*Photo: Prof Kehinde Yusuf*
We are living in a world in which words are indispensable. What words stand for, the pictures they create in a person’s mind, the actions they are used to perform, the impressions they are used to create and the emotions they are used to evoke make up their meanings.
These meanings are variable, because the human societies in which they are used as tools of existence are varied. So, in different situations, the same word may have different meanings and different words may refer to the same thing. The meaning of a word may also differ depending on who is using it. This set of facts is represented in the semantically profound dictum, “Meanings are in people, not in words.”
Words are also used to show affection. This was what happened when the 78-year-old President-Elect Joe Biden acknowledged his grandparents as follows in his acceptance speech when he won the presidential election in the United States on 7 November, 2020: “So, remember, as my grandpa, our grandpappy, said when I walked out of his home when I was a kid in Scranton. He said, ‘Joey, keep the faith.’ And my grandmother when she was alive, she yelled, ‘No, Joey, spread it. Spread the faith.’”
Similarly, on the death of his mother Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96, Prince Charles (now King of England) baby-talked as follows on 9 September, 2022 to a global audience: “On behalf of all my family, I can only offer the most sincere and heartfelt thanks for your condolences and support. … And to my darling Mama, as you begin your last great journey to join my dear late Papa, I want simply to say this: thank you.” This baby-talking 73-year-old child reminds one of the fact that the meaning of the word ‘child’ does not necessarily have to include the feature of ‘being young’, as many people presume.
This presumption played out when an around-70-year-old Professor moderating an academic paper presentation on 15 February, 2024 said, “We’re all children”, without intending to be funny, and many people in the audience burst into laughter. As this example shows, in communicating, speakers and hearers may make different assumptions about the meanings of the words used. When these assumptions are in conflict, they may result in mild or even humorous reactions, but conflict in speaker intentions and hearer perceptions may, in some cases, have grave consequences.
Explaining another case of the interesting use of affectionate language, in an 18 September, 2023 issue of the Daily Post, popular Yoruba singer, Ahmed Ololade, who uses his mother’s feminine oríkì àbísọ (i.e., personal praise name), Àṣàkẹ́ (meaning ‘One who is specially-favoured’), as his professional name, was reported to have said: “My stage name is actually my mother’s. While I was in the cultural group, people used to call me ‘Ọmọ Àṣàkẹ́,’ which means ‘Child of Àṣàkẹ́’ in Yoruba. And after a while, it just stuck. People stopped adding the ‘Ọmọ’ and left ‘Àṣàkẹ́.’ I thought it was cool and decided to go by it.” This onomastic licence, the freedom to name oneself as one chooses, outside the traditional context, is represented in the Yoruba proverb, “Orúkọ tó bá wu’ni làá jẹ́ l’ẹ́yìn odi.” (‘One bears the name one likes abroad.’)
Furthermore, age-related rhetoric is manifested in Michelle Obama’s characterisation of then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump. In her 29 September, 2016 campaign speech reported in The Guardian (of London), she promoted Hillary Clinton, argued against voting for Trump, and explained that “because when making life or death, war and peace decisions, the president just can’t pop off, or lash out irrationally, … we need an adult in the White House.” In other words, Michelle Obama defined Trump as a temperamental baby in a biologically adult body. But not everybody saw him that way, least of all those who cast their votes for him to give him victory in the election. As a Yoruba proverb puts it, “Ẹ̀kọ̀ elẹ́kọ̀ ń l’ẹ̀gbà ẹlẹ́gbà.” (‘One person’s reject is another person’s treasure.’)
Words could also be used to try to make a difficult situation to appear less worrisome as AT&T, America’s largest mobile network service provider, did when it suffered network outage, on 22 February, 2024, leaving “1.7 million users without service for hours”, according to a Washington Post report by Aaron Gregg and Julian Mark. AT&T said that the outage “was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack,” The vague expression, “the application and execution of an incorrect process” and the contrast with “cyber attack”, together help to create a euphemistic effect regarding the massive outage and seek to reduce customers’ misgivings. Similarly, an ICT professional, Lee McKnight, was reported by NBC News, on 22 February, 2024, to have remarked: “The most likely cause of the outage ‘is a cloud misconfiguration’ which is ‘a fancy word for saying human error.’”
