When ‘enjoy’ has a negative connotation

The way our youth use certain English words simply puzzles me. What can you mean whenever you complain that I am enjoying you? In my ken, this verb is always positive.

To enjoy is “to take joy in”, “to receive pleasure from”, “to have the benefit of”, “to make use of”, “to have a good time”.

NEW MEANING

It comes from the old French enjoir and joir (“to find pleasure in”) and ultimately the Latin gaudere (“to rejoice”).

The French expression joie de vivre – which English has “nationalised” (and in which joie is the substantive form of joir) – means ebullience, boisterousness, great enthusiasm, a bubbling over and, more literally, “enjoyment of life” or “the joy of living”.

It was not until recently that I discovered that, in Nairobi, “to enjoy” also means something quite negative.

Pleasure remains essential to it. But it is negative pleasure. Here, “to enjoy” means to mock, to sneer, to crack ribald jokes about, to laugh at someone else’s expense.

During a recent media seminar in Nairobi, a reader of this column, Dr Joyce Nyairo – a linguistics scholar who works for Ford Foundation – reminded me of another verb which our youth have given a meaning completely different from the traditional one.

SCATHING ATTACK

In my knowledge, “to assume” is “to take for granted”, “to suppose”, “to undertake” (like a promise or a duty), “to pretend”, “to put on” (either clothes or airs), “to adopt” (like a title) and “to usurp” (as when a young hopeful from the barracks grabs the president’s regalia).

The word “assume” comes from the Latin assumere, itself from subsumere, “to take” or “to take up”.

But, apparently, our urban youth have given the English verb a meaning which you are never likely to find in any dictionary. It means “to ignore”. “She assumed me,” a bemused Adonis may complain when a former girlfriend deliberately passes him by along the street without as much as a “Hi?”

I do not know how these meanings arose. But I do not condemn them. I am not Peter Mwaura of Unesco, who recently wrote a scathing attack on Sheng (a linguistic invention of our urban youth). I do not have the right to prescribe how a language should spring up, be spoken and develop.

LOSE MIND

As a language expands, many old words take on localised meanings.

North of Nyanza Gulf, the Luo verb ran means to be emaciated, but south of it, it means to lose the mind.

Likewise, an American in Kent, England, may bewilder his hosts by his use of the word “through”. This was among the factors that enabled Latin, as it lay dying, to spawn such languages as French, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian and Spanish.

Thus, the “Englishes” spoken in North America, the Australasias, South Africa and other areas may one day become totally different languages.

CENTRAL ROLE

When we, East Africans, have developed our own English, the peculiar local meanings of the verbs “to enjoy”, “to assume” and others will play a central role in defining it.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist.