Weird Words We're Wedded to in Nigerian English

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Weird Words We're Wedded to in Nigerian English

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Nigerian English, in general, is characterized by a rather overinflated fondness for excessively recondite vocabularies. Perhaps this fact is true of all, or at least most, English-As-a-Second-Language (ESL) varieties. Stiffness and extravagant formality even in conversational contexts are some of the idiosyncratic linguistic trappings of many ESL speakers.

However, Nigerian speakers of the English language deserve a prize—or, if you’re so inclined, an official rebuke from the custodians of the language—for their uncannily extensive repertoire of weird and obsolescent words that no one else uses in standard varieties of the English language.

I am not talking about big, highfalutin, and intellectually fashionable words (what Americans quaintly call “vocabulary words,” or what Nigerians curiously call “grammar”) that snooty intellectuals use to show off their esoteric erudition and to linguistically map a social distance between them and lesser educated people. I am talking about some really weird words that are so are so out of step with contemporary English usage that they can’t be found in everyday dictionaries.

Take, for example, the word “imprest.” Almost every Nigerian with at least a high school diploma knows it to mean periodic petty cash, in form of a loan, for government officials to spend on incidentals, which is continually replenished in exactly the amount expended from it. This Nigerian usage is faithful to the etymology of the word. Its original Latin form, “impresto,” means a loan.

But there is no American I have met who knows what this word means. Not even a conservative semantic purist friend of mine who has edited many respectable U.S. newspapers and another a fastidious linguistic activist friend who is CNN’s chief copy editor had the vaguest clue what the word means. Heck, even Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize it as an English word, and a majority of notable print dictionaries don’t have an entry for it.

It’s obvious that the word came to our linguistic repertory through our colonial encounter with Britain. But even in Britain, the word has fallen into disuse in conversational English. In the course of my research, I discovered that its use in the UK is now confined to professional accounting circles. So, apart from Nigerians, only professional British accountants are familiar with “imprest.”

Then you have “estacode.” Most Nigerians know this word to mean daily overseas travel allowance, somewhat equivalent to what Americans call “per diem.” (This is a rich source for rifling the national treasury by our rapacious and thieving government officials).

“Estacode” is entirely meaningless for Americans and for the younger generation of British speakers of the English language. Like “imprest,” it’s also not found in many modern dictionaries, and is recognized as a foreign word by every edition of Microsoft Word.

The etymology of the word shows that it first emerged in 1944 when the British government established something called the “Civil Service Management Code.” This Code systematizes all matters relating to the conduct, discipline, conflicts of interest, and political activities of the British Civil Service. So “estacode” probably began as a portmanteau of “Establishment” and “Code.” (A portmanteau is a new word formed by joining two others and combining their meanings, such as “motel,” which is formed from motor and hotel, or “brunch,” which is formed from breakfast and lunch).

But it appears that the use of “estacode” to mean daily overseas traveling allowance for politicians, athletes, etc is peculiarly Nigerian. If that sense of the word was originally British, it no longer is. The latest example I found of the use of “estacode” in British English is in a Feb. 4 1993 news story by David McKie in the UK Guardian titled “The fall of the houses of Poulson.” The story goes: “What there wasn’t was any attention to the Estacode which governs the lives of senior civil servants and says you must never accept gifts from those with whom you have official connections.”

This is the sense in which the word is also used in Pakistan and India, which, like Nigeria, are former British colonies. Additionally, in all these countries, the first letter of “estacode” is always capitalized, unlike in Nigeria where it is not.

Another weird word that we use copiously in Nigeria is “parastatal,” which means a wholly or partly owned government company or corporation. This is decidedly a British English word that seems to have fallen into disuse in contemporary Britain but that is still actively used in almost all former British colonies—Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Kenya, etc.

It is completely non-existent in American English perhaps because the private sector has historically been the vanguard of America’s economy. But with the recent government bail-out of private companies and the formation of government-mandated committees to oversee these hitherto wholly privately-owned companies, such as the AIG insurance firm and the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loan companies, Americans may need this word.

One more weird word that has been popularized through Nigerian 419 email scams is “demurrage,” a charge required as compensation for the delay of a ship or freight car or other cargo beyond its scheduled time of departure. The problem with this word isn’t that it’s not in modern dictionaries. It is. It’s just that it’s too technical and too formal for conversational English. Most highly educated Americans and Britons who have no business with shipping don’t know what the heck the word means. But an average educated Nigerian does.

Other weird words that Nigerian speakers of the English language are fond of but that are Greek to other speakers of the language are, groundnut (which American and British speakers now call “peanut”); vulcanizer (British speakers no longer use this word and Americans never had its lexical equivalent because, as my American friend observed, “we don't do a lot of repairing [of tires]; we just replace [them]); trafficator (which the British now call “indicator” and Americans either “turn signal” or “turn indicator”), etc.

So what do we deserve for these weird words? An award or a reprimand?




Blog: www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[Akurang-Parry, Kwabena]

Na waa oh! African scholars, folks! Can't we have a sense of inimitability, uniqueness, distinctiveness, difference, dissimilarity, "Africanize" (Sorry oh: "idiosyncratic linguistic trappings") aspects of our way of life and so on? Why do we always have to juxtapose what we do with what others do or don’t and come to conclusions that what we do is inferior? Na dis be Ghanaian grammarist’s English! Hurray we call it, and even write it, as blofo [bluff] incidentally, Americans and even Nigerians don’t understand it!

 

Kwabena

 

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Farooq A. Kperogi [farooq...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 4:47 PM
To: USAAfrica Dialogue Series
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Weird Words We're Wedded to in Nigerian English

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com

[kenneth harrow]

i loved your wordplay; but did want to say that i've heard parastatal before and it doesn't seem particularly recondite.
the others are pretty weird...and funny.
you can add one other thing. i've noticed that nigerian pronunciation of english words often varies from american pronunciation in that words are more frequently pronounced the way they look than the way we americans learned they are supposed to be pronounced. as there are many more indian and nigerian and ghanaian etc speakers in the world, i was wondering which pronunciations would prevail over the long run, and more generally how that is historically determiined.
ken harrow

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsub...@googlegroups.com

Kenneth W. Harrow
Professor of English
Michigan State University
har...@msu.edu
517 803-8839
fax 353 3755

[Tony Agbali]

Farooq, The phenomenon you mentioned with regards to word shift and relegation into obsolescence in the original language of the introducing culture, also occurs, somewhat, when you examine the remnant and lingering African linguistic repertoire of some African descended diaspora groups in the Caribbean and Latin America.   This is especially evident within the ritualistic realm, songs, even rhythms or cogent symbolic markers of identity. I found this occurence within the extant Yoruba repertoire of Cuban Santeria (or more appropriately Lukumi).   I recorded some songs that some modern Yoruba speakers with whom I originally shared these chants and songs merely could not decode only saying this is really ancient Yoruba. While, those in Cuban retained these, the contemporary Yoruba I shared these with seems to have themselves evolved, as a result, of course, of many factors not excluding linguistic and historical shifts.   It seems that these lingering linguistic repertoire extant outside of the dominant or introducing fields probably  indicate some attempts to keep some level of fossilized linguistic originality, or equally constitute an embrace of a linkage-identity faithful to its source formation and incarnated toward sustaining social identity- as a marker of distinction or differentiation, in validating social relevance within the essence of mapping cultural cogntion within the universe of identity politics. --- On Thu, 1/21/10, kenneth harrow <har...@msu.edu> wrote: