Although “hitmen” is a word which is quite common in popular fiction and other English language media, my computer dictionary — though the computer is English-made — completely rejects the word “hitman”.
Yet “hitman” — and its plural form hitmen — are words extraordinarily popular with headline writers of all the print media throughout the world, including in England itself.
I mention England because it is the mother country of the Euro-Germanic language that we, East Africans, later adopted as our medium both of formal education and of governance.
The probable reason is that, indeed, the words hitman and hitmen are popular in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales themselves, the very countries that imposed English on us in Euro-imperially conceited and inhuman circumstances.
Among the several British tribes, however, I underscore England because the English were the European tribe that colonised Kenyans, thereby perpetrating extraordinary racial conceit here in East Africa.
England it was that imposed its language on us all as our means of both education and socio-political governance.
It was thus that our high school teachers of English became also our official exemplars in communication with the rest of humanity the whole world over. Howbeit, the word Whodunit (pronounced like “who done it” (which, indeed, is what Whodunit means) — is used by many producers of exciting popular fiction in the English language.
Peter Cheyney, one of England’s most popular story tellers, readily comes to my mind.
For I devoured his fiction throughout my high schooling (against vigorous discouragement) from our headmaster, a profoundly conservative Englishman called Edward Carey Francis.
Indeed, though Peter Cheyney taught me many English words and expressions, our high school teachers (practically all of them British) always vigorously played us against that novelist.
Yet the word whodunit (pronounced somewhat like hoodunnit) is but an uneducated, though very popular, form of a likely question from a police investigator in England itself. Whodunit is an uneducated form of “Who did it?”
That is to say, who committed this folly? The Nation recently invoked it through a prominent page one headline as follows: “He hired hitmen to kill his lover, then they shot him too”.
Such information, however, always raises language questions. For instance, what do hitmen actually “hit”?
Hitmen is a word nowadays used especially by newspaper headline writers even in Kenya and throughout the erstwhile British Empire.
Although the word hitmen usually alludes to individual male perpetrators of a given kind of violence or crime, I have seen the word hitmen used to refer even to female individuals when such persons perpetrated the same kind of violence.
Whodunit is a shot form of Who done it, namely, an uneducated abbreviation of the police investigator’s most likely question: Who did it? It is a form of “Who has done this?” That is, who has perpetrated this crime?”
Our colonial British high school teachers were always ready to inflict the most painful bodily punishment on any African child found reading a storybook by, say, Peter Cheyney.
Even I came to dislike Peter Cheyney, not for the same reason that Edward Carey Francis — the conservative Englishman who headed Alliance High School when I attended it — hated Peter Cheyney. Mr Francis always vigorously discouraged us from reading any fast and excitingly written fiction.
Whodunit, pronounced just like “Hoodunnit?”, which is the popular English fiction writer’s fast way of putting the question: “Who has done it?” or “Who committed this crime?“
It is the uneducated Londoner’s usual way of uttering that thought in his or her own mother tongue.
Whodunit means “Who perpetrated this crime?”
The writer is a veteran journalist and former editor.
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