![]() ![]() Words like uce, but also bots, and of course skux, which in particular was well charted in this piece by Tayi Tibble. In particular she was looking at words taken from Sāmoan and Tongan that had morphed into a local vernacular. I laughed because seeing the words that sit in your home as comfortably as unnoticed dust on the top of your fridge as a Stuff headline is awks as.Ī few years ago Leilani Momoisea traced some of the origins of ‘ poly slang’ for Metro magazine. ![]() I laughed because while, yes, at a stretch, uce can be described as Kiwi slang, the localised iteration of the Sāmoan uso (brother) is definitely used from a place of knowing only among certain people. I laughed when I read a Stuff headline that said, “ Hey uce, here’s a mean-as guide to Kiwi regional slang”. Could this mean ‘lessgo’ comes not from Chris Brown but our very own prince of NZ hip hop, Dei Hamo?Įven with its origins on shaky ground, ‘lessgo’ has a firm place in a long line of brown urban colloquialisms – our own local brown vernacular if you like. Dei Hamo’s ‘let’s go’ is a whole year earlier than Chris Brown’s. Dei Hamo’s ‘let’s go’ is not a contraction but it has the right energy and emphasis on the final ‘o’ as today’s ‘lessgo’. Uses of the phrase ‘let’s go’ can be found as early as 1615 in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, which reads, “Now let’s go hand in hand, no one before another.” In this usage it is just a polite request to do something.ĭid Dei Hamo, in his 2010 smash hit ‘We Gone Ride’, just say lessgo?. ‘Lessgo’ is essentially a contraction of ‘let’s go’, which is itself a contraction of ‘let us go’. And before you know it, the call is hanging in the air waiting for another ‘lessgo’ to come back in response. It just rolls off the tongue so nicely, like the cold pineapple Frujus my great-grandpa Pete used to have in his chest freezer ready and waiting after my walks home from intermediate school. It was something I enjoyed hearing from others – at weddings, at the clubs, the Ranui train station and at the Tonga versus All Blacks game at the FMG Stadium Waikato.īut it only takes a few bevvies (of any kind) before I too catch the bug. Not because I had taken a vaccine, but because I’m the introverted type, and I don’t want to risk something unexpected spilling from my mouth. It was an ailment I thought I was immune from.
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