Headline from pg 6 of today’s Isolezwe Newspaper:
Bazalela ukuthola imali yeqolo: ucwaningo
Translated, this means:
They have kids to get welfare money: research
Now, apart from the obviousness of this headline, there’s an interesting bit of linguistics, and specifically metonymy.
iqolo is ‘the small of the back; the lumbar region’ – so imali yeqolo is small-of-the-back’s money (or lumbar money). It is so called because it is money paid when one is injured, or otherwise cannot work.
‘Lumbar-money’ or imali yeqolo is another way of describing umhlalaphansi (both retirement/pension as well as ‘welfare’ – literally ‘the-sitting-down-thing’).
Umhlalaphansi is also, naturally, a euphemism for loafing or lounging about, and a word for a string-trap (since it sits flat).
