Deputy President William Ruto speaks during a past function. The deputy president is highly learned in the area of plant (and probably animal) biology. PHOTO | FILE NATION MEDIA GROUP
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Why do I feel a tad uneasy whenever you refer to William Ruto as “Deputy President”?
Since the question has nothing to do with our young brother, let me put it differently. Why does our new Constitution prefer the term “deputy president” to the term “vice-president” with which we began our republicanism?
But was it perhaps because, in one of its senses as a substantive (noun), the word vice denotes any action or habit considered immoral, evil or, otherwise, anti-social? That, of course, is on the cards.
But, once again, it does not reflect on Mr Ruto. For the change was not made by him or with him in mind.
Social vices include murder, rape, robbery, theft, speeding (on the road) and bigotry (political, sectarian, sexist, racial and tribal). However, certain other vices — namely, tools with pairs of jaws with which you can hold an object while you work on it — are humdingers.
The word “humdinger” is used especially in the United States to refer to a really good thing (or person).
VICIOUS PEOPLE
But users of such vices — if they hold definite religious opinions — are advised never to allow such tools into the hands of neighbouring Christian or Muslim fundamentalists because these are thoroughly vicious people.
As predictably as the sun sets in the western horizon, it will provoke them into wielding a really monstrous vice to viciously smash your brain. For a fundamentalist is called so because he has the brain of a Lilliputian.
His skull contains only a pinch of medulla oblongata. And it is so skewed that he will rush into smashing the brain even of a newborn baby because, to his puny mind, the baby must pay for the vices of its dissentient parents.
It is called fundamentalism because it purports to go to the fundament — the root — of certain commandments in the book of Deuteronomy, astonishingly primitive and barbaric thoughts and dictums which, although perhaps passable in a Palaeolithic (Old-Stone Age) book, should never constrain any civilised society in the age of satellites, computers and astronautics.
GOD-GIVEN TRUTH
In the Calvinist Christianity of the United States, fundamentalism is the view that whatever the Bible says is the literal and God-given truth.
In Islam, it demands strict obedience to every letter of the Qur’an. Yet scholars now know that both books use a form of language — known in Hebrew as Pesharim — which will lead you completely up the garden path if you take it literally.
A fundamentalist is a person who takes every scriptural metaphor, simile, pun, syllabic reversal and other figures of speech at face value — completely ignoring the exegesis with which even Jesus of the gospels admonishes his disciples: to strive to hear every scriptural statement with the same inner ear with which the poet William Wordsworth once heard the message of certain “daffodils”.
Vicious is the adjectival form of the noun vice in its negative senses.
However, the word vice is also adjectival in such positive expressions as vice admiral, viceroy, vice chancellor and vice president.
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