In its September update last year, the OED took a significant stride in tracking the growth of English vocabulary worldwide by publishing the first of a new series of quarterly updates for World Englishes. These included new and revised entries for words from the Caribbean, East Africa, New Zealand, and Wales. Since then, the OED has released three further updates, all featuring a colourful assortment of distinctive words and phrases used by English speakers across the globe.
In this year’s September update, we go back to where our journey started as we present a new batch of Caribbean, East African, New Zealand, and Welsh additions and revisions to the dictionary, now also joined by recent inclusions from the Isle of Man.
Caribbean cuisine, with its bold tropical flavours and diverse influences, features very prominently in this update. A bulla is a small, round, flat cake from Jamaica, made with flour, molasses, brown sugar, and various spices and flavourings such as ginger, nutmeg, coconut, and pineapple. First recorded in English in 1940, it comes from the Spanish word for a bread roll, bollo. In Trinidad and Tobago, a buss up shut (earliest seen in 1988) is fried unleavened bread with a flaky texture, similar to paratha or roti, served torn into pieces. The name represents the Caribbean pronunciation of bust-up shirt, apparently because of the flaky bread’s resemblance to rags of fabric.
Pholourie is an Indo-Caribbean dish consisting of fried balls of dough made from flour, ground split peas, and various spices, usually served with chutney and eaten as a snack. A borrowing from a language of India (Hindi, for instance, has phulaurī, while Bengali has phuluri) and ultimately reflecting an unattested Prakrit compound with the sense ‘puffed cake’, the OED records 11 other possible spellings, including pelauri, pulouree, and phulouri. Our first quotation for this wordcomes from the 1936 song Bargee Pelauri by the Trinidadian calypso singer and composer Rafael de Leon, known by his stage name ‘The Lion’ or ‘Roaring Lion’.
Cou-cou (1843)is a Caribbean dish made from a mixture of cornmeal, okra, and butter stirred together until firm, typically shaped into a ball and served as an accompaniment to other dishes, especially steamed or fried fish; a cou-cou stick (1985) is a flat wooden paddle that is used to stir it. Saltfish is a word dating as far back as 1558, referring generally to fish that has been salted and dried for food, but now used more specifically to refer to salted and dried cod or similar white fish that is widely consumed in the Caribbean.
Beyond the culinary sphere, this batch also includes other Caribbean terms that reflect the region’s cultural and linguistic diversity. In Trinidad and Tobago, a bobolee (1939) is a stuffed and dressed-up effigy, originally of Judas Iscariot but now of any hated or controversial figure, paraded through the streets and set up as a target for beating on Good Friday. The word is of uncertain origin but is perhaps from a language of West Africa. A few decades later, in the 1970s, it developed an additional figurative sense: a person who is easily deceived or taken advantage of; a dupe, a scapegoat. Also possibly after an expression in an African language is the phrase to cry long water (out of one’s eye), meaning ‘to cry copiously or insincerely’. Another word from the 1970s, broughtupsy (1974), refers to good manners and courteous behaviour resulting from a good upbringing.
Carry-go-bring-come (1825) is gossip, or a person who spreads it. This noun, made up of four high-frequency verbs strung together, is derived from Caribbean English phrases like to bring (something) and come, to bring (something) come, and to carry (something) come, all meaning ‘to bring (something) back’ or ‘to get (something) and bring it’, with ‘news’ as the implied object. These verb phrases reflect the syntax of serial verb constructions found in several languages of West Africa. Some Caribbean nations have their own versions of this local term for gossip, like Saint Vincent, where they say bring-and-carry. In Trinidad and Tobago, bring-back-carry-come is the usual term, whereas in theBritish Virgin Islands, it’s bring-come-and-carry-go.
The full list of Caribbean words added in this update is as follows:
New words
- bobolee, n.
- broughtupsy, n.
- bulla, n.2
- buss up shut, n.
- carry-go-bring-come, n.
- cou-cou, n.
- cou-cou stick, n.
- Jamaican Creole, n. and adj.
- pholourie, n.
- saltfish, n.
- tantie, n.
- to cry long water, phrase in cry, v.
Revised words
