It hadn’t been by choice: I had got a job as a sports journalist, a post which required me to travel internationally every day, leaving my Cape Town suburb each morning to cross the Claremont border post into Newlands, a small country populated by enormous white youths called Bazza endlessly courting tiny blonde women called Tasha, ruled by a parliament of former Springboks, all of whom were called Chalky.
The grammar and idiom, however, remained forever out of reach. Just as I had struggled with German’s der, die and das, I never knew whether it was ‘bru’, ‘bro’, ‘buggah’ or ‘boet’.
As an English speaker raised in the British linguistic tradition rather than the American one, this was quite familiar to me. Speakers of American English are like golden retrievers: everything is out in the open, as complex and subtle as a chewed frisbee. When they ask you, ‘How are you today?’ – and they always do, for some reason – they are asking you how you are today.
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