Afrikaans Lesson

Well, not just Afrikaans, but this was just the last in a line of several lessons in vernacular I've received this weekend. I've told you about my weakness for Superbuzzer before, and although the game usually restricts me to just a handful each day, I enjoy these usually. The game suffers from some defects, not the least being that even though players are encouraged to contribute questions, the same ones do tend to recur. This leads onto the main point of this post, which I will get to shortly. Another drawback is that the checking of these questions, if indeed there is any, leaves quite a lot to be desired. One of my favourites yesterday was the suggestion that the Greenwich Meridian somehow manages to pass through Norway and Russia.

Well, as I say, if you play regularly the questions tend to recur, and for a certain type of person, once a question has recurred a couple of times, well, not only will you remember it, you'll remember it from the first few words. In a game in which speed of reaction is so important, you'll understand that this can have a huge effect on the game's outcome.

Unfortunately, some players either don't understand or can't accept this. As a result, if you start to win on a regular basis, you are going to either be called a cheat, or to be told to go and do things to yourself which would require both a very supple body and a very broad mind. In several different languages. The last player I played today had a little South African flag next to his avatar, and when I defeated him in the final round he favoured me with a couple of words of Afrikaans. Being of a naturally inquisitive nature, I used google to translate it. With respect to all readers, especially those in South Africa, I shan't repirnt them here.

I'm not having a go specifically at South Africa or the good people there of, since I've been requested to do similar things by a range of people in a range of different places across the world, it just so happened that it was Afrikaans today. But I mean, come on! Get a grip. Not for the first time, I reflected on these sage words, once uttered by my friend Rob Merrill,
"You can beat a man 10 – nil in a football match, during the course of which you have also insulted him and his family and inflicted physical pain upon his person, and he’ll often shake hands with you afterwards, and share a beer with you in the bar. However, if you make a man feel stupid in his own local. . . you're in trouble!" For local, read 'Facebook game, I suppose.