People on Twitter are debating whether a person using uncommon words like "delve" are trying to sound smarter than they are, or worse, are ChatGPT bots, because "normal" people don't talk like that.
You don't have to get upset, or embroiled in the debate. Not worth the time or attention. But I'll share some important context as your friendly neighborhood Nigerian 🙋🏿♂️
Many Nigerians have bigger English language vocabularies and better command of grammar than the typical American or English person
@mekkaokereke This is 100% true. Even this white guy has seen it with his own eyes. Bunch of discriminatory nonsense.
I find that type of behavior especially rich coming from the same people — the same damned people! — who fancy up their own weak ideas in useless BS business-speak.
Nigerians have large vocabularies. We are not trying to use big words for you. We are genuinely surprised that you don't know your own words. These are not rare words for us.🤷🏿♂️
People that don't believe this, have not played a Nigerian at Scrabble.
@radhika@mekkaokereke
I would guess that the countries under colonialism got the English of the day and get the English of today, whereas us English of today have only the drift. I would guess that also applies to the US given their now cultural dominance. Nigeria amplifies this through their culture.
@taatm@radhika@mekkaokereke I understand that "thrice" (3 times) is in common use in India today but "thrice" dropped out of usage in the UK in maybe 1890 or so.
@mekkaokereke Will say that as a white girl currently living in America, I have been repeatedly negged by men in this way. "Well we don't all sit around reading the thesaurus all day." ... neither do I? I just ... read ... books?
Delve is not even an obscure word! It's part of a common nursery rhyme!
Not discounting the experiences of colonized populations at all. But yeah we have a man problem.
A Nigerian speaking to an audience of Nigerians with the appropriate level of complexity of grammar and vocabulary... will be different than the grammar and vocabulary used to speak to a US citizen.
Listen to this public health briefing, where Nigerian health admins tell people "The West ain't selling us the vaccine now. So we have to stay masked up." Hear:
Colonial accent
Uncommon but grammatically correct sentence construction
Yes, the Jabari are based on Nigerians. Nigerian accent and idioms. Nigerian height and build. Brain and brawn. Right down to the adding of "Oh!" at the end of "We will not have it!" That's a classic Nigerian-ism!
But again, this "different" way of talking is not the Nigerian way. It's your way!
These are British words! 🇬🇧🙂🙃
Used correctly, preserved since the time of colonization, and taught to 200 million school children so we can get into your colleges without you crying DEI.
And yes, this thread could have been written about
Indian colonial English
Hong Kong colonial English
[Insert any country that celebrates independence from Britain] colonial English
Also as a white dude I have also been asked if I’m trying to sound smart saying a word. The answer is simply that it was the most appropriate word. Some times the water is best described as temperate.
Assuming a Black country can’t be more literate is… well… racist.
As an pedant myself, I got the "did you swallow the dictionary" comment for my sesquipedalian vocabulary when I was young, but "temperate" is not really le mot juste to describe water temperature! 😀
@mekkaokereke
See also '[x] colonial [French / Portuguese / Dutch]' (& with a slightly different twist, also Spanish). Then there's the thing where so many pre-Soviet-Collapse Russians thought they could speak Ukrainian, because the Ukrainians all had to understand Russian. But this is preaching to the choirmaster.
It's always annoyed the shit out of this old linguistic descriptivist & probably always will.
@mekkaokereke 200M is a lot of text written. also, coincidentally, they're the same parts of the world that LLM RLHF human intervention was farmed out to.
LLMs are indeed speaking to us like Nigerians/Indians/etc. because that's what they were trained to do
Now I'm thinking about all those concerns about how "English first" model training forces culture on others. Ironically, Americans are getting a first-hand taste of what it's like
@mekkaokereke I'm really curious how this would compare with the use of English by people from countries that do not have English as an official language (say, Sweden, Brazil or Japan).
@mekkaokereke
I had a conference between American DoD reps and African Union reps, and my fellow officers (college educated Americans) complained about the "big words" that the Nigerian presenter used. To this day, I have no idea what words they considered big, but it was an enlightening glimpse into the narrowing vocabularies of my fellow Americans.
Having a non-native speaking spouse also made me realize that most Americans speak primarily in slang and idioms.
