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By Mihar Dias (C) Copyright February 2023
An article from The Edge reproduced from Reuters on February 10, 2023 02:03 am has a "peculiar spelling error" in the headline.
I told myself that it could not be possible for a respectable publication like The Edge to make such an error. But if it did not then the source must have been wrong in the first place.
Or was it a pun? It is possible, I thought.
Sometimes editors are known to do that just to attract the reader's attention. If that was their intention then in my case they were indeed successful.
That reminds me of my school days when friends who have difficulty with the letter R would just easily slip into using L instead and eventually crept into their essays upsetting the teacher to no end.
So, may be this might be the case for the Reuters editor too. Anyway, a publication like The Edge with graduates in English and journalism could not have made such a glaring error.
But then again my thoughts went back to my college days where students from Japan or Taiwan had the same problems with letters R and L. Perhaps the guys at the Edge might be equally bad at it.
Then I noticed neither did the editors at Newswav who are known for being fussy with spellings from content creators make any attempt to alter the spelling in the said article.
So, I went back to scan Google to get to the bottom of the "error" just to satisfy my own curiosity, way past midnight on Thursday night.
In fact, to my amazement, all articles reproduced from Reuters did not make any change in the spelling at all.
However, British papers did not carry the same word. "Zelo" has been changed to zero. The English being English are always fussy about their language often being terribly upset when Americans spell words not following the original.
Anyway, still curious I checked meanings of words on Google and found "Zelo" in Ukrainian. It means "really".
In Italian it means "zeal" or "a lot" depending upon which dictionary you refer to.
I suspected it must have originated from Latin. So I Googled for Latin-English translation. In Latin it means "serious about" or "be jealous of" or "love ardently".
Anyway, with the above as background let's get back to the original purpose of this exploration.
Below is a reproduction of the page from The Edge reprinted from Reuters:
"Ukraine's defence minister declares 'zelo tolerance' on corruption By Dan Peleschuk KYIV (Feb 9): Ukraine's defence minister said on Thursday hundreds of officials at the ministry or in the armed forces had been disciplined last year after internal audits, and that he had "zero tolerance" for corruption."
Notice that while the headline spells "zelo" but in the text the word is back to its proper English spelling in the first paragraph itself.
So it is a pun after all!
Dan Peleschuk who wrote the article must have laughed out loud when he filed the report.
Perhaps when editors called him back to explain why he used such a word he would have done the same thing I did as above directing them to Google the word in Ukrainian or Italian or even Latin.
Incidentally among UMNO members when Bossku was in power it was indeed "gilo" because the coffers were empty.
Some Malays have problems with Z and money was "flee" instead of free. But most of the money did flee the country. The rest is history.
Meanwhile it has been a fun filled Thursday night, just because of the word "zelo".
Laugh out loud (lol) bro!
Mihar Dias is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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