About being Stellenbosched

By MAEDER OSLER / I first came across the marvellous website wordsmith.org when I was doing some research around the Great Wilgenhof Debate, following Jannie Gagiano’s article for Toverview on this rather byzantine topic.

As its name implies, the site does all sorts of fun and informative things with words. So when I googled ‘Stellenbosch’, I wound up on a Wordsmith section called ‘A-Word-A-Day’, which informed me that ‘Stellenbosch’ is a toponym — a place name that has become associated with a particular quality. Specifically, it can be used as a verb, which means to ‘relegate someone incompetent to a position of minimal responsibility’.

Wordsmith explains this as follows: Stellenbosch was a British military base during the Second Boer War. Officers who had not proven themselves were sent to Stellenbosch to take care of something relatively insignificant, such as looking after horses. Even if they kept their rank, this assignment was considered a demotion. Eventually the term came to be applied when someone was reassigned to a position where he could do little harm.

According to Wordsmith, this usage was first recorded in 1900. It adds that one can even talk of somebody being ‘Stellenbosched’.

One can subscribe to a free newsletter with the most recent words. According to the site, there are nearly 400,000 subscribers in 170 countries. None other than the New York Times has called it ‘the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace’.

So there you have it … it seems to us that this meaning of ‘Stellenbosch’ resonates significantly with the Wilgenhof saga, particularly in respect of some of the people who’ve been involved in dealing with it. But we’ll leave the rest of this to your imagination.