Jan Smut has one struck by its tone and West Mister does ring a bell, writes Denis Beckett.
Two distinctively Joburg writers talking Joburg books seemed a good deal even without the ghluwein that Love Books laid on. At Harry Kalmer’s launch of A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg, A City Novel, Ivan Vladislavi did the honours.
Makes a guy proud of Joburg, people writing books about it, Harry talking easily of handed-down history going back to when the Bezuidenhout plaas was the east and the Geldenhuyse had the west and Commissioner Street was laid down in a hectic rush of oxcarts.
Which brought up an intriguing exchange.
Does one feel discombobulated when your city’s street names change?
Ivan spoke of disaffected moments, something being taken, Harry’s take was more upbeat, something being added.
Concurrence that both factors have a place in the scale led on to agreement that misspelled streets are jarring.
Ivan knows a corner of Jan Smut Avenue, and is struck by how the missing “s” changes the tone.
Harry brought up Sam Hancock Street on Constitution Hill. On one corner, he says, it is Sam Hadcock Street. And there is a place where Westminster Road is Westmister.
Or did he mean Westminster Avenue, more Bryanston side? Either way a West Mister is a refreshing change from the West Minister that is Westminster’s usual misspelling. Plus the subject rings lots of bells.
Hurlingham’s welcome sign on the William Nicol is Hurlinghum.
Not far from it is what I’ve known for years as the miraculous Street of Three Names.
I don’t promise it’s still the same but I was a regular there long ago and the street had four kerbsides at its intersection with William Nicol, in three names: Cromatie, Cormartie and Cromartie.
Until right now I have never known which of those is correct, and now I know only because two of them get Word’s red squiggly underlining in disapproval, and Cromartie does not.
Cromartie? Where’s that from? I have no idea and nor, surprisingly, does Google. Wikipedia offers a list of Mr and Ms Cromarties, baseball players and violinists etcetera.
I’ll concede there is a bit of a clue in here in discovering there is an earldom of Cromartie.
The northern quarter of Joburg being more reverential to Scottish-sounding earls than Arizonan quarterbacks, Inspector Clouseau here begins to think we can close the file on that part of things.
But a juicy question remains: does it matter? Say that the Cromartie signwriter had got it wrong every time, but the same wrong, so every corner said Cormartie. No one would know. No one would care. Would we?
But getting it wrong in different ways bugs us. I suppose that’s partly about the famous fear of decline-and-fall lining up, as with plumbers fittings.
Once upon a time your loo, your basin, your shower etcetera were all 90° square-on. Nowadays the 87°s and the 94°s are on the increase, I would say, and for a while that bug did bite me.
But the bug has left town now; leaving a contented sense that a bit of individuality is a kind of assertion of Africanness.
Could we, should we, say that of erratic spelling? In Mthatha (then Umtata), Eli Spilkin Road was Spilkin on every corner except its main intersection, where for decades it proclaimed itself Eli Splikin Road.
I recall a row with some young politicos – “that makes investors think the place is slap and makes residents become slap”, versus “Ag, man, hang loose, don’t be white and uptight”.
That file is still open. Many files, actually. Who was Sam Hancock? Is the road still Eli? Still Splikin? Still legible?
Congratulations to Harry, may his tales/novel boost the Joburg oeuvre.
* Beckett is a writer and journalist. His Stoep Talk column appears in The Star on Mondays and Fridays.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.