Flingpord

  In a country that is as infrastructurally challenged as Nigeria, certain words are bound to be recurrent. These include light, darkness, hospital, roads and schools. As a result, some substandard usages are associated with them. This is the reason you usually have ‘They have taken light’ instead of ‘There is an outage’ or ‘Off the gen’ instead of ‘Put off the gen’ etc. What about ‘portable water’ instead of potable water’? It is in this context that I situate the erroneous ways ‘drainage’ is also often handled. Many roads are crying for drainage and governments do try to work on such. But the word is an uncountable noun, meaning that it should normally not be pluralised. So, what all of the governments are building is drainage, not ‘drainages’. The term is thus in the class of infrastructure itself, furniture, information and sewage. They are all uncountable nouns not meant to be pluralised especially when it refers to ‘the process or system by which water or waste liquid flows a...