Words and maneno
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Had a near heated discussion yesterday about the use of the term Third World countries as opposed to First World countries, this has to do with how someone identifies their continent. The appropriate terms in my mind fall squarely between Least Developed to Developed and of course the in betweenies. This brought to my mind the daily discussions we had while I was training to work in the HIV/Aids sector about the use of language and how it can be used to diminish a human being, the use of AIDS victims, patient, sufferer were a definite no-no. Of course this was always brushed aside/dismissed as political correctness gone mad, now that term political correctness gone mad really annoys and irks me. As these were people living with HIV/Aids telling us what they preferred to be called, the choice has to be by the person that you are defining; that you desist in defining them by terms that often diminish them…….
The use of names of cities, recently one English pompous man called the BBC complaining about the change of names of Bombay to Mumbai, Peking to Beijing and that is something that the British in the empire days gave names that suited their pronunciation. Kenya is derived from Kerinyagah (I think, correct me if I am wrong)
This also follows from MJY’s post on Kenyaness, which set me thinking about identity, you know those identity cards (vitambulishos), I went to collect mine and I was told that I needed a chief to sign it, mind you this is not an ordinary run of the mill chief, but he had to come from the Central Province after all this where my “tribe” are supposed to come from. At least at this instance, we used kifua where the District Commissioner was a family friend. Anyway, I lost my kitambulisho and I am still trying to puzzle which chief I could have gone to…..
This morning on the radio, a deejay was describing a thief who went to burgle Tesco’s and he managed to get away with £400 worth of ciggies and ciggie papers, but the thief left his prison ID card as he had just been released from prison a couple of days before, the DJ said that “somewhere out there, there is a village that has lost its idiot” this reminds of me another one which I thought was so funny, cannot remember whether I read it in a book but to paraphrase “ the sex was so good that there were people in a ten-mile radius smoking”…..
The server at this place is down so I am trying to kill time… Can you imagine being at the whims and fancy of a network connection that can be so prima donnish?
The use of names of cities, recently one English pompous man called the BBC complaining about the change of names of Bombay to Mumbai, Peking to Beijing and that is something that the British in the empire days gave names that suited their pronunciation. Kenya is derived from Kerinyagah (I think, correct me if I am wrong)
This also follows from MJY’s post on Kenyaness, which set me thinking about identity, you know those identity cards (vitambulishos), I went to collect mine and I was told that I needed a chief to sign it, mind you this is not an ordinary run of the mill chief, but he had to come from the Central Province after all this where my “tribe” are supposed to come from. At least at this instance, we used kifua where the District Commissioner was a family friend. Anyway, I lost my kitambulisho and I am still trying to puzzle which chief I could have gone to…..
This morning on the radio, a deejay was describing a thief who went to burgle Tesco’s and he managed to get away with £400 worth of ciggies and ciggie papers, but the thief left his prison ID card as he had just been released from prison a couple of days before, the DJ said that “somewhere out there, there is a village that has lost its idiot” this reminds of me another one which I thought was so funny, cannot remember whether I read it in a book but to paraphrase “ the sex was so good that there were people in a ten-mile radius smoking”…..
The server at this place is down so I am trying to kill time… Can you imagine being at the whims and fancy of a network connection that can be so prima donnish?
