As local knowledge evolves, rural people must create new words for things, but may do so in surprising ways, as I saw this week while visiting Tiv-speaking farmers in Nigeria. The farmers told us that they were troubled by a white insect pest that lives in groups on the leaves of the cassava plant. The farmers told me the insect’s local name, which I wrote down phonetically: apolo, as in “ah polo�. We identified this as a mealybug and eventually realized that it is not apolo at all, but Apollo, the god of music, poetry and art. That’s a strange name for a soft-bodied insect that doesn’t move.

The Apollo Space Program (1966-72) was a big story in Nigeria, just as in most of the rest of the world. Coincidentally, West Africa suffered an outbreak of conjunctivitis (pink eye) in 1969, and people started to call the affliction “Apollo,� after the spacecraft.

The mealybug was then accidentally introduced to Africa from South America in the early 1970s and became a major pest.  Farmers all over the continent were forced to start talking about the mealybug, and they needed a new word for it. Some Nigerians called the tiny mealybug Apollo, because the gregarious, white insects reminded people of the white or yellow discharge that forms a crust on the eyelashes of pink eye sufferers.

This is why the Tiv have named the mealybugs for a Greek god.

Linguists call this “semantic extension�, where the meaning of one word is extended to include another concept.

By contrast, a word is “coined� when it is created out of thin air. Coining a new word is easy to do, but for some strange reason is quite rare. The Flemish chemist J.B. van Helmont coined the word “gas� in the 1650s, and George Eastman coined the name of his camera company “Kodak� in 1888, simply because he thought that the K was a strong sound and that Kodak would be easy for speakers of different languages to pronounce. There are other examples of coining, such as Gremlin and Jaberwocky, often linked to fantasy, but creating new words out of thin air is less common when naming things in the real world.

Semantic extension, on the other hand, is much more common than coining. Naming a mealybug in Nigeria for a Greek god is simply an extreme, if cross-cultural example, where the insect is named after a disease (based on symptoms), which was named after the rockets (historical coincidence), which was named for a Greek god (out of boundless self-confidence). Semantic extension can go on forever, on the most tenuous connections, even leaping from one country to another.

Apparently other Nigerian ethnic groups (not just the Tiv) also call the mealy bug the Apollo: a name which (like Kodak) is easy to say and to remember.

Local names for pests and diseases may not always be entirely local. Usually, farmers are fairly prosaic when they label new pests, e.g. calling an introduced moth larva “yuraj khuru�, meaning white insect in Bolivian Quechua, or naming new plant diseases “pocha rog� (rot disease) in Bangladesh (Bentley et al. 2009). But sometimes, as with the Apollo, local people reach out to current events for a fresh name. For example, in Kenya farmers had named the larger grain borer (Prostephanus truncatus) “Osama Bin Laden� because it was so destructive—the insect could destroy a family’s entire maize store (Mulira et al. 2011).

See our earlier blog story: Softly killing the mealy bug

Further reading

Bentley, Jeffery W., E.R. Boa, P. Kelly, M. Harun-Ar-Rashid, A.K.M. Rahman, F. Kabeere & J. Herbas 2009 “Ethnopathology: Local Knowledge of Plant Health Problems in Bangladesh, Uganda and Bolivia.� Plant Pathology 58(4):773-781.

Mulira, G., F. Lusweti, Macosore Lokwaleput, C. Mulusa, Khisa N. Wekulo, Kisaka Nicodemus, Kunikinah Justus, Wefwila Jotham, Dinah Wekesa, Esther Limo, and Mary Mwania 2011 “Osama Destroys Maize.� 13 Kenya Fact Sheets. Nairobi: CABI.

Acknowledgement. This story was written with Dr. Tess Madu, who is the real expert on Nigerian cassava farmers.