Gbagaun: Origin: Yoruba: Colloquial to denote the sound made by a ringing bell.
Implied Meaning/ Usage: Error in one’s grammatical composition; written or otherwise.
It is with mixed emotions that I find myself contributing to what is at best Nigeria’s most popular hash tag on social media. There is no actual proof of its time of coinage, suffice to say that it has been in use since my primary school days in the 90’s way before its appearance on cyberspace. That and words such as ‘’Tabon’’/‘’Yi bon’’ (to shoot a gun), Gbosa (a loud cacophonic sound) would fly mischievously from student to erring school teacher or mate. Am sure these words were chosen to reflect the explosive nature of a shocking grammatical error. A gbagaun is that quiet explosion when, say, your mate embarrasses you with that poorly constructed sentence in public. You hear the English Language misapplied-murdered, shot down, and thus we would playfully point out such mistakes with screams of Gbagaun, gbosa, tabon-all to the chagrin of the offender.
Given that English isn’t our native tongue an artificial social strata arises consisting of those with a better command of the language pontificating over those with poorer grammar skills. It was usually the timid nerd’s way of soliciting recompense from the fumbling bully. The smarty’s way of deriving pleasure in a physical world he did not exactly fit.
Learning from that age however, you’d find no one exactly immune from the gbagaun scourge. A screamer would become the victim the very next minute. It was crazy fun, we’d giggle silly and recount the exact grammatical impropriety over and over. That was primary school, I thought it was done with then but that is not even close. It has instead waxed stronger.
Over time its usage changed as these things are wont to the point where the idea of a gbagaun has morphed into cyberspace. When exactly this happened is also hard to determine. The earliest recorded is sometime in 2010 according to Google. I bet some poor soul with more data bytes than knowledge of tenses probably triggered it, typing murderously what he thought was proper English to the irritation of some internet Soyinka.
On twitter specifically, the hash tag #gbagaun is recognisable as a source of popular discourse and as a humorous national sport. It has spawned various handles, cheeky songs, t-shirt captions and some would even argue; a sub-culture of its own! It was this line of argument that got me involved in researching this trend.
Earlier I said I contribute to this hash tag with certain reservations and my reasons are simple Gbagauns are fads and fads are usually irrational, self defeatist, have a short lifespan and reflect an underside of society that shows just how lacking in individuality we are.
But the gbagaun isn’t like any fad, for one: it doesn’t have a short lifespan. It has been around for the past 10-15yrs, online for 3yrs and doesn’t seem to be slowing down to a halt. Instead, it has become an online identity synonymous with the Nigerian internet user as is an IP address from this part of the West African coast.
I therefore took it upon myself to chat up one of its finest disciples: @gbagaundetector this fellow has over 51k followers. A cult based on his RTs of grammatical errors. A scroll through his favourites is a journey through humour land.
He seems to me to be a shy fellow, rather observant too. I am quick to suspect his motives. Among the many questions I put his way, I ask him why he does this. Is he some complex driven messiah out to absolve us of our grammatical inadequacies?
‘’it’s fun really. Mischief...’’ he replies.
Well I don’t imagine you’d detect gbagauns forever, do you think people will get bored and let go? His reply is quick and unpretentious
‘’most likely’’
I have a feeling he is wrong on this and I tell him so. I leave him thinking to myself perhaps he has no idea how much resilience this hash tag has. I bet he even thinks am nuts trying to write about gbagauns in the first place. Whatever doubts maybe expressed about my sanity pales into insignificance when you realise that some folks intentionally create errors just to have them ‘’gbagauned’’ and then trend.
Fortunately for us all however, Goodluck’s Dame is not on twitter. Her famous; ‘’my husband and Namadi are a good people’’ would have shut twitter down am sure. I cannot honestly imagine the Dame with a twitter account, dear Lord no!!
This gbagaun cant make anybody succeed "@iridiuminter: You think you are too young to succeeded?... "
No comments:
Post a Comment