South African Slang Part 2

As my wonderful roommate (are you reading this? ;-)) reminds me, I forgot several important words and phrases in my earlier discussion of African slang. Here are a few that I left out before but couldn't bear to do without!

Tomato (pronounced toe-mah-toe) sauce - Ketchup

Takkies - Sandals

Trackies - Tennis shoes, sneakers

Anti-clockwise - Because counter-clockwise sounds too optimistic

Robots - traffic lights, I have no idea why!

Dodgy - not quite comfortable, similar to sketchy or shady in the U.S.

Serviette - like the French, this is the South African word for napkin

Queue - This is used as both a noun and a verb, it refers to a line of people waiting for something

Kit - suit

Costume - This is a bathing suit, but it took me a while to figure that out, causing great confusion.

Lockers - Overhead compartments, like in an airplane

Boot - The trunk of a car

Bonnet - The hood of a car (I find these two very funny, since they always make me picture hiking boots and a bonnet on a baby, instead of car parts!)

Lift - Elevator

Lekker/Lekkers - Lekker is similar to the slang "cool" in the U.S., while lekkers are candy. Perhaps these both come from the idea of "sweet"? I don't know.

Queries - Questions

Trolley - Shopping cart at a grocery store

Keen - Interested, used in "I'm keen to..." or "I'm very keen on..."

Shame! - This word is thrown in, like "Pity!" or "That's too bad!" whenever a person is responding to a story of something bad happening to someone else.

Hectic - While this has the same meaning as in the States, it is incredibly overused here, and is often applied for things that are intense, busy, crowded, quick, or overwhelming.

There are also some crazy pronunciations. Liesbeek, for instance, would look like it should be pronounced as lice-beak, but instead it is pronounced lease-beck. This is from Afrikaans, but with 11 official state languages, it is impossible to predict how things might be pronounced since they could have roots in any of those languages. This becomes particularly complicated when one considers that at least two of South Africa's official languages also include clicks. It's difficult to know, for instance, if a "q" in a word will be pronounced according to the English like "quiet" or as a click from Xhosa.

Another challenge comes in the concept of simple letters and numbers. The letter "Z" is spoken "zed" like the French here instead of "zee" as it is in the U.S. Numbers are also very complicated because a comma is used instead of a decimal point, so 8,99 is actually 8.99. At first I thought it was a place-holding comma and a digit had just been left off the end of the number, which confused me greatly.

George Bernard Shaw said, "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." I think if Mr. Shaw could see South Africa, he'd say the same about them, too!