_{Image by Alborzagros CC-BY-SA-3.0, 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Words.

Beautiful things, those.

Okay, I just realized I’m not supposed to say beautiful. My friends and I made a pact to refrain from using the word for a month, (You know, just our little way of waving placards in the wind with ‘Restore the dignity of the b-word, oh writers!’ printed on them.) Join in, if you can. Use more suitable words instead. There's tons of them: Okay. Good. Great. etcetera etcetera.

When I was younger, I fell in love with the word eccentric, and went out of my way to use it. I employed every known tactic to incorporate it into my speech. The man in the movie had no friends so he was eccentric. My grandfather served people expired Coke because he was eccentric (I said this in a whisper to my mum, to which she laughed and corrected ‘miserly', the word you’re looking for is miserly’). The woman that sold soup ingredients down the road was cross-eyed and smiled too brightly and had the faint smell of onions left out in the sun. Eccentric.

There were other words too. Ethereal. Denouement. Facade. Ennui. The last three I got acquainted with on the pages of some steamy Sandra Brown paperbacks, ‘borrowed’ from my mother’s Ottoman. I liked that they were French and not pronounced as spelt. There was also the ‘snafu’ word. But it sounds like a weird sneeze or a bad pot of unripe plantain porridge served in a run-down shack somewhere up north.

You know, I said ‘denouement’ in secondary school and my teacher corrected, ‘de-new-ment; and went on to ask "is your eyes paining you?’'

"No, ma, you could check the dictionary."

She did, and then she said ‘That’s the British pronunciation; we’re using the American pronunciation’.

Oh well. Then, the designation ‘word bank’ belonged to a smallish black boy whose native vernacular name literally meant ‘the year of money.’ Psst, he said one day, do you know what a French letter is? I shook my head no. He sniggered. I was un-amazed at its meaning when I got to know it, because I’d known it’d be something like that, what with everybody saying ‘pardon my French’ right after using a slang. I still hate those, by the way. Slangs. Because they suck. There’s no melody in them. They’re flat and blah and commercial (oh, I used this one a lot too a coupl'a years back, as opposed to ‘cheap’. It dealt a punch.) Commercial!. Except when Stephen King uses them. In The Tommyknockers, the part where Bobbie’s amazing sister says ‘...just wash them first to get the bug piss off’? Kills me every time.

Now here’s another word. 'Superfluity'. Some Nigerians, like the biblical Pharisees, are known for their much speaking. Now, this expresses itself in different ways: one is pretty clear in our love for tautologies. Check these out:

• ‘He is reversing back.’ -- (Yeah, I mean he's reversing while reversing. How cool is that.) Googled the words and got CCTV cameras all over my browser as the result.

• ‘I bought some cracker biscuits at the market.’ -- (The word 'cracker' was never going to be enough name for a biscuit.) I'm pretty confident @belemo and @holybranches blasphemed a lot with this one. They come off like the hands-in-the-cookie-jar type of kids to me. Who gave you money?

• ‘She’s wearing short knickers,’ -- (because 'Shorts' and 'Knickers' aren't the same at all for us.)

Did you know, they also find everyday uses in the words we invented ourselves: disvirgin, trafficate, instalmentally, opportuned, pepperish.

We find them in asking totally unnecessary questions too. You meet your friend after a trip, in person, and the first thing she says is ‘are you back?’ A Nigerian mum asks you, after you bid her good morning, ‘have you woken up? There are identical babies in matching outfits and a Nigerian still asks, ‘are these twins?’ Hell, no, they're football teammates all kit up. Moron.

The only economy of words I can boast of is the use of the kinda-word ‘ehen’ to mean about 12 different things, ranging from ‘are you serious?’ to ‘of course’ to ‘what do you want?’.

I loved seeing the legal movie series Suit. Didn't you? Well, i did, until Mike and Rachel wouldn't stop bleeping around! In times past, my lecturer said, in defence of his assertion that most of us would end up perpetually poor, that lawyers charged clients per word. In their drafts, they’d go;

"Pursuant to these aforementioned points stated above which I will reiterate for the kind consideration of your most glorious lordship in this suit before this honourable court for further consideration..."

Hence, he encouraged us to use them in reckless abandon, and as frequent as we could.

A certain ex-legislator in my country is a god at it. A god!. Asked a simple question, he’d pull out bombastic words like 'bombastic'. Plus a smattering of non-words too, hybrids borne of the synthesis between his language and English. He was the object of comic relief a couple of years ago. He once went;

‘I am maniacally bewildered, overgassted and flabberwhelmed at the paraplegic crinkum-crankum that characterised the Glo CAF Awards, culminating in an odoriferous saga cum gargantuan gaga!...The perfidy and mendacity of all the apparatchics of sports suzerainty, is not only repugnant, but also insalubrious.. Dare say that African football is swimming in a pestilential aqua with a disastrous terminus ad-quem, inherently laden with avoidable cataracts, ice bergs and Oxbow lakes. It is sardonic and lugubrious!

Hell, that was the much I could dig out. And, yes. It was an official speech. Delivered with a straight face. Like I said, a god!