Gone was the politeness that allows that the other guy might have a point, or at least that he deserved a hearing. That was bad enough, but the atmosphere was soured by over-use of words we used to think should not be heard in polite society.
Now, I believe there is a place for strong, even shocking words, but one example of its appropriate use might remind us how rare these occasions are.
Towards the end of apartheid, on one of those many days of protest on the Cape Flats, protesters were lined up in tightly packed rows and facing massed police in their armoured vehicles. A column of these vehicles started to move towards the crowd.
A small, frail-looking priest stepped out of the crowd and tottered towards the leading Caspir, his unruly grey hair and his flowing white robe blowing in the wind. As the gap between him and the column narrowed, he held up a cross. Was he going to pronounce a prayer? Or would it be an exorcism? He straightened himself and in a surprisingly strong voice let out a string of language that would make a drill sergeant blush. The leading Caspir stopped abruptly, then turned and began to retreat. The others followed.
If he had been accustomed to use that kind of language, the driver would probably have driven on and possibly driven over him, but it was the shock value of his words that stopped them.
The late Dambudzo Marechera used those shock tactics, the situation he protested against was undoubtedly evil, but, as one reviewer said privately about his writing ‘I find the word f—ing loses its impact if it appears more than once on a page.’ We have lost a sense of when shocking people is appropriate, and so it no longer shocks anyone. Perhaps it disgusts them, but only in the same way as if they accidentally stepped on a dog’s droppings. Shock can prompt you to serious action; disgust does not. We have lost something valuable.
We do have an extra problem here. Before independence, many people learned English by working for the coarsest, uneducated and ill-mannered white people. There are some of those who seem to know no adjective or adverb but ‘f—ing’ so they use it whenever they can’t think of a word. Older people may still not know how bad those words are. We should, as a nation, be putting that behind us.
Whatever people may say in English, they still preserve the Shona equivalents of those shock words for really serious emergencies. Maybe I am a bit innocent, but in 50 years I have only seen the Shona word for f—k twice in print, once in Fr.Hannan’s Shona – English dictionary, where it was included because it exists, but we are reminded it is not polite, and the other time as part of a name on a Facebook group, where it was no doubt a clear advertisement of the content to be expected. Most of us only rarely hear it spoken.
Can we try, in our spoken English, to be as careful to keep those f– and c– words under lock and key, to only be taken out in desperate emergencies, as most people still do in Shona? If we don’t have those words any more or they don’t shock, how do you shock people? Punch their faces?
Post published in: Featured