@mekkaokereke I get weird looks and/or told I'm being offensive when I say that as a native UK English speaker I love hearing people speak English who don't have it as their native language or (like you!) Do have English as their native language but with a whole different culture.
But I do, it's awesome to hear someone speak something completely perfectly but also completely differently.
I always describe it as being English words with Irish grammar. Irish has a different sentence structure which comes through sometimes. Instead of saying "I am sad" the translated version is "There is sadness on me". This doesn't come through that often but in Ireland if you're hungover you might say "There is an awful head on me this morning".
I love that post-colonial nations have made British words their own.
@mekkaokereke Thank you for these posts! Just the other week my niece was told to "keep her French to herself" after using words like ennui and assimilationist in a homework assignment. She does not speak French.
@lan@mekkaokereke these are valid words in French, so she does know some french, but omg, that a teacher would say such a thing to a student, what a pedagogical failure. Instead of encouraging her to learn and share knowledge. The teacher probably feels threatened for not knowing them. Awful.
@mekkaokereke There are also a lot of different Englishes in Europe. It’s my first language, but I’ve lived here long enough that I’ve picked up aspects of these, and my kids have done so even more. When Germans say “We have to finish it until Friday” (i.e. by Friday), or French people say “Normally I’m free this weekend” (i.e. I should be), it sounds fine to me. English isn’t the exclusive property of any group, it belongs to everyone who uses it.
@mekkaokereke Then again, I also had years of French, Latin and Greek, and some other languages, and ambitiously hoped someday to be known as “a monster of erudition” just like Athanasius Kircher lol ;) so admittedly I’m not the best barometer.
@mekkaokereke Love this thread! I'm also reminded about my experience (as a "Non-Anglo" person) in project work with people from across Europe and our conversations in "European English", with lots of our "native" words, phrases and grammar interjected into English. It made total sense for "us" (Germans, French, Polish, Hungarians etc) but the English were always puzzled. We sounded both too posh/complicated and too wrong for them at the same time.
@mekkaokereke i guess it all comes down to the point that the English language no longer belonging to "Anglo people" but to everyone. Which also means that there are many more "X-English" than AE or BE.
@jynersolives@mekkaokereke Remember Esperanto? English is Esperanto now. A Swede and a Yemeni meet in Thailand. They speak English to one another and to the waiter in the restaurant.
@farbel@mekkaokereke
Yeah but they don't speak British or American English. The Swede will speak something like European English and the Yemeni some other form, maybe Arab English. The cadence, the sentence structure, the words, the phrases, all will appear strange to a BE or AE person. Because they never had to converse in a third language and make it "theirs". So we are not talking about capital E-English but something else, a third language that resembles English but not quite.
@jynersolives@mekkaokereke In the same way, there is such a thing as "Singaporean English", where pronunciation is also somewhat different, kind of a mix of British and Mandarin accents. English is the official national language of Singapore.
@mekkaokereke That whole video reminds me a lot of Ncuti Gatwa's role as Eric Effiong, the ghanian-nigerian character in Sex Education. He's a fine actor - though he's apparently Rwandan-Scots, so maybe all the banter with him and his nigerian family/friends is off-key a bit for an actual Nigerian.
@mekkaokereke I'm struggling as to why anyone thinks those are uncommon as well. Going through school in the US, some of these are the kinds of words we'd have as weekly vocab both in grade school and high school that we'd even talk about being surprised they entered our own vernacular, and enjoyed their usage. It boggles that people think "delve" is too 'fancy'.
I get suspicious of trends over on Twitter frequently, and this is no different, that it feels sparked by malicious anti-intellectual blathering with the veil of "is it like chatGPT" as a foil for some intent. I hadn't considered "racism" as the reason though until this thread, and it sure fits like a snug puzzle piece! :kay_frustrated:
@mekkaokereke I'm glad you explained, I watched the previous one and genuinely could not understand what anyone would have an issue with... now I'm a bit stunned that this kind of language is too much.
@mekkaokereke I’m 50 and a native English speaker, and I still love discovering new words. But then I also enjoy reading and word puzzles, so having a general love of language is within me.
I wish more Americans weren’t so afraid of learning. And even worse than being afraid: being proud of not knowing anything outside of your immediate experience.
@mekkaokereke paulg calling "delve" an unnecessarily complicated word, and going on about how simpler is better, after promoting full-fat LISP, is amusing inconsistent.
