Starting the Toli
So I guess I'm relaunching Koranteng's Toli today. But first a definition:
toli: n. 1. A juicy piece of news. 2. The latest word or gossip. 3.The talk of the town, typically a salacious or risque tale of intrigue, corruption or foolishness.
This is a word originally from the Ga language spoken in the southern coastal regions of Ghana, West Africa (A few links on the Ga people,more accurately the Ga-Adangbe people). It's a word that very succintly expresses not just a notion (the news) ie. Asking someone 'What's the toli?' implies a certain attitude - but also interest in the speaker. I haven't been able to find the equivalent in English or French so I'll do my best to ensure that it's fully incorporated into the english language. Reading this blog should give you some idea about what I mean.
Koranteng's Toli was my first online presence, a basic homepage of the variety common circa 1996, where my ranting and raving started but which I haven't been updating of late. It's been a nomad, moving from ISP to ISP (channel1, geocities, tripod, at&t broadband, comcast). I guess I should get a domain and find a new host and perhaps move this blog there (hmmm, that's an idea).
My innate shyness, or some would rather say conservatism, means that I've resisted the blog world until now. On the other hand, blogging, and micropublishing is one of the things that has become so ridiculously easy to do that there's no reason not to. It's likely to be to get much easier to maintain a site using blog publishing tools than the NetObjects Fusion or Dreamweaver tools I had been using.
I'd also like to do more writing - my fiction writing seems to have stalled (more on that later) and I haven't been following up on the other things that my wide range of interests would imply. Since I read widely, I accumulate lots of ideas but often don't follow up on all, I hope the ease of posting to this blog will give some of those lost ideas more coherence. Or maybe not, maybe posting about them will show them in their proper unassuming light. You'll find me voicing on politics, economics,technical stuff and the kind of mundane things that every blog features. For technical writing, I hope I can get to the kind of groove that Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim have attained (techies who write well but have very wide interests).
In any case, less talk, more blogging. Welcome.
File under: toli, introduction, Ga, language, culture, Ghana, profile
3 comments:
Yay! you started a blog :) though i think you should admit that you were just envious of http://www.orchidlover.blogspot.com
The (American) vernacular equivalent to "toli" that I'm familiar with is "dish," as in "What's the dish on their breakup?" or "She came in, honey, and she had *all* the dish!"
Well in Australia we might say "what's the goss [short for gossip]" indicating a similar interest in the sort of juicy news that will establish a conspiratoral bond between the parties
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