dhodhi

dhodhi
 n.β€” Β«The source of laughter is the name Dodi which, according to the way it is pronounced, would be spelt “Dhodhi” in Shona and is used euphemistically in everyday conversation as a polite way of referring to human waste or faeces. A corruption of the English word “dirt” (meaning filth), dhodhi (singular) or madhodhi (plural) is used in everyday speech in place of the actual Shona word for human waste, “matuzvi” which, among the overly prudish Shona people is considered vulgar.Β» β€”β€œTime for names Chimurenga” by Mbulawa Moyo Financial Gazette (South Africa) Aug. 5, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Further reading

Sleepy Winks (episode #1584)

It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...

Can You Have Four Corn?

The owner of a Berlin, Maryland, produce stand wants to know: When a customer is buying four ears of corn, should they say I have four corn or I have four ears of corn? Corn is a mass noun that can also be counted as a plural, just as we might say I...

Recent posts