You take the high road, I’ll take the main road

IWAS reprimanded by a 4-year-old. He said, “Why are you stopping?” I said, “Because the robot is red.” He guffawed scornfully. “Ganpaw,” he said, aiming for “grandpa”, “that’s not a robot! That’s a traffic light!”

I understand that in his world robots aren’t even clanking, humanoid bits of metal like R2-D2 any more; they are giant moving parts of steel, looking like shipyard cranes and doing the work of what used to be fifty pairs of human hands.

But in my world of sort-of proud Seffricanism, cherishing “our” distinctive terminology, robots are robots because in nineteen twenty-voertsek (an example) our forebears were agog that a pole on a street corner could change colours all by itself.

Other places must have been agog, too, but somehow suppressed their excitement.

I’d venture that in South Africa until at least the seventies, “robot” was the only term.

If you talked about a “traffic light”, people would for a moment think you meant the high, white streetlight.

And “robot” was no kind of slang. We had proper official green signboards with signs saying “Robot 250m” (and metres only came upon us in the seventies).

Half-a-century later it begins to feel artificial, even to me, to hang on to the word “robot”.

The conscious mind would like to preserve a sliver of innocent legacy, but the other part flinches at years of hiplevel people shrieking in mirth. Next they’d be expecting me to read tea leaves – if such things still exist, or is it all in bags now?

Why lament it at all, you might ask? South Africans with native English are stunningly well-blessed with distinctive words.

We borrow them, unashamed, from the other 95% – bakkie, bergie, haikona, laduma, kugel, shebeen, songololo… Why not bask in that individuality and let “robot” rest in peace?

My response would be that we might like the English tradition to contribute, too, not merely to receive.

There is, of course, a sense in which we have over-contributed, not to say dominated, invaded and crushed.

For years it’s been hard to hear an all-Afrikaans sentence except on the radio, and now it’s hard even on the radio. Zulu, Sotho & co go increasingly the same way.

(When I try listening through a mysterious torrent, I’m momentarily delighted by little spears of recognition, only to deflate when I realise it was just a bit of English.)

The English that we’ve contributed has been proper English, not our own. Insofar as we like to think we have our own English, we mainly mean those Afrikaans words that we’ve annexed so wholly that we think we invented them.

Biltong and braai would be there, in any English quarters I know of, and boet and swaer in many.

Indeed, while we all know that a bakkie is a pick-up in American and an LDV (light delivery vehicle) in Pom, I doubt that we even know what the bak of a bakkie is in orthodox English (looking it up I find nothing better than “cargo area”).

Digging up actual homegrown English that has enriched the whole nation can leave an ou blinking a bit.

One guy who’s studied these things has to think awhile before outing with that the British talk High Road and the Americans talk Main Street, and it’s only us who have Main Road.

Which seems a tad anticlimactic even if it was correct (and my memory is the Brits talking more High Street than Road).

If my 4-year-old language instructor grows into a universal, standard English with a vaguely American accent, that’ll be nothing to weep about. But, hey, a bit of shared ownness would be something lovely.