@sgf@mekkaokereke I've never thought of "delve" as unnecessarily complicated. Heck, I see that word used a lot in technical documentation ("Let's delve into the code to see what's going on here").
I sense motive here, and not the good kind either.
@mekkaokereke I suddenly realize I have a different standard for spoken language than I have for code and I’m not sure I can justify the difference.
With code, I assume that a future maintainer will have less context than I do and less knowledge of the language than I do (and that future maintainer might actually be me).
With spoken language I usually assume the listener will either know the words I’m using, or be willing to ask me to clarify.
@mekkaokereke This is fascinating because I am a big old white guy, and even I get this response. I have been called "arrogant" more times than I can count because of my vocabulary, and it's like, guys, I learned half these words from comic books! Maybe this has nothing to do with how I talk and WAY more to do with you perceptions of yourselves.
a) do you think that it's only about how English is taught and used in Nigeria, or could it have some influence that fact that there are many other languages spoken in Nigeria, meaning that probably a good chunk of the population are polyglots?
b) Latin America has a similar issue with Spain. For instance, on both sides we use two past tenses for two different situations, but the relation is flipped across the Atlantic.
c) We even pronounce the same letters differently. A friend used to say that at the end of her stay in España a coworker told her 'I never understood anything you said because your orthography while talking is wrong'. Probably a joke, but there's a half-truth there¹.
¹ not the fact that was wrong, just about the difference.
d) Not exactly the same, but colloquially French people use much fewer verb tenses that us hispanohablantes. French people find out I'm not French quicker because I use too many tenses while talking than using my accent.
e) I have now many friends from all LatAm, and had to learn (and teach) how to speak more neutral so conversation is not a staccato spiked with explanations of terms that do not survive 10000 km over land, much less across a Ocean.
@mekkaokereke Watching the video, I just realized that for most of those superior Nigerian Scrabble players, English is probably their second (at least) language, not their first one 🤯
One of the strengths of American-English is how flexible it is in terms of expressing meaning.
One of the weaknesses of American-English is how inscrutable and nebulous "fluency" can be.
"Why this word and not that word in this context?" 🤷
But that brings us back to #1.
You do not need to be fluent, or really anywhere close, to make yourself understood. You just need not to be talking to jerks. (Which makes Twitter a bad space to communicate).
@mekkaokereke
I don't wield my mega vocabulary to sound 'smarter.' I use it to be accurate and convey the exact meaning I want to convey. The right word for the right intention.
Sure, I could say dig rather than delve. But if what I want to convey is an intensity of effort and rigor of discovery, then delve is better.
@mekkaokereke when I was like…8 or so, I was out with my parents. Who mind you, played scrabble as a full-contact sport. They were brutally good. So I had been raised by two people with amazing vocabularies and the wit to use them.
I forget what I said, but someone nearby said something to the effect of “that child is too smart for their own good, trying to sound smarter than they are.”
@bynkii@mekkaokereke Do they, do you, does anybody have the rule that you must be able to define the word you use … or use it in a sentence maybe?
I once came 2nd in a Scrabble tournament because I didn’t know the word “qi”. Last time I played I got sick of seeing my opponent use 3 or 4 other two-letter words. At least 2 of them he couldn’t use in a sentence.
It’s bad enough that these are words they never use outside Scrabble. It’s against the spirit of the game.
My ex-wife once pulled off “bovinely”, got two triple word scores off it, still the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in scrabble. She never used that word outside of scrabble.
I find “spirit of the game” arguments to be somewhat specious anyway.
@mekkaokereke@mentallyalex I saw that, and was very surprised because I didn’t think delve was a particularly uncommon word? It certainly isn’t in British English
@purplepadma@mekkaokereke@mentallyalex The nursery rhyme "One, two, buckle my shoe" ends up with "Eleven, twelve, dig and delve", but I don't know if that rhyme is common in the US, or if it gets explained to kids, or what.
@purplepadma@mekkaokereke@mentallyalex My wife, a reformed Yank, when asked said, "Like 'to delve into something'?", so at least one colonial has heard of it.
@purplepadma@mekkaokereke@mentallyalex Doubly weird because the guy who originally made the claim, venture capitalist Paul Graham, was born and currently resides in the UK.
