BBC.
Lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary have updated the dictionary with 29 Nigerian words, recognizing Nigeria’s “unique and distinctive contribution to English as a global language.”
The former British colony’s 200 million people speak more than 250 languages, according to this article. English is the official language.
The OED has described most of the 29 new entries as “either borrowings from Nigerian languages or unique Nigerian coinages”.
Here are a few of my favorite new entries:
severally: on several occasions; repeatedly
next tomorrow: the day after tomorrow
barbing salon: a barber-shop
chop-chop: bribery and corruption in public life
to rub minds: to consider a matter jointly; to consult and work together
The article recommends adoption of the following two terms:
akara: deep-fried balls of ground beans
moi-moi: steamed and flavored cakes of ground beans
“[They are] things I have heard called ‘bean cake’ and ‘bean puddle’, neither of which sounded right to me,” writes the author.
(Nduka Orjinmo, “War of words as Nigerian English recognised by OED,” BBC, 3-1-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Geography & Poetry
The Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Old road in Ladakh has 37 bridges over snow-fed rivers in spate during summer melt. It leads to Karakoram Pass where, on 15 June two-thousand-and-twenty, Chinese warriors ambushed Indian warriors with rocks, staves & nail-studded clubs, tossing dead & dying over cliffs into the Galwan River.
It’s the stuff of hoary epic: In the frigid barrens of the Karakoram, two ancient civilizations go mano a mano contesting the Aksai Chin, an alkaline desert that abuts Xinjiang province, where Mother Earth demos her end.
I’m brought to consider the perennial terror that poetry, besotted with love & death, milks from the human condition in sulfurous spate; how bloody life imitates hoary art over and over and over.
(Ajai Shukla, “How China and India Came to Lethal Blows,” NYTimes, 6-19-20)
(c) 2020 JMN