Believe me, every society has a trend setter.
Usually, what these people say ends up across our lips, becoming signatures we use to spice up our daily speech.
It is even easier to internalise these signatures when they come via mass media such as radio or television.
My good old friend, Agama of the kuchitekete fame, introduced us to his fotseki way of looking at those holding ideas in conflict with ours.
It so happened once in a while that even children would stun their parents with a fotseki of unexpected proportions.Â
Agama’s friend, and by extension my friend, the Professor Chitsulo cha Njanji, came about with tiakhwenzule.
We have since used tiankhwenzule so many times to befittingly describe the noisy Arsenal fans as they get busy weeping over goal-machine Robin Van Persie’s departure from the Emirates’ valley of dry shelves.      Â
A few years down the line, we are now into the amayi titakate regime.
It’s only human and many more terms will come with time.
Arts too has the power to contribute to the vocabulary via the words that films, music or drama popularise.
What about Nollywood and how it has planted into the Malawian fabric expressions of the Chineke inclination?
Recently, it has been the ‘Chewanese’ films, those Chinese titles mimicked into Chichewa.
I would say there is some ingenuity in these. Think of the ‘madness’ it takes for one to wake up one day and mimick the whole film from start to finish.
We also know so many films Americans have translated from other languages to English, only that the Americans do official translations while we aim more at playing up the fun, not the sense carried in the original sense.
But that seems to come at a great cost.
My friend who teaches at some primary school notes that the ‘Chewanese’ pieces have had a bad influence on pupils.
He notes that children are so moved into grammatically illogical terms the Chewanese movies carry and that this may have a negative impact in years to come.
I am forced to agree with him, especially when even the Chewa Heritage Foundation (Chefo) worries about the hasty and improper translations where nkhondo siimanga mudzi becomes ‘war does not arrest a village’.
