I myself have recently released a book exploring our beloved Pidgin English in all its intricate detail. ![]() My good friend Delalorm has written excellently, I believe with no small degree of cringing, on some common phrases he finds most irritating. Ghanaians say a lot of strange sounding things to the purely English ear. If it isn’t by the end of our short journey, fret not, I shall tell you with plain words. Let’s do this slowly, and soon it should become clear to you. I knew the less than creative, highly haphazard and accidental source of this fake glitter.Īnd what is the source, you wonder? Hold on a minute. There’s a sense of foreboding invested in “Wednesday.” But I knew better. ![]() Wednesday is suddenly a D-day… the far demonstrative pronoun “that” adds the effect of a special note, of pointing to that great day of days. ![]() Most people would have said, “We’ll start on Wednesday.” Indeed, most Ghanaians would have said, wrongly, “We’d start on Wednesday.” But the little boy goes for “Wednesday, that is when we will start.” It is the construction of a writer, tense with drama. Indeed, if you did not know better you might even be impressed with the choice of the phrasing. On the surface, the cadaver looks normal. These days I accept it, for better or worse, as a part of our language cloud as Ghanaians as one of our own “Englishes,” as recent linguistic scholars are beginning to say.īut rather than just tell you its name and describe its parts, let’s put the little boy’s answer on the examination bench for a little while, and dissect it. ![]() Gone are the days when I used to be repulsed at the phenomenon I’m about to tell you about. It is a punch I’ve learned to dodge many times already. But if you are I, that statement comes to you with a great deal of weight. He answered in the negative, and added, “Wednesday, that is when we will start.” It could have ended there. When I asked my eleven-year old nephew when he’d be vacating from school, he said, “Next week Thursday.” I asked him if he had started taking exams.
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