Slang words used by Nigerian university students – Slang words are often, by nature, transitory and limited to particular age groups, subcultures, eras, and even professions. But a few slang words do endure and make the transition from marginality to respectable mainstream usage.
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A notable example of a word in common usage today, especially in British English, that started life as a student slang term is “don,” an alternative word for a university teacher. An English-grammar website called World Wide Words says it was undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge universities who first used “don” as a slang term to refer to their teachers. And then the term caught on.
“The source [of the word] is the Spanish Don, originally a term of high rank, which derives from Latin dominus, master or lord, which has also bequeathed English words such as dominate and dominium, as well as domine, a one-time term of respect for a clergyman or a member of a learned profession and — as dominie — for a schoolmaster in Scotland.
Around the middle of the seventeenth century, English began to use don for a leader or a man of importance or ability; to be a don was to be an adept at some activity, whether literature, cricket or a craft skill. Undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge began to humorously apply don to the tutors and fellows of their colleges, with perhaps an echo of domine, and the term went into the language,” the website says.
There are many words in mainstream Nigerian English that also started as university student slang words but are now in general use in Nigeria. In fact, many Nigerians don’t recognize these words and their meanings as nonstandard. I list 10 such words below.
1. “Dub.”
It means to cheat during exams by copying another person’s test answers word for word. It’s obviously derived from a metaphorical extension of the sense of dubbing that means “make a copy of a recording,” as in “dub music from CD to tape.”
Slang terms are notoriously difficult to periodize and etymologize because they are usually first primarily spoken for a long time before they are written, but it seems to me that “dub” entered Nigerian English in the early 1980s and reached the peak of its popularity in the 1990s. I thought it had lost currency in contemporary Nigerian English until I saw it used many times on a popular Nigerian online discussion site called Nairaland.com by people who are obviously not students.
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