Of the governor and everything gubernatorial

In Summary

• Cybernetics studies how the elements of an electro-mechanical system govern one another (in analogy with biological organisms). But gubernator went into French gouverneur (a ruler), which is the source of the English verb to govern and noun governor.

“Governmental” is one adjective we can form from the noun “government”.

But how can we call “governmental” the ongoing controversy occasioned by Mr Isaac Ruto, one of Kenya’s recently elected county governors? Is it because the argument concerns how to govern a county?

In the United States — where 50 local-government units called “states” are the equivalents of our 47 counties — they surmount that problem by describing all activities concerning the rulers of such states, not as governmental, but as “gubernatorial”. For instance, they speak, of “gubernatorial elections”.

The difference lies, then, in usage by various countries. For, if — as Collins says — the adjective gubernatorial relates to a governor, so does the adjective governmental.

The difference, Collins adds, is that gubernatorial is “chiefly American”.

That seems to assert that the two adjectives are semantically identical but that governmental is what all other English-speaking countries prefer.

Even in the United States, however, it appears that gubernatorial describes only the 50 local governments and governmental only the federal District of Columbia.

The adjectives governmental and gubernatorial, then, are tap-rooted in the noun gubernator (“administrator”), which Latin owed to the Greek kubernetes (“steersman”). Its kuber element is what we have corrupted into our “cyber” words.

Cybernetics studies how the elements of an electro-mechanical system govern one another (in analogy with biological organisms). But gubernator went into French gouverneur (a ruler), which is the source of the English verb to govern and noun governor.

That is probably why the adjective gubernatorial appears confined to North America and is practically unknown in England. Hearsay claims that America’s revolutionary founders deliberately sourced it directly from Latin because, on matters governmental, they wanted nothing more to do with England.

But, given the alacrity with which Jefferson’s constitutionalists voted for English as the new nation’s official tongue — against such Latin tongues as Spanish and French — that suggestion sounds contrived.

But the American “states” (and Nairobi’s headline writers) pose the question: Is the state the same thing as the government? Of course, not. The state includes the entire nation, its territorial expanse and such of its organs of rule as Parliament, the civil bureaucracy, the Judiciary and the armed forces.

Technically speaking, the “government” is just the executive branch (the Cabinet), especially in its role as (a) the chief initiator and chief implementer of policy and (b) the activator of all such other organs of state as the civil bureaucracy, the various wings of the armed forces, the police and the whole people.

That is why a governor is defined as the chief administrator of any political unit.

Governor is the collective term for all our world’s emperors, czars, kaisers, presidents, prime ministers and, once upon a time, Britain’s colonial strongmen overseas.

Yet, in a social species, governance — which is the structure of control in every such unit — begins at home.

Uhuru Kenyatta’s rod is long.

But he will wield it only when we fail to behave in our living rooms, football clubs, church synods and industrial offices.