By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi 6. “Herbalist.” In Nigerian English, a herbalist is a witch doctor, a practition...
By
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
6.
“Herbalist.” In Nigerian English, a herbalist is a
witch doctor, a practitioner of black magic, and sometimes a ritual murderer or
an enabler of ritual murder. That is not what the word means in Standard
English. A herbalist, also called an “herb doctor,” is a therapist who heals
sicknesses through the use of herbs. He practices “herbalism.”
I consulted
several dictionaries to see if any of them has an entry for a meaning of a
herbalist that even remotely comes close to how most Nigerians understand it.
Here is the result: Webster's Unabridged
defines a herbalist as a person whose life is “dedicated to the economic or
medicinal uses of plants.” Webster's New
International Dictionary defines it as someone who is “skilled in the
harvesting and collection of medicinal plants.” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as
someone who is “trained or skilled in the therapeutic use of medicinal plants.”
Collins English Dictionary - Complete
& Unabridged defines it as a person “who grows, collects, sells, or
specializes in the use of herbs, especially medicinal herbs.” All the
dictionaries also point out that botanists used to be called herbalists.
As the reader
can see, unlike in Nigeria, there is no negative connotation associated with
being a “herbalist” in Standard English. A herbalist is not the same thing as a
babalawo.
7.
“Offer.” The way Nigerians use this word in an educational
context mystifies me to no end. Nigerian university and high school students
often say they “offer” a course where other English users would say they “take”
a course. For instance, in response to one of my Saturday columns deploring the
discontinuation of the teaching of history in Nigerian secondary schools,
someone wrote to tell me that he was the only one in his class who “offered
history.” It had been a while since I heard someone say or write that, so I was
initially puzzled. It didn’t take long, though, to realize that he meant he was
the only one in his class who “took history” as a subject; others chose
government.
This popular misuse of “offer” in Nigerian English has
real consequences for mutual intelligibility in international communication. In
my December 18, 2011 column titled “Top Hilarious Differences between American
and Nigerian English,” I recounted the story of a Nigerian who “wrote to tell
me that an American university admissions officer was bewildered when she told
him she wanted to ‘offer a course in petroleum engineering’! I told her in
America—and in Britain—students don’t offer courses; only schools do. To offer
is to make available. Students can’t make courses available in schools; they
can only take or enroll in courses that schools offer.”
So the school
“offers” the course, the teacher “teaches” it, and the student “takes” it. A
student can’t offer a course.
A similarly puzzling Nigerian English phraseology is the
use of the word “run” to indicate enrollment in a course of study, as in, “I am
running a master’s degree in English at ABU.” That expressive choice became
mainstream, at least as far I am aware, after I left Nigeria. That was why when
I first heard it I thought the person who “ran” a course was the director or
coordinator of the course.
This was how the conversation went:
“Hello. I am running a postgraduate course in mass
communication at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and need your help.”
“Let me get this straight first. Do I understand you
to mean that you’re the postgraduate director of the mass communication program
at Nsukka? If yes, what help do you need from me to run the program?”
“No, I am not a postgraduate director. I am a PhD
student.”
“A student? How do you run a program as a student? Are
you a student assistant to the postgraduate director?”
“No, just a student.”
“OK. So you mean you’re enrolled in a PhD program?”
“Yes, that.”
This conversation took place many years ago. Since
then, I’ve heard and read many Nigerians say they are “running” a course when
they mean they’re enrolled in a course. I frankly have no idea where that construction
came from. But to run a department, a course, a program, etc. is to be in
charge of it, to direct it, to control it.
Maybe the expression is an incompetent mimicry or
misapplication of the idiom “run its course,” which is used to say that
something starts, continues for a time, and then ends, as in, “We will let
Buhari’s incompetence run its course so that in future Nigerians will learn not
to trust deceitful people who mask their duplicity with the veneer of faux
integrity.” But to use the idiom in place of “enrolled for a course” is simply perplexing.
8.
“Local.” This is invariably a bad word in Nigerian English. It
is often used in place of “inferior,” “uncivilized,” “crude,” “insular,”
“backward,” “substandard,” etc. But
that’s not the Standard English meaning of the word. In Britain, America,
Australia, and all places where English is spoken, “local” simply means
belonging to a nearby place. When used as a noun it can mean a person who lives
nearby. There is not the slightest whiff of inferiority in the word in all
varieties of English except in Nigerian (and perhaps Ghanaian) English.
Here is what Professor David Jowitt wrote about this
in his Nigerian English Usage: An
Introduction: “…‘local’ [in Nigerian English] is synonymous with a range of
other adjectives, according to context: ‘parochial’, ‘narrow-minded’,
‘primitive’….By extension again, however, almost anything can be described as
‘local’: a house, a school, a piece of furniture, an agricultural implement. In
all these cases the use of ‘local’ imputes inferiority to the object so
described. In [Standard British English], on the other hand, ‘local’ does not
have connotations of imputed inferiority; and a common use of the word is in
attributed position preceded by ‘the’, e.g. ‘the local priest (=the priest
serving a limited area…).”
Let me give an example to illustrate the widespread
misunderstanding of the word “local” in Nigerian English. In a January 30, 2012
news report about the death of the wife of Nigeria’s former Inspector General
of Police, the New York-based Sahara Reporters wrote: “Hajia Maryam Abubakar
died of cancer in a local clinic in Kano.”
Several commenters berated Sahara Reporters for using
the word “local” to qualify the clinic where the IGP’s wife died. Others
thought the woman would have survived if she had been taken to a “standard” or
“better” hospital instead of a “local” one. I will republish just two
representative samples: “What a report!! What has local clinic got to do with
it? Are you mocking the IG, even at the loss of his wife? How wicked can you
be? When did Nigerians descend to this level?” “Why a local clinic? What’s d
Acting IG doing? Her life would have been saved if she's in a better hospital.”
By contrast, Nigerians understand the word
“international” to mean “of high quality.” That is why almost every private
primary and secondary school in Nigerian urban centers has “international” in
its name. My first daughter used to attend a school called “Unity International
School” in Abuja, although there is not a single non-Nigerian in the school. In
Standard English, “international” means involving at least two or more nations.
9.
“Reply me.” Nigerians almost always use this word
without the preposition “to.” During a training I was invited to give reporters
and editors in Nigeria sometime ago, I asked who could identify what was wrong
with this headline that appeared in almost all Nigerian newspapers at the time:
“Jonathan replies Obasanjo.” Nobody did. When I pointed out that it should be
“Jonathan replies to Obasanjo,” the reporters and editors looked quizzically at
me.
10. “Talk less of.” This is the Nigerian English
expression for “let alone” or “much less.” Even highly educated Nigerians use
this expression, which is actually borrowed from Nigerian Pidgin English. Where
a British and American speaker would say, “I can’t remember the title of the
book we were supposed to read, let alone the details of the story,” a Nigerian
speaker would say, “I can’t remember the title of the book we were supposed to
read, talk less of the details of the story.” Sometimes “talkless” is written
as a word. The expression probably emerged out of the misrecognition of “much
less.”
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