Ja well no fine
other.— «Consider the local expression, “Ja, well, no fine.”….Is it one word? Does it have commas? Even the Dictionary of South African English stumbles: “to explain this to a non-South African is a challenge.” A few years ago, the former radio broadcaster RJB Wilson, who coined the expression back in 1978, tried to explain it. “My youngest brother,” he wrote, “was in the habit of saying ‘no fine’ to everything that really required a ‘c’est la vie’ or ‘that’s the way the cookie crumbles.’ It had a nice South African feel to it. I added ‘Ja, well…’ to it to reinforce the South Africanism.”» —“Letter from South Africa: Blend of Languages Hard to Digest” by Kurt Shillinger in Johannesburg, South Africa Boston Globe Oct. 22, 2000. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How and why do words from one language find their way into another? Vietnamese, for instance, includes many words borrowed or adapted from French, a vestige of colonialism. For example, the Vietnamese word for “train station,” ga, comes...
In 1971, when a new public library opened in Troy, Michigan, famous authors and artists were invited to write letters to the city’s youngest readers, extolling the many benefits of libraries. One of the loveliest was from E.B. White, author of...