All over the world, wherever the English introduced their language to the Indigenes, an adulteration of the English language ensued. It got mixed up, slanged, patoied, pidginized and even drawled out.
It was no different in Ghana where we not only made English our official language, but also created our own pidgin version out of it. Not satisfied with that, we borrowed a few words to add to our everyday discourse. In the process, we have at times so altered the meanings of the original word or phrases that not even Chaucer will make them out.
Sometimes, we translate directly from the vernacular into English, using that literal translation as an expression. A good example is the expression, “skin pain”, a term that means “jealousy”. In the Akan language, jealousy is “ahoa” (skin) “yaw” (pain) and just like that, we have a term.
One old and popular phrase that is probably older that most living Ghanaians can remember is the term “distin”. The term was birthed from the phrase “this thing”.
The term was used to describe anything or any event whose name the speaker could not remember or did not know. Often these were people whose command of the English language was fragmented. However with time, it got into popular usage. Following is a good example of it’s use:
Remember back when cellphones first appeared on the market. If I tried to describe one to a friend and I couldn’t remember the name, I could have said, “I saw “distin” you can use to make calls that is wireless”.
Boom! I didn’t miss a beat!
Thus “distin” grew and with time became the Swiss Army knife of everyday Ghanaian conversation, morphing into other branches of our discourse.
So now, one can hear the term, “It was a sad distin” meaning “It was a sad day or It was a sad event”.
The term has also crept into our bedrooms where all things conjugal fall under the broad umbrella of “distin”. Here one even hears variations like “to distinate” or “the distinate”…..I’ll leave the meanings to your imagination.
Matter of fact, all parts and participants of that male-female interaction can be described with “distin”:
“His ‘distin’ doesn’t work anymore but that is not catastrophic since we live in the age of Vitamin V”, Ama confided to Abena.
One can only marvel at the versatility of the word!
I cannot end distin without my favorite “distin” story.
This past July, I was in Accra with the family and took the kids to Coco Lounge at Stanbic Heights for brunch. Street-level parking was full so we used the underground lot and thus, had to take the elevator up. The minute my son saw the elevators, as he is wont to do, he ran over to the door and starting pushing repeatedly on the call button.
Suddenly an attendant appeared like out of the blue. He was an older guy. He pushed my son’s hand away from the call button and yelled:
“Why you pressing, pressing, pressing? Don’t you know you’ll break the distin?”
At that moment, all I could imagine was my son breaking a distin.
I still laugh when I remember that funny distin.