the marking, there is always that
psychological response occasioned by the wrong construction, wrong content,
distortion of fact, lame or absent logic, etc. And who suffers the consequence?
The owner of the script! It will definitely show in the reader’s attitude. So,
when teachers correct errors in the writings of their students, they are doing
them a great favour, posturing as their future or hypothetical readers. Who
would taste a badly prepared or badly presented food and not wink?
One’s piece of writing
is, therefore, one’s representative: it goes forth to speak, to present one’s
face , before readers. One’s piece of writing writes about one. That is one reason
we must be careful when we speak or write, especially for the public. Pontius
got it, without knowing it: what one has written has been written and cannot be
withdrawn. Even if withdrawn later, it was once written and will be remembered
one day. That is why it is good to listen to ancient Igbo who enjoined us to test
our words with our teeth before someone else does the tasting! That person is
only tasting and not testing the words!
When I listen to those
ancient Igbo and their folk theorization of discourse, I hear them say, after
taking a pinch of snuff and clearing the nostrils: Okwu din a nka (Talk requires
craft or involves craft). We lose touch with their wisdom when we write or say
anything we like, anything that enters our heads. Those ancients called it imetari ihe (Doing things anyhow) or ikwutari okwu (Saying anything that
enters our heads). Ikwutari okwu
undermines ita okwu eze. If the
speaker tests the words with the teeth before uttering them, that speaker would
know whether the words are hard or soft, whether the words would likely be
received and processed, etc. Some guesswork is definitely involved, but one has
weighed the words first, becoming its first assessor.
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