A lady has been arrested for allegedly beating her stepdaughter to death in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital for eating plantain the father of the girl bought for the house.

It was gathered that even after a female soldier intervened, the lady said to be the wife of a soldier serving at the 6 Division of the Nigeria Army in Port Harcourt called her husband who ordered the female soldier out of their apartment. 

The 10-year-old girl reportedly slumped and died after her stepmother continued beating her after the female soldier left their apartment. She was confirmed dead after being rushed to a nearby clinic. 

The soldier and his wife are now being detained by officials of the 6 Division of the Nigeria Army in Port Harcourt. 

An American couple faked a proposal just one month into their relationship to get free drinks from strangers in two bars.

The pair, Adam Carroll and Corinne Miller from Prattville, Alabama, went on vacation to Atlanta to celebrate Corinne’s birthday last July. While on vacation, they didn’t want to spend much money, so they came up with a plan. 

They decided to fake a marriage proposal in a bar full of revelers who would want to celebrate the moment with them. 

Carroll got down on one knee and pretended to ask for Corinne’s hand in marriage. Other customers were so excited about witnessing the special moment they started giving the couple free shots. 

The plan worked so perfectly well that they took to the celebration to another bar and got “engaged” again and were treated to more drinks to toast their ‘engagement’.

Six months later after they faked their engagement, Adam, 28,  popped the question again and this time it was real. He reportedly got down on one knee in front of all their family and friends at his birthday party and asked Corinne to marry him. 

She said yes for a second time, and the 29-year-old photographer said: “We both have the exact same humour- that’s one of the main components of our relationship.

“People started buying us shots and congratulating us – it was hilarious and definitely a great way to get free drinks.

“It has definitely been a whirlwind romance. We were best friends for eight years before we were a couple and that trip to Atlanta was actually one of the first trips we had been on together.

“I’m happy we did it – it definitely saved us some cash so Adam could get me a real engagement ring!”

Watch video below;

The two children of kaduna-based medical doctor, Philip Ataga, have been released by their abductors two weeks after they were abducted alongside their deceased mother from their home in Juji, Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna metropolis on January 25th.

Dr Philip Ataga who confirmed their release, said the children were dropped by the kidnappers at Ungwar Kati area along the Juji bypass at about 7pm on Thursday night February 6th. They were later picked by one of his relatives who brought them back home.

Their release comes barely a week after the kidnappers killed their mother, Bola, and dropped her body along the Abuja-Kaduna highway.

In recent years, there have been many words that have been coined or created by Nigerians to explain certain concepts that other English speakers from around the world might not understand. As Nigerian culture especially through its movie industry, Nollywood and music from stars like Fela, TuBaba, DBanj, Wizkid, Davido, P-Square, Burna Boy and others like Tiwa Savage and Yemi Alade have crossed African and international borders, the world is taking note and Oxford English Dictionary published by Oxford University Press has recognized more words from the Nigerian  repertoire as formal English words that everyone in the world should recognize. The following is the official blog post on these new additions from the Oxford English Dictionary blog.

Release notes: Nigerian English

My English-speaking is rooted in a Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one. I have taken ownership of English.

This is how acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes her relationship with English, the language which she uses in her writing, and which millions of her fellow Nigerians use in their daily communication. By taking ownership of English and using it as their own medium of expression, Nigerians have made, and are continuing to make, a unique and distinctive contribution to English as a global language. We highlight their contributions in this month’s update of the Oxford English Dictionary, as a number of Nigerian English words make it into the dictionary for the first time.

The majority of these new additions are either borrowings from Nigerian languages, or unique Nigerian coinages that have only begun to be used in English in the second half of the twentieth century, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s.

One particularly interesting set of such loanwords and coinages has to do with Nigerian street food. The word buka, borrowed from Hausa and Yoruba and first attested in 1972, refers to a roadside restaurant or street stall that sells local fare at low prices. Another term for such eating places first evidenced in 1980 is bukateria, which adds to buka the –teria ending from the word cafeteria. An even more creative synonym is mama put, from 1979, which comes from the way that customers usually order food in a buka: they say ‘Mama, put…’ to the woman running the stall, and indicate the dish they want. The word later became a generic name for the female food vendors themselves—Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka notably includes a Mama Put character in one of his works.

The informal transport systems that emerged in Nigeria’s huge, densely populated cities have also necessitated lexical invention. Danfo, a borrowing from Yoruba whose earliest use in written English is dated 1973, denotes those yellow minibuses whizzing paying passengers through the busy streets of Lagos, the country’s largest city. Okada, on the other hand, is first attested twenty years later, and is the term for a motorcycle that passengers can use as a taxi service. It is a reference to Okada Air, an airline that operated in Nigeria from 1983 to 1997, and its reputation as a fast yet potentially dangerous form of transport, just like the motorcycle taxi.

