SALAD ENGLISH

I have extraordinary hearing abilities, in plain English my ears are a little bit on the large side. Not quite like dumbo the elephant, but I could do with a smaller pair. The moral of this story is I rarely say “could you please repeat that”. These days that sentence has become an integral part of almost every conversation I have. At first I was excited; I assumed this was happening because my ears had shrunk to a respectable size. I consulted my mirror and the evil thing dashed my hopes. My ears are still a tad bit too large. Because I am me, I analyzed all the possible reasons why this was happening and then I figured it out.

The blame is all yours, yes you. Dear reader what is it? What did I do to warrant this inhumane treatment from you? I assumed we were friends and as such you would not try to hurt me. Obviously I was wrong. Why are you looking all confused? Please stop acting like you have no idea what I’m talking about. I guess you want us to wash our dirty linen in public. I will oblige you; all my linens are spotless, unlike your filthy stack, so let’s begin. What went wrong? A year ago you were normal, now things have gone all Libya at your end.

I feel as if everyone got the memo, and someone forgot to send me a copy. When did we decide talking like there is “hot yam” in your mouth was the new cool? I don’t mean the regular “wanna, gonna, shudda” we spoke 10 years ago. Oh no you all have taken fake accents to another dimension. Nowadays having proper diction is not enough, we have to garnish it with salad English. I listened to a show on this internet radio station two nights ago. I convulsed with laughter. The accent I heard was a cross between americanese, britease, yorubaese, haitianese and pidginease.

Lucky for them their base of operations is somewhere in the United States. I was ready to March naked to their office in protest. I am a sucker for proper English, and frankly if you’re a guy that is one way to win my heart. This article is a plea to everyone out there, stop it. Stop it now! Don’t you see every time you open your mouth to utter your amala English a baby dies? The biggest culprits of salad English are the returnees. They are everywhere, some of then returned 5years ago after a 2week trip to “the abroad”. Yet they talk like they have spent ages in obodo oyibo.

These special breed of returnees add an “R” to every word they pronounce. Say the word in question is jogging; our returnee for some reason says “jorrging”. Let us not blame them too much; at least they’ve been abroad. How can we justify other salad speakers who have never been to Togo, talk less of going overseas? Where did you acquire your own accent from? Was it via Nollywood movies or perhaps music videos? These ones are weapons of mass destruction waiting to happen. The amount of nuclear waste they produce from their mouth makes Hiroshima look like child’s play.

It is abnormal for people to constantly ask you to “say that again”, especially when you’re not a CD player on repeat. If you must speak with an accent please make sure it is authentic and if you cannot pull that off, sign language works just as well. Simply sew your mouth shut and wave your hands around. The world will thank you for it. I will thank you for it. Till we meet again remember Oyibo accent is not by force and faking one only makes you sound like Snoop dogg without the ganja.