Wordsmiths are a-plenty in Malaysia. However, another commodity, people with constant memories, are in short supply.

Many wordsmiths here churn out words they don't mean, or they later qualify with mind-boggling caveats, or most wonderful of all, give a word the opposite meaning!

A now famous example: for more than two decades the federal government had been paying oil royalties amounting to five percent of oil output revenues from Terengganu to that state government. It was a happy state of affairs. Until 2000, when the state government changed hands from Barisan Nasional to federal opposition party PAS.

With a lightning strike of memory recall, BN leaders said all along the payments to Terengganu, including a partial payment of RM432 million in 2000, were, genius wordsmiths coin the word " wang ehsan " (goodwill payments) ... and the rest, as a cliche readapted, history is re-written!

They have made it a tool for their own expedience - political, commercial, personal or mere survival interests.

Another bunch of creative writers abound at the stock exchange. Chain listing rule, put option ... then they come out and trumpet a whole new list of good sounding rules to make the KLSE more transparent and attractive to foreign investors.

But foreign fund managers are not kindergarten kids like some of the board of directors of blue-chip companies take Malaysians generally to be. So they make up more rules for "greater transparency", but ignoring the breaches they officially or unofficially sanction, by both omission and commission.

But Malaysians, especially its leaders, to my mind, display short memories. The 1997/98 financial, economic and political crisis is merely a year or two old, and yet the lessons are not learnt.

Famous speeches

But words when properly crafted can inspire.

In our schooldays, when English debates were quite popular, orators often quoted from Lincoln's Gettysburg address.

Those familiar with World War II would recall some of Churchill's famous speeches to inspire the Allied troops to final victory, despite great odds and sacrifices in lives lost on the battlefield.

But in Malaysia, gems are greatly outnumbered by coals.

Remember the great one about "My decision to resign from" (from a minister's post) "is final and irrevocable"?

When something is irrevocable, there is no turning back, even when one is facing the muzzle of a gun.

But of course, some ingenious puppet-master with a sleight of hand turns the "irrevocable" decision to resign to merely "an expression of wish to resign" and a few weeks later, following an orchestration of appeals by supporters, party members and community leaders and plain citizens, the "wish to resign" is reversed, and lucky Malaysians are stuck with a fine performer of a minister who continues to take us on more joy rides.

So politicians get away with such gostan (go astern) moves 'cos they take their constituents as kindergarten kids, or worse, as idiots, such compliments ... or is it to complement their own level of IQs?

Something to best is MIC chief S Samy Vellu's Lunas statement: "I shall not leave Lunas if BN fails to win this by-election ..." .Yes, by the way, he can still "take leave", with or without permission of the Lunas electorate, for he is a Yang Berhormat !

These are interesting times ... These are also times which breed interesting people.

Green lung

Then there was the promise to make the present site where KLCC and Petronas Twin Towers stand a national park - green lung for weary Malaysians tired of all the concrete in KL - when the former racecourse was acquired from the Kuala Lumpur Turf Club. What happened along the way ...?

And of course, the promise of a politician to then Penang's chief minister Lim Chong Eu that he (not Tun Lim, now retired ) would jump off the Penang Bridge if it (the bridge) materialised. Yes, and so far several have jumped off the bridge (mostly of love-lorn lovers), but not this politician.

So don't ever take politicians' words at face value, add several layers of salt from off the South China Sea!

But the same advice applies to other subjects and levels too like at the workplace where bosses say wonderful things to their employees but treat them with inhumanity. There are community leaders, non-government firebrands preaching high and mighty mission statements but don't even practise a tenth of their own message.

In our land of potential beauty and plenty, has it reached such a state that only a dead politician's philosophy engraved on his/her epitaph can be his/her only word to honour. Yet often then, a dead man's word in his will is often challenged by his offspring, so that even the living would help him not keep his last words!

I end this swan song of Ruminations with Lord Alfred Tennyson's from The Charge of the Light Brigade : "Theirs is not to question why, Theirs is but to do and die ..."

To reporters who have been under my charge (my privilege indeed, for I learnt a lot from them), my message is: Tennyson's reality befits the soldiers in the battlefield, but as wordsmiths with a commitment to the truth and a mission of integrity: "Yours is to question why, Yours is but to investigate and inform and educate, To report the facts and tell a balanced story, Arrive at an approximation of the Truth, With a discerning eye."