A few of the Nigerian words in this update were created by shortening existing English words. One example is the adjective guber (earliest quotation dated 1989), which is short for ‘gubernatorial’—so Nigerians, for instance, would call a person running for governor a ‘guber candidate’. Another frequently used clipping with a longer history in English is agric. It was originally used in American English around 1812 as a graphic abbreviation for the adjective agricultural, but is now used chiefly in this sense in West Africa. In the early 1990s, agric began to be used in Nigeria to designate improved or genetically modified varieties of crops or breeds of livestock, especially a type of commercially reared chicken that is frequently contrasted with ‘native’ (i.e. traditionally reared) chicken. Two decades later, Nigerian students also started to use the word as a noun meaning agricultural science as an academic subject or course.

Also originating in the 19^th century is K-leg, first attested in 1842 in British English, but now used mostly in Nigerian English. It is another term for the condition of knock knees, as well as a depreciative name for a person affected with this condition, whose inward-turning knees often resemble the shape of the letter K. It is of such widespread use in Nigeria that by the early 1980s, it had acquired a figurative meaning—a K-leg can now also be any sort of problem, flaw, setback, or obstacle.

The term ember months was first used in an American publication in 1898 to signify the final four months of the calendar year. Almost a century later, this expression was taken up again in Nigeria, where the months from September to December are usually considered together as a period of heightened or intense activity.

The oldest of our new additions that are originally from Nigeria is next tomorrow, which is the Nigerian way of saying ‘the day after tomorrow’. It was first used in written English as a noun in 1953, and as an adverb in 1964. The youngest of the words in this batch is Kannywood, first used in 2002, which is the name for the Hausa-language film industry based in the city of Kano. It is a play on Hollywood, following the model of Nollywood, the more general term for the Nigerian film industry that was added to the OED in 2018.

Nigerian Pidgin is another rich source of new words for Nigerian English. Sef, first evidenced in Nigerian author Ben Okri’s novel Flowers and Shadows, published in 1980, is an adverb borrowed from Pidgin, which itself could have been an adverbial use of either the English adjective safe or the pronoun self. It is an emphatic marker added to the end of statements or rhetorical questions, often to express irritation or impatience, as in this quotation from Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah:

‘He could have given you reduced rent in one of his properties, even a free flat sef.’

Also coming from pidgin contexts is the verb chop, which is a common colloquial word in Ghana and Nigeria meaning ‘to eat’. However, beginning in the 1970s, chop also developed the sense of acquiring money quickly and easily, and often dishonestly. The negative sense of misappropriating, extorting, or embezzling funds is also in the earlier reduplicative noun chop-chop (earliest quotation dated 1966), which refers to bribery and corruption in public life. This likening of stealing money to actually devouring it is also reflected in the even earlier synonymous phrase to eat money (1960), as in the following quotation from Nigeria’s News Chronicle in 2016:

‘Our roads were not done. By the end of this year, you will know who ate the money of these roads.’

A few other expressions in this update would require some explanation for non-Nigerians: a barbing salon (earliest quotation dated 1979) is a barber’s shop; a gist (1990) is a rumour, and to gist (1992) is to gossip; when a woman is said to have put to bed (1973), it means that she has given birth; something described as qualitative (1976) is excellent or of high quality.

By focusing on contemporary language in this update, and adding words and phrases that form part of the everyday vocabulary of today’s Nigerians, we hope to give a flavour of English-speaking which, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie put it, is rooted in a Nigerian experience.

Here you can find a list of the new Nigerian words and senses added to the OED in this update:

• agric, adj. & n.
• barbing salon, n.
• buka, n.
• bukateria, n.
• chop, v./6
• chop-chop, n./2
• danfo, n.
• to eat money, in eat, v.
• ember months, n.
• flag-off, n.
• to flag off in flag, v.
• gist, n./3
• gist, v./2
• guber, adj.
• Kannywood, n.
• K-leg, n.
• mama put, n.
• next tomorrow, n. & adv.
• non-indigene, adj. & n.
• okada, n.
• to put to bed, in put, v.
• qualitative, adj.
• to rub minds (together) in rub, v./1
• sef, adv.
• send-forth, n.
• severally, adv.
• tokunbo, adj.
• zone, v.
• zoning, n.

Source: OED