Top hilarious differences between American and Nigerian English (I)

1. “You’re so silly!” In Nigerian English—which is, of course, derived from Standard British English—this phrase is decidedly an insult. In British English “silly” is chiefly an adjective of disesteem. It usually denotes and connotes stupidity or foolishness. Nigerian English inherited this sense of the term.   Sometime in 2005 when I told my intercultural […]

1. “You’re so silly!” In Nigerian English—which is, of course, derived from Standard British English—this phrase is decidedly an insult. In British English “silly” is chiefly an adjective of disesteem. It usually denotes and connotes stupidity or foolishness. Nigerian English inherited this sense of the term.

 

Sometime in 2005 when I told my intercultural communication students at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, about cultures in southern Nigeria where prospective brides go to “fattening rooms” for months to grow “flesh in the right places” so that they would be desirable to their husbands,they thought I was overstretching the bounds of the truth. One of them asked if I was “just being silly.”

Silly?My pride was violently wounded. However, I realized that nobody was shocked by theunwarranted “insult.” That warned me to restrain my emotions.It turned out that in American demotic speech, to be silly means to be willfully and affectionately funny or playful. So the student just wanted to know if I was merely kidding because she didn’t imagine that there were cultures anywhere in the world where “fat” people are not vilified.

An African-American professor friend of mine who teaches political science at the University of Ohio had a reverse experience in Ghana. While on a one-year sabbatical at the University of Ghana in Legon, a male professor almost physically assaulted her because she told him he was “so silly.” She, of course, meant that he was affectionately funny. “I never used ‘silly’ again for the rest of my stay there,” she told me.

I went to elementary school with children of white American Baptist missionaries whohabitually called their parents “silly” and the parents would smile and even hug them. We used to be mortified. We thought Americans had no culture of respect for their parents.

To be sure, the notion of silliness as foolishness also exists in American English, but it co-habits with the denotation of light-hearted joviality. Americans can often tell the difference between the two meanings of the word through context and nonverbal cues. In American English “silly” is also used as a noun to describe misbehaving children, as in: “Don’t be a silly!”But when it is used as a noun in British English, usually as a form of address, it means a foolish person, as in: Come on, sillies!”

Interestingly, according to etymologists, when “silly” first appeared in the English language, it was written as “seely” and meant fortunate or happy. Isn’t it fortunate that the notions of “silly” as stupid and jovial still happily co-exist in American English?

2.“It’s a shame.” As an expression, “it’s a shame” simply means “it’s regrettable” or “it’s unfortunate.” In the US and the UK, the phrase is used both with a tone of approving empathy and disapproval, but mostly the former. Examples: “It’s a shame your mother died when you needed her most”; “It’s a shame you missed getting a First Class degree by only a few points”; “It’s a shame students of English can’t write good English these days,” etc. In Nigeria, the expressionis exclusively disapproving. That’s because Nigerians isolate the meaning of the word “shame” from the expression and understand the entire phrase to mean disgrace, dishonor, or embarrassment.The preferred expression in Nigerian English (which is fortunately also present in all other varieties of English) to express approving regret is “it’s a pity.”

If you’re a Nigerian and you’re reading this, please don’t fight an American or a Briton who says, for instance, “It’s a shame that your country is associated with Internet scams.” The person could actually be saying that he thinks that Nigeria’s reputation as a nation of scammers is undeserved!In both British and American English, the idiom that unequivocally expresses the sense that one should feel embarrassed or ashamed over something is “for shame!” as in: “That’s a terrible thing to say to your parents. For shame!”

3. “You’re so homely.” An American woman I met recently told me she stopped communicating with her Nigerian online lover because he described her as “homely.” She said that was the rudest, meanest, unkindest, and most gratuitous verbal violence she had ever suffered in her life. In American English “homely” means “ugly.” But in Nigerian English it is used of a woman to mean she is warm, friendly, responsible, decent, and worthy of being kept as a wife. This meaning is derived from the (earlier) British sense of the word. The American lady was rueful after she learned that her friend was actually complimenting her.

4.“Are you mad or something?” This question got my undergraduate thesis adviser, the late Professor Mike Egbon, to break up with his first American girlfriend when he was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The lady wanted to find out if he was angry (which is what “mad” means in American English), but in British (and Nigerian) English “mad” means insane, crazy. My professor understood his American girlfriend as calling him a mentally disturbed person. So he got REALLY “mad” and broke up with her! The lady was flummoxed. When she tried to explain what she meant, my professor said herebuffed her. A few years later, he realized his error, by which time the woman had moved on. Curiously, as I pointed out in previous write-ups, the American usage of “mad” to mean “angry” is faithful to the original meaning of the termup until the late nineteenth century.

5. “Let me take my drugs.” In American English the default meaning of “drugs” is a substance used as a narcotic. In Nigerian English, however, it’s a synonym for medicine or, as Americans now prefer to say, medication. To be sure, both senses of the term exist in both varieties. That’s why, for instance, Nigeria’s anti-narcotic agency is called the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency and why Americans call chemists (or, if you will, pharmacies) “drugstores” and call pharmacists “druggists.”

Early this year, I read of a Nigerian traveler to America who was detained at the airport for hours because she told Custom and Immigration officers that the traditional African herbs she had in her checked-in luggage were “drugs” for her malaria. The “malaria” bit escaped the officers. They were unnerved by what they thought was her forthrightness. After putting the herbs through every imaginable crucible todetermine what kind of “drugs” they were and finding that they tested negative, one of the officers had the good sense to pause and wonder if by “drugs” the Nigerian meant “medicines.” It was then they remembered the bit about “malaria” and thought it unlikely that anyone would treat malaria with narcotics. That was how she got her freedom from detention.

My daughter, whose linguistic idiosyncrasies have now become fully American, also recently jumped out of her chair when I said I was going to the pharmacy to buy drugs for her cold. She had just had a “drugs-free day” in her school where she learned about the deleterious consequences of drug use. So she protested, “Daddy, NO WAY will I take drugs for my cold! Drugs are bad!!” I smiled knowingly and told her I meant “medicines.”