The Canada-based author of Ja No Man: A memoir of pop culture, girls, suburbia… and apartheid – out in a new edition in January 2010 – writes in The Daily Maverick against those tools of linguistic contraction beloved of South Africans, acronyms and initialisms:
Aphabetism is a tool of obfuscation, but it does make some things plain – like bureaucratic ugliness and a contempt for verbal felicity.
When I was a kid, I had a predilection for canned food, and especially anthropomorphic canned food – sugary, goopy pasta molded as animals, or video game characters (yup – there was a Mario Bros tinned pasta product). This made an otherwise painful process – dinner – far more entertaining. I could eat boring old roast chicken and potatoes, or I could, with little more than a spoon, conjure a bushveld landscape in my soup bowl. A bookish lad, I would also happily spend a dinner fiddling with a bowl of alphabet soup, inventing a language comprehensible only to myself. I’d spoon a greasy K alongside a puffy R, hitch a swollen V to a mushy X. Or, if I was feeling particularly ribald, I’d search for an A and then coax two S’s from the bottom of the bowl. “What are you giggling at?” my mother would ask. “Well mom,” I’d say, “it’s hard to explain.”
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