Nigerianisms, Americanisms, Briticisms and Communication Breakdown (II)

In my Weekly Trust column sometime in 2005, I once related the story I heard of a British gentleman who shocked his American female host out of her wits with his perfectly polite Briticism, which turned out to mean something outrageously vulgar in American English. The Brit came to America for an official duty and […]

In my Weekly Trust column sometime in 2005, I once related the story I heard of a British gentleman who shocked his American female host out of her wits with his perfectly polite Briticism, which turned out to mean something outrageously vulgar in American English.

The Brit came to America for an official duty and was received by a respectable, married American lady who worked for the State Department. In order to make the guest feel at home, the lady offered to take him out, along with other people, for a dinner in some exclusive restaurant in Washington, D.C.

But since the guest was still weary from jet lag and needed to catch a few hours’ nap, the American lady told him to let her know when he woke up from his sleep and ready for the dinner.

After exchanging the conventional parting civilities, the man wanted to affirm that he would indeed heed her request to let her know when he was ready for the dinner. So he said, “When I wake up by 6: 00 p.m. I will come by and knock you up.”

The man did not anticipate what followed. The American lady gasped for breath and almost froze. Her eyes popped out. She looked utterly outraged and embarrassed. But the man was confused. And the man’s confusion confused the American lady even more!

In American colloquial English, to knock up a woman means to get her pregnant! But in British English, it means one of many things, the most common being to knock on somebody’s door—literally. Other meanings of the phrase in British English are “to make quickly” or a period of practice before a play, e.g. in soccer.

So the American lady thought she had had the misfortune of relating with a shamelessly lewd old reprobate, and the man probably thought his American host suddenly had some nuts loose in her brain.

In my first semester teaching undergraduate students in Louisiana I also fell victim to this “clash of languages” several times.

One day I had occasion to give my students homework on a Monday and I wanted them to turn it in on the Friday of the same week. So I told them to submit the assignment “next Friday” as we would say in Nigeria. However, on the Friday of that week, nobody turned in their assignment. When I asked for an explanation, they told me, “But you said NEXT Friday!” Then I said, “So what? Today is the NEXT Friday I spoke of on Monday!” They said I should have said “this Friday” on Monday if I wanted the assignment that Friday.

They were right. In American English, when “next” is prefixed to any day of the week, it usually implies that the speaker is talking about the subsequent week. Saying “next Saturday” even on a Sunday does not convey the sense that the speaker is referring to the Saturday in the week. Well, my students got away with not submitting the assignment that Friday.

On another occasion, while giving a midterm exam, I instructed my students not to write on their “question papers.” They all looked blankly at me. I initially thought that they had problems understanding my Nigerian accent which, by the way, CNN recently ranked as the “5th sexiest” in the world behind Italian, French, Spanish, and Czech accents. So I not only enunciated it more clearly— and more slowly— but also wrote it on the board.

But they still said, “What’s that?” And when I pointed to their “question papers,” they said, “Oh, you mean we should not write on the tests?” Write on the test? How the heck does anyone do that, I thought. Test is an abstract noun. How can you write on an idea? Anyway, I have since stopped calling question papers by their name; they are “tests.”

Again, when I said to my students that I would “mark” their “scripts,”, or that I would reduce their “marks” as a penalty for not adhering to certain instructions that I gave in the exam, I was greeted with bewildered stares. I later learned that the correct American English equivalent for “mark scripts” is “grade tests/papers” and, instead of saying I would “reduce their marks,” I should have said, “I will take off points.”

I also recall a communication breakdown I encountered at the university bookstore the first month I came here. I went to the university bookstore to buy a type of padded envelope that Americans use to “post” letters that contain pictures. I forgot the name of the envelope, however, because I had never used it before. The cashier wanted to help me, so she asked what I wanted to use the padded envelope for. And I said, “to post a letter.”

She couldn’t figure out what it meant to “post” a letter. So she said, “On a website?” I was lost. I later learned that day that Americans don’t post letters; they “mail” them. “Post” is used mostly in reference to uploading materials on the Internet. Of course, they have no postal addresses; only “mailing addresses.” Thankfully, they still have “post” offices, not “mail” offices.

And when Americans say “momentarily,” they don’t mean “suddenly”; they mean “soon” or “now.” I remember the first time I boarded an American airplane and the pilot announced that the plane would take off “momentarily,” I got really panicky. I thought the plane had developed a mechanical problem and was taking off suddenly. When nobody joined me in my panic, it dawned on me that “momentarily” is probably the American equivalent of the equally crazy British word, “presently,” which also means “soon.”

Other major British English expressions we use in Nigeria that absolutely make no sense here are “full stop,” which Americans call “period”; “brackets,” which they prefer to call “parenthesis,” (what they call brackets here is what British people call square brackets— like this: [ ]); “dual-carriage way,” which they call “divided highway”; “roundabout,” which they call “rotary” (pronounced row-ta-ree); “ring road,” which they call “beltway”; “lift,” which they call “elevator” (elevator was actually a trademark for the major manufacturer of lifts in America but it has now been genericized to stand for lift, just like Coke has been genericized in parts of the US to stand for soft drinks); “biscuits,” which they call “cookies,” (their biscuits are something else!); “sweets,” which they call “candies”; “chips,” which they call “(French) fries.”