When he came to me to bemoan how the inability of his girlfriend to grasp the weird structural logic of some English words cost him his relationship with her, I asked him to recount for me exactly what happened. “Even the great Awo called his wife inestimable or valueless,” he said in a last-ditch effort to salvage his relationship. My friend’s attempt to lecture her on negative-sounding English words that have positive meanings failed. So the following day he told his girlfriend that the love he had for her was “valueless!” As you would expect, the girl was enraged. A friend of mine took this lesson to heart and couldn’t wait to impress his girlfriend of his mastery of the recondite morphological logic of the English language.
The teacher answered in the negative and added that words like “invaluable,” “priceless,” “measureless,” “numberless” also appear to be negative but actually have positive meanings. “Does Awolowo mean that his wife is like a worthless jewel?” one student asked. In one of our English reading comprehension passages, we read Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s description of his wife as a “jewel of inestimable value.” Some students in the class told our teacher that the word “inestimable” sounded rather negative. This week’s column was incited by my reminiscence of an incident that happened in the 5th year of my high school.
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