Last words from Karin Brynard

In every family there exists a lexicon of words unique to them, says Karin Brynard.

AA friend I hadn’t heard from for quite a while called me up and announced that he was suddenly speaking in tongues. He’d had a stroke, he said. And when he woke up, he had lost his mother tongue of Afrikaans, and could only speak English. “Me, a Free State boy, nogal. With a name like Frik!” Worst of all, he confessed, the stroke had left him with a mild case of Tourette’s Syndrome. He had started cursing involuntarily. Nasty words. But all of them in eloquent, crystal-clear Afrikaans.

Which got me thinking about words – like, it takes us forever to get them into our heads, but we can lose them in the blink of an eye. They say a young child learns a new word every two hours up until the time he has a vocabulary of about 20 000.

That’s a whole lot of words, come to think about it. Apparently, Shakespeare was the last guy to have full command of all 20 000 – and more. He and one of my late aunts. When Aunt Nelie called, we would take shifts on the phone. “Damn woman can talk on both the in- and the out-breath,” my father would mutter.

At my mom’s retirement home, on the other hand, there’s an old man who only ever says one word: ja.

I could swear he’s a philosopher, that old oom. He can transform any innocent remark into a profound contemplation on the way of the world. If you said “good morning”, he’d bark back a rather sardonic “ja?”

Maybe the rest of his 19 999 words have deserted him. Which one, I wonder, was first to jump ship? Maybe the prickly ones, like pernicious and cacophony. Tongue-twisters like infinitesimal and reciprocity, or the stiff-upper-lippers: sanguine or denouement. And what about the family treasures, I wonder – those words coined and spoken only in families?

We all have them – gems that came to life perhaps through a child’s clumsy efforts or someone’s mangled mispronunciation. At first you’d repeat them, much to everyone’s amusement, but soon they’d settle in as rightful members of your family lexicon.

One family I know always talks about ‘Spanish’ when they mean ‘spinach’. At the pharmacy, they’ll ask for the ‘Titanic’ of a medicine, instead of the ‘generic’ one, and something funny will be ‘hillerarious’. The children go on the ‘jumperspring’, not the trampoline. They don’t even bother with foreign-sounding words such as vice versa; they go with ‘vika verka’ and ‘Le Kriekkriek’ for Le Creuset pots.

One sister-in-law brought ‘garment’ instead of ‘night gown’ into our family. It was a gift from her Granny Gertruida, a staunch royalist from the Smuts-era who was convinced that ‘gown’ was far too common a word for her gown. And because she struggled with her false teeth, she’d lisp her slippers. Before long we were all wearing garments and putting on ‘flippers’.

These usurper-words are sticky, you see. Once you open the door to them, they move in for good, like poor relatives. Let me give you an example: my mother, a proper platteland-tannie all her life, always spoke about ‘kewshays’: “We’re baking a few kewshays for the church fete.” Naturally, this is due to the fact that her Cook and Enjoy It failed to provide a phonetic pronunciation for the quiche recipes. All my life I’ve been merrily ‘kewshaying’.

But there comes a day when you’re in sophisticated company and you desperately need the real quiche. You dig furiously around your brain but the original word has absconded. Where to, you’ll wonder. Maybe back to France, for all you know, living in Provence and teaching the locals to make bobotie.

And it’s not only me it has left; it has also deserted my dear old Mom. She used to be our word generator, but these days she carelessly leaves the gate open, lets them run off into the wilderness. Kewshay, for example, is wandering about, forlorn and unloved, in the cold kitchens of my mother’s daughters. Never again to emerge sizzling and fragrant from one of our family member’s ovens. The same goes for ‘lah-di-dahs’. Mom is probably the only person I know who loves hadedas – those unattractive old birds with their doleful cries. Her affinity still exists but her special word for them has gone. “What do you call those birds again?” she will ask. “The ones that sing such a sad old song?”

Lah-di-dahs, Mamma. They’re off to France, I think. Same way the words went.

And she’ll chuckle contentedly, as though she agrees: that’s the way of the world. Perfect denouement.

Ja.