By Farooq Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi My first column this year is a reflection on Professor Wole Soyinka’s language use ...
By Farooq Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
My first column this year is a reflection on Professor Wole
Soyinka’s language use in his December 30, 2017 article titled, “Blame Passing,
Social Media Automated Mumus – The New Year Gift To A Nation.” In the article,
Soyinka translated a Yoruba proverb as follows:
"Some voices alerted the k-legged porter to the dangerous tilt of
the load on his head. His response was- Thank you, but the problem actually
resides in the legs".
At issue is the expression “k-legged porter.” People who
have read my grammar columns and my book will be familiar with the fact that
“k-leg” is an idiosyncratic Nigerian English expression for what native English
speakers call “knock-knee.” But Soyinka is clearly not unfamiliar with this
fact. He isn’t just a maestro of the language, he was educated and socialized
in native English environments and has near-native mastery of the language.
Because he has mastered the rules of the language so well, he occasionally
chooses to bend them in the service of communicative and cultural
convenience—like Chinua Achebe did. Pablo Picasso once said, “Learn the rules
like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
If Soyinka had intended for his article to be read by native
English speakers, he would have rendered “K-legged porter” as “knock-kneed
porter.” But I can bet my bottom dollar that 90 percent of Nigerians have no
clue what “knock-knee” means. I'm delighted that someone of Soyinka’s stature
has chosen to use this uniquely Nigerian, but supremely evocative, expression in
an article. That’s how to internationalize the distinctive expressive repertoires
that define our everyday dialogic encounters.
In my more than one decade of writing about Nigerian English
usage, I’ve noticed that many Nigerian English users instinctively refrain from
using expressions I’ve identified as peculiarly Nigerian. This isn’t necessary.
To imagine that, as a Nigerian who grew up in Nigeria, you can speak or write
English that doesn’t reflect and inflect a Nigerian flavor is akin to assuming
that you can have a place without a climate. That’s an existential impossibility.
In addition to
“flashing” (intentional missed calls, about which I wrote several columns),
“K-leg” is my Nigerian English candidate for inclusion in prestigious,
well-established global dictionaries like Oxford English Dictionary,
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Chambers Dictionary, Longman Lexicon
of Contemporary English, etc.
But words don’t just get listed in dictionaries because some
linguistic nationalist desires it. Sometimes, it takes a concatenation of
improbable circumstances for this to occur. Take the word “trek” as an example.
It used to be an exclusively South African English word for “long walk” by way
of Afrikaans, the Dutch-inflected language spoken by white South Africans.
After repeated use of the word by prominent South African writers, it got a big
boost with the iconic science fiction TV series called “Star Trek.” "Trek”—along with its various
inflections such as “trekker,” “trekking,” even “trekkable”— is now an everyday
word in every English variety, and competes with the older, better-known “walk”
or “hike.”
In my June 20, 2010 article titled “Top Cutest and Strangest Nigerian English Idioms,” I wrote this about “k-leg”: “This is the Nigerian
English word for the inward slant of the thigh that Americans and Britons call
‘knock knee’ (adjective: knock-kneed). But in Nigerian English, ‘K-leg’ means
more than knock knee; it is also often used figuratively to refer to something
that has gone awry, as in: ‘his plans have developed K-leg.’
“My sense is that this expression slipped into educated
Nigerian English through Pidgin English, although Americans also use the
expression to describe K-shaped legs of tables. But I have never read or heard
‘K-leg’ being used either literally or figuratively in reference to human
beings in either American English or British English.”
Upon reflection, I think it is entirely possible that the
expression was formed on the model of “bowleg” (adjective: “bow-legged”), the
colloquial term, in all native English varieties, to denote the deformity in
which legs curve outward at the knees. Since the name deploys the imagery of
the bow to lend vividness to the condition, Nigerian English speakers also
invoked the imagery of the alphabetic character “K” to denote the inward bend
of the thigh. I find this to be admirable lexical inventiveness worthy of
formal recognition in English lexical pantheons.
My Word of the Year: Necrocracy/Thanatocracy
I solicited my readers for suggestions on the word of the
year for 2017. I received a fair amount of suggestions from several of you.
Thank you!
I have settled on the word “necrocracy” as my word of the
year for 2017. It means government by dead people, which President Buhari’s
appointment of at least 10 dead people (and counting) into governing boards of
government agencies exemplifies.
On December 28, 2016, President Buhari grieved over the
death of Senator Francis Okpozo of Delta State through a formal press release
signed by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity. “The President hopes that
all who mourn Senator Okpozo will carry forward his legacy of unwavering
dedication to the unity of Nigeria, even as the nation would fondly remember
his contributions to peace, development and justice in the Niger Delta.
President Buhari prays that God Almighty will comfort the family of the late
senator and grant the soul of the departed eternal rest,” the statement read.
Then, a year later,
on December 30, 2017, the president appointed the man whose soul he prayed to be
granted “eternal rest” chairman of the Nigerian Press Council. Dead people can’t
have any rest, much less an eternal one, if they are called upon to be part of
governance from the great beyond.
The late Okpozo is one of at least 10 dead people the Buhari
government has appointed to governing boards of government agencies. Since
governing boards of government agencies are the engines of government, Buhari
can be said to have inaugurated an era of necrocracy in Nigeria.
The word is formed from two Greek roots: “necro” and “cracy.”
In Greek, necro is a prefix that denotes death. Examples of derivatives from
the prefix include necrophilia/necrophilism/necromania (which means sexual
attraction to dead bodies), necromancy (the occult art that claims to bring the
dead back to life), necrolatory (worship or undue veneration of the dead),
necrology (an obituary or a list of people who died recently), etc. Of course,
most people know that “cracy” is a Greek suffix for power or rule or form of
government.
The synonym for necrocracy is thanatocracy. People who have
read my November 1, 2015 column titled “El-Rufai’s Kufena Hills and Metaphors Of Death in Nigerian Public Discourse” and my September 23, 2017 column titled
“El-Rufai’s Morbid Fixation with Death of His Political Opponents” would be
familiar with the word “Thanatos.” In the 2015 column, I wrote: “Thanatos is
the ancient Greek god of death, so ‘thanatological’ is an adjective for
anything concerned with death.” Since “cracy” is the Greek suffix for form of
government, thanatocracy means government by the dead.
Before Buhari formally signed Nigeria up for necrocracy or
thanatocracy, this system of government used to be associated chiefly with
North Korea whose dead leader, Kim Il-sung, is officially recognized as the “Eternal
Leader” of the country.
Nigeria’s thanatocracy isn’t by way of its leader (although
Buhari is on the way to achieving this status in the Muslim North); it’s
because the current government is so dead incompetent that it appoints dead
people, including those whose death it officially grieved over in newspapers,
to head government agencies while it works day and night to cause the death of
its living citizens through its insensitive, reverse Robin Hoodist policies.
In addition, a government that took six months to appoint the
most underwhelming cast of characters as ministers in Nigeria’s history is as
good as dead. A government which unprecedentedly took nearly three years to
appoint members of the government boards of government agencies (some of whom
are literally dead), which halted governance for than half of the life of the
administration, is decidedly a necrocracy. I can think of no better word that
defined the essence of the Buhari administration and its governmental system
than necrocracy or thanatocracy.
Haha...I'm just reading
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