@purplepadma@mekkaokereke@mentallyalex Maybe if you’re into fantasy with dwarves, who do a lot of delving? I dunno, it’s not unusual to me at all, a USian who reads a lot. Though admittedly I read a fair bit of British fiction, so maybe that’s why it doesn’t trip me up at all.
I would reverse the argument: if a person feels demeaned by use of certain vocabulary of a shared language, then perhaps that person doesn't think or speak "normal" themselves?
It's not the speaker's problem, it the listener's, as is more often the case that those listeners would care to admit.
@mekkaokereke Over the years I watered my vocabulary down so that I could communicate with more people. Now I regret it because my own children will get fewer words. I have been "corrected" by people who are wrong so many times it would take days to list all of the cases I even remember.
Note to all people who read books: You are in a very tiny minority.
@mekkaokereke I'm the author of an open source tool named "delv", and I had to drop the E because someone else had already used "delve" for something. Doesn't seem that abstruse.
@mekkaokereke I’ve been told I have a large vocabulary in English, and these are my reasons:
I have a large vocabulary in Spanish and a lot of complex words come from Latin – easy to remember.
My English usage is shaped by working within the outsourcing model, which colonially, rewards language profficiency over anything else.
I don’t have a specific English dialect, I borrow from all the ones I’m expose to. If I just read a new word, I’ll use it, I never sound “natural” anyway.
@mekkaokereke it's also an issue for autistic people whose spectrum includes hyperlexia, like me. We read so early that some teachers don't believe us, and I doubt I'm the only one whose vocabulary broke tests. But we all have different challenges.
@mekkaokereke I was extremely surprised that he considered DELVE "advanced". DELVE!? I'm pretty sure we were using that in secondary school debates lol.
The strangest part of delve-gate (as I saw someone call it) was that he kept doubling down.
@mekkaokereke I feel this thread a lot and I'm not Nigerian/Nigerian descent but Puerto Rican. I recently had a thing where someone thought I was using a translator because...idk apparently my writing didn't appear to be that of "a native speaker."
Meanwhile in grad school, some of my evaluations had design students offended that I was so rude and arrogant enough to take time to teach the class of college seniors how verb tenses work. Because I had way too many Americans not knowing how tf they work in their essays.
It's not my fault that not only am I a native speaker of English (and Spanish at the same time, it's complicated) from a little small island, but that I know English better than you :ai_niyari:
I've had other moments where folks are impressed I know "old" words :akko_aah:
Delve? Seriously? I use that word several times a week (Swede here, being trained on British English in school which was the norm then in Sweden's mandatory English classes and then having a 90% American media consumption). Not sure if that matters.
I've often found that the people in America who are the loudest proponents of English becoming the official language of the United States are also deeply uncomfortable with anyone who is actually fluent in it.
@mekkaokereke I play scrabble everyday against a computer. Having played against Nigerians, I can attest they have a large vocabulary and I always had a di tionary on hand. 😊
@mekkaokereke I believe it was Fiona Shaw (tho i'd have to check) who talked about how the melting pot of immigrants in America simplified British English into a language more people could understand. For instance: "Perchance, would you like a cup of coffee?" became "Coffee?"
@mekkaokereke thanks for delving into this important topic 🙃 joking aside, I think this is true to a degree for any non-native speaker, even my childen are getting snide comments from primary school classmates that they "can't understand the nerdy words"...
@daaain@mekkaokereke especially if a person's first language is Latin-based, because a lot of the "big words" in English have Latin roots, but the speaker might just be using the most direct translation of the word in their language and not even know there's a more common word for it in English 🤷♀️
@mekkaokereke I remember the first two Nigerians I met were hematologists. One told me that every Nigerian in America either a doctor or a disappointment to their parents. 😜
Tade Thompson's Rosewood trilogy is one of my favorite scifi series, and aside from being a great author, he is also a psychologist.
Son of two surgeons. I was ~35 the last time my dad told me about a post-Bacc medical school program for software engineers that I could still get into! 🤣
Everyone laughed at him and told him to give it up! He looked hurt and defeated.
@LinuxAndYarn@mekkaokereke
The one I met was doing GIS, and got married while working there. (He returned to Nigeria for that, and got stuck in France because of a volcanic eruption in Iceland.)
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