A reader took issue with the title of my column two weeks ago. Inter alia, he wrote; “It is incorrect to say ‘Beware of’ . The correct usage is either “Be aware of” or just ‘Beware’. In response, I drew his attention to the transitive and intransitive forms of the offending phrase.

However, having had a fresh look at the headline: Beware of order of words and placement of comas for clarity’, I realised my response to him was inadequate. In today’s column, let us consider the applications of the phrase.

First, let’s acknowledge that ‘beware’ and ‘be aware’ are, to a larger extent, interchangeably used though they mean different things. ‘Beware’ is a cautionary word, an imperative. It warns about potentially dangerous or harmful things or situations. It is an alert to risks or dangers.

Some of the synonyms for beware are ‘watch out’, ‘look out’. Warnings such as ‘Beware, slippery floor’ or ‘Beware of slippery floor’ adorn most of the buildings where floors are either made of tiles or highly polished wood (parquet) that could be treacherous for the unwary.

Along major roads undergoing renovation, one encounters the warning ‘Beware of loose gravel’ or ‘Beware, loose gravel’. These are versions of the transitive and intransitive verbs earlier alluded to.

These technical terms can be intimidating at times, but the trick is finding one’s own unique way of remembering them. In this case, for instance, transitive is easily remembered if one associates it with transferring.

So forth

If I simply write “he filled”, in your mind, the question ‘filled what?” will form. That is because’ filled’ is a transitive verb and the action of filling is transferred to either cup, bucket, glass, hole and so forth.

Hence, the sentence is only complete when written as ‘He filled the glass with water’, ‘they filled the hole with stones’, ‘she filled the cup with tea’. In short, a transitive verb must directly relate to an object. Object in this case is the person or thing receiving the action. Intransitive Verbs on the other hand do not require a direct object to be understood.

Thus, words like beware, jump, run, sit, cook on their own, are intransitive. They however alter form when an object is attached. For instance; Jump over the fence, Sit on the couch, Cook food and so forth.

The phrase ‘be aware’ is a combination of the infinitive ‘be’ and the verb ‘aware”. It is used to call attention to something, to emphasize awareness or alertness. For example, “When you get at the bottom of the stairs, be aware of that lazy tomcat, you might trip on his furry body “.

This serves to inform one that there is a tomcat that loves to lie at the bottom of the stairs. Of course, it serves as a warning too because if one steps on the cats tail, injuries could be sustained as the cat defends itself against what it might take to be an attack. This far, it should be fairly clear why the issue of the past headline was brought up.

The subject

Still on the matter of headlines, another reader used social media to draw my attention to a headline appearing in the Standard last week and started a debate.  The headline read: ‘Police recover over 200 stolen laptops from a house’.

In short, he believed the subject, verb, object order had been violated. His suggestion for the headline was: 200 laptops recovered from a house.

This suggestion, however, leaves out a lot of detail that ideally, a headline should compress. It raises the questions; ‘Which laptops?’, ‘who recovered the laptops?’ ‘From which house were they recovered?’

The newspaper headline as it was captured the essence of the story. However, because of the limited space allotted for headlines, could not accommodate additional wordings that would have dispelled any confusion.

On a lighter note, serious learning is never really serious without the light touch. So, while we debated the suitability of the said headline, introducing the elements of participles and the need to modifying verbs here and there, someone wrote: “On behalf of the common mwanainchi, stop participling and modifying these things.Of importance is that the police recovered 200 laptops - an achievement. Happy Mashujaa Day to them”. That concluded the discussion. To the police, I say congratulations: there were no ugly incidents in Kakamega.