The word ‘compromise’ is also of interest. The Cambridge Dictionary (online) defines it as “to allow your principles to be less strong or your standards or morals to be lower”, as in the example, “Don’t compromise your beliefs/principles for the sake of being accepted.” However, announcing her resignation in controversial circumstances on 24 May, 2019, former British Prime Minister Theresa May said she regretted that she could not get the consensus required to see through the British desire to exit the European Union and implored whoever succeeded her to endeavour to achieve that consensus.
She further remarked: “Such a consensus can only be reached if those on all sides of the debate are willing to compromise. For many years the great humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton – who saved the lives of hundreds of children by arranging their evacuation from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia through the Kindertransport – was my constituent in Maidenhead. At another time of political controversy, a few years before his death, he took me to one side at a local event and gave me a piece of advice. He said, ‘Never forget that compromise is not a dirty word. Life depends on compromise’. He was right.” This view is in line with the Cambridge Dictionary’s alternative definition of the word ‘compromise’ as “an agreement or settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions.”
The dictionary illustrates this with the sentence, “Eventually they reached a compromise.” The company a word keeps could therefore determine whether it would be perceived as negative or positive.
Some words evoke very deep negative emotions. One set of such words is ‘International Monetary Fund’ and ‘World Bank.’ These are perceived by very many people as malevolent international institutions, set up as giant financial traps by powerful Western nations to ensnare unwary or weak African and other nations and thereby stymie their growth. Other intensely emotive expressions in Nigeria include ‘Sharia’, ‘Boko Haram’, ‘IPOB’, and ‘Yoruba Nation’, to mention just a few.
Another remarkable emotion-inciting expression is ‘Islamisation and Fulanisation’, and it was popularised by former President Olusegun Obasanjo. The ready appeal to religious and ethnic stereotypes and prejudices often signals a failure of the intellect, and is marked by the attempt to limit or abrogate thought or short-circuit reasoning.
Some words define a milieu and have infused in them all the aspirations, fears and hopes of a nation, group or individual. Such sets of words include former U.S. President J.F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream”, and Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s “Èmilókàn” (‘It’s my turn.’). The emotive or inspirational value of these expressions or utterances changes as conditions in society change.
For example, vexed with what he perceived as unsatisfactory progress in ensuring racial justice in America or what he saw as the naivety of Reverend King’s kind of dream, the famous African-American Muslim Minister Malcolm X said, as Blacks in America, “We don’t see any American dream, we’ve experienced only the American nightmare.”
When languages co-exist in a particular environment, interesting aspects of words are further revealed. A phenomenon may be represented in one language more strikingly than in another. Consider, for example, the Yoruba word jápa. One of its nuances is ‘to rush out in fright’. When the accounts of those who have embarked on such relocation are considered, they show that the frightful way in which many left Nigeria did not give them the opportunity to be sufficiently reflective about the emigration.
The word jápa is, in other words, more picturesque and more apt than the English equivalent ‘economic emigration.’
Another remarkable Yoruba word is egbére. Its English equivalent is ‘goblin’, and it is characterised as existing in “folklore and fantasy fiction” and defined by Oxford Dictionary as “a mischievous, ugly creature resembling a dwarf.”
In Yoruba folklore, it is additionally characterised as always carrying a small, wretched mat under its armpit and as engaging in ceaseless inexplicable wailing. In fact, a common Yoruba simile is “Ó n sunkún bí egbére” (‘They are crying like a goblin.’) Femi Adesina, Special Adviser, Media and Publicity, to former President Muhammadu Buhari, has been widely associated with the term “wailing wailers” with which he has described President Buhari’s strident and unceasing critics.
Now, imagine how more picturesquely striking and communicatively effective it could have been to simply call those, or any other, inconsolable losers, ill-motivated denigrators and implacable detractors by the Yoruba term àwọn egbére.
Definition is an exercise of power. Diplomats know it, counselors appreciate it, and demagogues exploit it. If somebody defines you negatively, define yourself positively. Language is flexible enough to make both definitions legitimate. So, if you allow your negative characterisation by others to stay unchallenged, you have granted them a semantic concession. You then cease to be a victim; you become a collaborator. After all, as our people say, “Alásọ níí pe aṣọ rẹ̀ ní àkísà kí wọn ó tó ba fi nu’lẹ̀” (‘If you call your cloth a rag, it would be used by others to mop the floor.’)
In using language as in running our world, we are constantly making choices. And choices have consequences. As our leaders continue to be faced with hard choices, let me commend to them these timeless words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but … a molder of consensus. And on some positions, cowardice asks the question ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but [you] must do it because conscience tells [you] it is right.”
