Idea and Image of Anglophone Vocabulary

Annnnd after a short break, we’re back. The Internet over here in Jo’burg has been a little shaky, and I was also lazy. But more posts to come regularly, I hope.

In other news, we just finished a project in African Studies about the Idea and Image of Africa. My group concluded that the global image of Africa is mostly one of god-awful governance, gore, and giraffes. Okay so that’s not true, but I had a hard time with the alliteration. All that having been said, I have some choice observations on the African reality that we didn’t include in our presentation:

First, as you may have gathered from the first sentence of this post, utilities such as power and Internet can be shaky even in South Africa, which is one of this continent’s more developed countries. The water cut out a few weeks ago and no one so much as batted and eyelid. Everyone just said, “TIA. It’ll come back eventually. Eat fruit.”

Yet there is one detail that I find weird: In South Africa, the cold water runs out first. For the love of God, WHY?! Every morning I get out of bed, try to find my glasses, give up because I need them to find stuff in the first place, and then crawl blindly back under the covers. Then I get up again and take a shower a few minutes later. And for no discernable reason, only the hot water tap works. Five scalding minutes later, the cold water comes back on…but only to taunt me, because it leaves almost immediately. Showers here swap between “kettle” and “glacial”, and I think Twoface is manning the switch.


Some of you may be under the impression that what we have is better than feeling like an icicle whenever the hot water runs out, but none of you have ever had to chose between feeling clean and being boiled like egg.

Second, forget warthogs and hippopotami; the Jacaranda trees here are gorgeous. Africa is not about savannah animals; it’s about beautiful purple trees. Honeydew is full of them, and they are my new favorite plant. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen one.

Right, so now for the African view of the US. For this, I will call on my primary case study, Mr. Boubacar Diao Diallo. Boubacar basically thinks that Americans live in a mixture of a Captain America comic, MTV, and the last page of The Sneetches, by Dr. Seuss. To him, America is a land of acceptance and baggy pants. And for no obvious reason, he loves The Star Spangled Banner. He’s working on memorizing the song’s lyrics, and frequently makes me put it on repeat. And then he sits on my bed, conducting and humming to his heart’s content. It’s the stuff of legend; Uncle Sam would have been proud.

I also think Boubacar has an inaccurate view of how eloquent Americans are. I’m not sure who’s been writing the vocabulary list for his writing class, but they definitely skipped over some of the more obvious options. Most American’s can’t spell “armchair”, but Boubacar can already use “grandiloquence”, “flabbergasted”, and “fungible“. I’m Anglophone, and I thought that fungible was an adjectival form of the word "mushroom”! But no, it actually means mutually interchangeable.

Needless to say, this sort of thing happens often: