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WHEN CONVERSATION WANES, THE MEANINGS OF EXTRAORDINARY WORDS GET TONGUES WAGGING
Tessa Dowling

The Sunday Independent
December 10 2006

There we all were, sitting kwaMzoli, with no conversation. Seriyas! Sometimes it happens, a bra or a leyidi (lady) just doesn't have anything to say.

Bra Mali was not going to mention to anyone how he had not won the Lotto, even though he had paid a famous sangoma R567 to give him the numbers in a dream.

Dikeledi was still wondering why her doctor drew pictures of her menstrual cycle every time she visited him. She guessed no one at the table would be really interested.

But then, hallelujah, in walked Bra X. He pulled up a chair and produced, from inside his bulging briefcase, a book.

He held it up and announced grandly: "The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World, by Adam Jacot de Boinod."

He was plainly disappointed at the less than enthusiastic response.

"Hey, you people! Kutheni nithe cwaka nje?" (Xhosa: Why so quiet?)

He took a stubby finger and read from the first pages of the book. "Maybe you are termangu-mangu?"

"Huh?"

Bra X kept his thumb on the page, but enhanced his professorial air by using his other hand to put on a pair of glasses with one lens missing. "Termangu-mangu is Indonesian for 'sad and not sure what to do'."

We all clustered close to him, to get a look at this new "dictionary". There was a helluva lot of shouting and remonstrating as Bra February grabbed the book and read, rather badly, "OK, listen, listen, madoda (men), this one is for us: Narachastra prayoga is Sanskrit for men who worship their own sexual organ!!" He looked down adoringly towards the region of his own, as if he had just fallen in love with the nooi next door: "Nei, man, this is a kwaai (terrific) boek! Bra X, you must mos photocopy it for us!"

"That's illegal!" snapped Sis' Dikeledi, whose brother was a librarian and who was not in the mood to worship anybody's sexual organ, let alone Bra February's.

Aware, however, that her censorious tone might exclude her from the "book club", she quickly added: "But we can create our own volume of weird African words. How about the Sotho word thonkga, 'hurt someone on a place which is already sore'?"

She was thinking of the rough way her gynaecologist had shoved some blunt instrument into her already tender parts. "There you are, a nice little follicle," he had murmured, completely unaware that in her mind she was kicking him in the balls with her tikoloshe (slang: sharp-pointed shoe).

Sis' Dudu, who had failed linguistics 101 at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, not from lack of talent, but through missing the exam because she always used the diary of the year before, slammed her bottle down on the table.

"I wish the English had an equivalent for the Zulu isisholo, 'an unmarried man in disfavour with women'."

Liseli, a quiet Zambian copywriter whom no one ever really noticed, but who had been taking a keen interest in the proceedings, suddenly chirped: "You know, Lozi, my language has some very interesting words. We have sooko, which is 'a tree on which skulls of shot animals are hung by hunters as an advertisement to attract custom'."

"Hey, Mzoli!" shouted Bra X, spluttering his drink over the table with excitement. "Forget about your fancy signage! When your customers get too rowdy you can sommer hang them babalas in the branches."

He laughed so much at his own joke that he choked on a chicken wing and Mamthembu had to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre - English: first-aid procedure for dislodging an obstruction from a person's windpipe.

Zambians are patient, and Liseli finally managed to find a gap to continue. "Then we have buili-limifu, which is 'a state of not crying at someone's death'."

Bra V had to confess he had experienced major buili-limifu when the Groot Krokodil passed on to an even greener wilderness.

Liseli carried on relentlessly: "Katanafu is 'excrement involuntarily emitted by a person knocked out'."

"Well done!" Bra X slapped Liseli on the back so hard that Bra February, recently converted to penis worship (now that he had found a word for it), had to say: "Don't hit our Zambian brother so hard! We don't want no fokken katanafu here!"

Matome, who had been racking his brain the whole evening trying to think of a good Pedi word, suddenly shouted out, "Tladimothwana: 'lightning sent by one person to another'!"

His friend from the office, Piet Geldenhuys, said drily: "I never knew I needed a word for that, my pal, but I am going to tell my boet, he works in the post office. I suppose you would send it speed services."

At this stage, Bra X felt he needed to assert the authority and erudition of the core group, the Xhosa Nostra.

"You know everyone is talking these days of 'culture', using it to allow them to do all sorts of naughty things. But there is something I would like to say to all those men in my culture who are guilty of that - what is it, Bra Feb?"

"Narachastra prayoga - men who worship their own ..." He did a sexy Michael Jackson tilt with his pelvis.

"Yes, yes, that ..." Bra X seemed a little embarrassed. "Well, in my Xhosa culture there is a word qutsa, which is when a boy lies on his side on a flat rock or on hard ground and beats his hip bone repeatedly on the hard surface."

The non-Xhosa-speakers in the group stared in bafflement. "You think that is mad?" He burped and looked around the group. "It is not. It is a punishment. It is what we make boys do when they are guilty of disgusting things."

"Hmm, I think we should have some mass qutsa-ing on the pavement outside parliament one of these days," Sis' Dudu growled.

Liseli, the Lozi man, bought everyone a packet of salt-and-vinegar chips. He said that he had lyuululu, "a desire for salt things after one has drunk a lot of alcohol".

Somehow the lack of conversation that had hung over us at the start of the evening had vanished, and I remember the night as one in which we talked harder than we drank. Bra X was found at 2am, asleep on the toilet, clutching his book, with a long, grey smear of umkhala (Xhosa: dried saliva extending from the corner of the mouth to the cheek of a person who has been sleeping).