Word and Text A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics Vol. IV, Issue 2 December / 2014 67 – 83 A Word: ‘Palaver’ and Its Transferal Residues Mira Shah University of Bern E-mail: mira.shah@germ.unibe.ch Abstract The word ‘palaver’ is colloquially associated with useless verbiage and the nuisance of a tediously long, aimless and superfluous debate. At the same time, it insinuates an uncivilized culture of discourse beyond reason and it appears to be of vaguely exotic origin but still firmly set in the European lexicon. Yet behind this contemporary meaning there lies a long history of linguistic and cultural transfers which is encased in a context of different usages of language and their intersections. By tracing the usage and semantics of ‘palaver’ in various encyclopaedias, glossaries and dictionaries of English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, the following article explores the rich history of this word. Moreover, it also regards the travelling semantics of the term ‘palaver’ as a process of cultural transfer that can be likened to the microcellular workings of a (retro)virus. Viral reproduction and evolution work through processes of transfer that enable the alteration of the host to adjust it to the replication and reproduction of the virus. In some cases, these processes also allow for the mutation or modification of the virus, making it suitable for transfer from one host to another. The virus is thus offered here as a vital model for cultural transfer: It not only encompasses the necessary adoption and adaption of contents or objects of cultural transfer in different contexts. It contributes to a conceptual understanding of the transferal residue that the transferred content is endowed with by its diversifying contexts. This model thereby surpasses an understanding of cultural transfer as literal translation or transmission: it conceptualizes cultural transfer as an agent of evolutionary processes, allowing for mutational effects of transfer as endowment. Keywords: cultural transfer, palaver, virus, lexicography, etymology, transferal residues, rhetorics, semantics Palaver - A Word Transferred In David Caute’s 1959 novel At Fever Pitch, set on the eve of transition of an unnamed British colony into an independent and soon to be troubled African nation, language is a problem. ‘[B]oth pidgin and the vernacular’ 1 are forbidden by the War Office. Since the colonial administration hasn’t taken care to teach their African subjects proper English, however, the military personnel instructing African battalions to safeguard the coming election against protesters of the opposition revert to either pidgin talk or the help of vernacular translators to get their instructions across to the soldiers. British-educated and National Socialism-inspired African politicians debate political strategies at length and with Shakespearean drama in mind. Yet they stumble over ideologies that fail to bridge sophisticated education and linguistic virtue on the one hand and powerful 1 David Caute, At Fever Pitch (London: André Deutsch Limited, 1959), 17. All subsequent quotations will be given between brackets within the text.