COMMENT The week’s most inescapable cliché?

There’s a clear winner - "winnable" candidates.

Grrrrr!

The point has been made before but must be made again.

It seems that, once an egregious error of English expression has been uttered in Malaysia and has entered into what may politely be termed "the official mind", it can never thereafter be erased, removed or corrected.

Specifically, this week, what is a "winnable" candidate?

What could that silly term ever possibly mean?

There are "winnable" seats, seats that can be won.

But there is no such thing as a "winnable" candidate.

There is such a thing as a "winning" candidate.

In fact there are two such things.

One is a candidate who, during the course of an electoral contest but before (or just when) it is concluded can be said to be, or appears to be, "winning" the contest.

The second kind of "winning" candidate is one with "winning" or, in other words, endearing ways, a pleasant manner, an attractive personal style.

But “winnable"? That literally means “able to be won”, as a prize. Or, in Malay, “ yang boleh dimenangi ”.

What is now being sought by the Umno leadership is candidates with good prospects, those with the best chances, of winning.

In other words, the kind of candidate who can or might be confidently expected to win, one who has good expectations or prospects of winning. Or, in Malay “ yang berupaya menang, yang ada harapan untuk menang, yang kemenanganya boleh diharapkan ” and all that.

The problem in many political and electoral systems - I am not speaking here about Malaysia, be it noted! - is that the smart people who really decide things are not much interested in identifying, finding and putting forward "winning" (or incorrectly, in the current local usage, "winnable”) candidates.

They don't much care who wins.

What they are interested in is that the candidates, whoever may ultimately win, will, after their victory, be not "winnable" but "buyable".

They want, and they want the system to provide and make available to them, "the finest politicians that money can buy"!

That is not the challenge that Umno has now set for itself.

Silly expression

What Umno is looking for, and if it is to prevail and survive must look, for is "competitive" candidates, candidates with good prospects of winning.

They just want winners. Simple as that.

Yet we are now drowned in “winnable” claptrap.

The only thing that is literally "winnable" from all this nonsense is stupidity.

So, can we please have and put an end to this "winnable" candidate drivel?

I can bear it no longer!

All else aside, this ridiculous, and embarrassingly erroneous, infatuation with the term “winnable” is yet another case of the local preference, when moving from Malay into English, to prefer - on the misconceived grounds that, being more indirect it must therefore be more polite, or stylish, or “ halus ” - the passive over the active voice in verbs, and thereafter in words (often, as here, participles used as adjectives) that are then drawn from those verbs.

My favourite recent example heard a few days ago:

" Beribu-ribu ekor burung gagak telah berjaya ditembak oleh majlis bandaran ".

(Thousands of crows succeeded in getting themselves shot by the local council.)

What a success!

How hard those birds must have worked to achieve that result, to realise that challenging outcome, to accomplish that success.

I fear that, all too often here, " rakyat umumnya telah berjaya biperbodohkan oleh penggunaan 'bahasa resmi '

(That all too often people “succeed” in getting themselves stultified, made stupid, by their use of official language, terminology and idioms).

Again, the only thing that is literally "winnable" from all this nonsense is stupidity.

Stupidity can always be won.

It comes at a cheap price, but you always pay heavily for it.

No more “winnable” candidates, please.  Let’s just get rid of them.

Well, of that silly expression, anyway...

"Stupidity is a bad quality. But to be unable to put up with it, to be vexed and feel ground down by it (as I am), is another, and almost as bad as stupidity itself. To this latter fault I plead guilty". Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592).

CLIVE KESSLER is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at University of New South Wales, Sydney.