A case for “flashing” to be in dictionaries
In last week’s column, I nominated “flashing”-along with “k-leg”-as a candidate for inclusion in dictionaries. Many readers requested that I share the column where I first wrote about “flashing. I am doing just that today.
The article that follows was first written on January 6, 2010 in the People’s Daily and was expanded extensively in my book. I have mentioned in other columns that in both American and British English, one of the dominant meanings of “flash” is to briefly expose one’s nudity publicly. So be careful not to use the word outside Nigeria. You might trigger a tragic miscue.
An American friend of mine who was born in Nigeria but who left the country when he was a teenager in the 1960s shared with me an unpleasant experience he had with “flashing” when he visited Nigeria in 2010. He shared his phone number with his childhood friend and asked to have his friend’s number in return. Instead of going through the trouble of writing or reading out the number to him, his Nigerian friend said it would be easier to just call him. So he said, “Hold on a minute. Let me flash you.”
My American friend said he ran as fast as he could. “I didn’t want to see the naked body of an aging man in public,” he told me. “I thought he had gone crazy!” He never saw his Nigerian friend ever again. It was only after he shared the story with me that he realized that his friend would think it was he who had gone crazy. He had no idea that “flashing” meant an intentional missed call in Nigerian English.
So be careful where you use the word. Nevertheless, I think the word exemplifies lexical creativity.
My former American student who is now my Facebook friend wrote a status update on Dec. 31, 2009 that got me thinking about Nigerian linguistic inventiveness. He wrote: “Ok, I’m REALLY sick of how the Colombians will call you, hang up immediately, and wait for you to call them back so that they don’t waste their own cellular pay minutes.”
This lily white, perfectly gracious American who has friends in the South American nation of Colombia could have saved himself the torment of writing his status update with these needless overabundance of words if he knew the Nigerian meaning of “flashing.” Nigerians call what he described in so many words “flashing.” He could have simply written something like: “OK, I’m REALLY sick of Colombians flashing me.” All fairly affluent-and diasporan- Nigerians contend with this reality on a daily basis.
As linguists know only too well, language reflects people’s material reality. Americans have not lexicalized the act of necessitous people briefly calling financially well-situated friends and relatives, and hanging up in hopes of being called back because it is not in their mobile telephonic culture. In most cellphone plans in the United States, phone users get charged both for making and for receiving calls. So there is no incentive to “flash” anybody.
The comments that followed my ex-student’s status update showed that “flashing” is a decidedly “Third World” peculiarity, and most countries that practice it have different creative neologisms to capture it. For instance, a commenter said Pakistanis and Indians call it “onering.” “One-ring,” he said, is both a noun and a verb. So it is typical for Pakistanis or Indians to say something like, “That wasn’t a real call; it was a one-ring.” Or “he oneringed me.”
Another commenter wrote that people in some poor European countries, where call recipients don’t get charged for incoming calls, also “flash” their more prosperous friends and relatives. He said the word “squeal” (which ordinarily means to utter a highpitched cry like a pig or to confess) has been appropriated in the service of expressing the sense we convey in Nigeria when we say someone has “flashed” us.
What became obvious from the discussion that my ex-student’s status update generated is that the existing corpora of contemporary English in the UK and in America have no lexical items to capture a prevailing telephonic idiosyncrasy in poor countries where endemic poverty compels people to “flash” or “one-ring” or “squeal” people who are thought to be comfortable enough to afford to call back. Since nature abhors a vacuum, Englishspeakers across the world who live with this emergent techno-cultural