On gisting

Gisting is quite a phenomenon in Nigeria. It deserves a whole phallanx of linguists from across the world to come study, as with pidgin (especially its Wafi variant). Gisting is a kind of phatic communion (a linguistic term for initial speech interaction based on establishing sociality, rather than being based on the transfer of information). Gisting is a subset of gossiping. It is usually done at high speed. When done in English, the outsider cannot keep up with the blistering pace of the words. Gisting sounds a bit like Coltrane in his heyday - a sheet of sound cascading between mouths. It is more a form of verbal music than information exchange.

While gisting as a form of sonorous behaviour is fascinating and, as I say, deserves to be studied, I'm on the whole against it. Ok, good gisters have a masterful conversational memory which means they can remember step by step each element of discourse - he said she said etc. However, gisting seems to me to be a lazy form of communication on the whole. As with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's critique of what he called Das Man (equating ultimately to Idle Talk) in Being and Time, I find gisting to be mostly vacuous. The narrative genius of agile gisters is not enough. What is required is that rare thing in Nigeria: analysis. Gisting is such a waste of time when one can simply get to the point and break down speech and meaning into its constituent parts. Gisting takes up many hours which could otherwise be spent plotting the revolution. What we need is a device which converts a minimum of say 10% of gisting energy into revolutionary thought processes. I'm currently conducting a thorough search of the wildest margins of Google to find a mad scientist who will turn this theoretical device into a working tool.