The story of pensioner Rainer Dixel (see page 3) who has taken it upon himself to efficiently fill the potholes in his Johannesburg suburb is making people happy.
It’s a simple concept: potholes do not make people happy but people who fix potholes make people happy. Which sort-of means you have to have the potholes in the first place to eventually be happy when they are fixed.
The same applies to those who cheer when the lights come on after a bout of load-shedding. If it had not been for the load-shedding in the first place, that jolt of happiness would not have happened.
It’s a perverse argument, I know, and there is nothing to be praised about either power cuts or potholes. It’s just one of the ways in which we humans work, and perhaps it is essential to our resilience when the alternative is being constantly in a dark hole of depression.
When you google “pothole”, the first suggested search (meaning the most-searched term in recent weeks) is “potholes in South African roads”, and the top item that comes up is “All about potholes in SA”, a page on the website of a company called KHPlant, which sells and repairs graders (which help keep potholes at bay). This report claims that more than 1,000 new potholes are reported per week in Johannesburg alone. It also gives some slightly more obvious information, such as: “We have to take defensive action against an increasing number of potholes”; and “Extreme weather conditions, poor road maintenance and high volumes of load-bearing traffic all contribute to the creation of potholes.” I mean, duh.
The page mentions independent pothole activists shouldering sacks of gravel and getting out there to effect their own repairs. It seems to suggest that this happens only on small, municipally underfunded towns, but 82-year-old Dixel, who lives in a highly populated suburban part of Joburg which can hardly be described as poor, gives the lie to this statement.
What we need are more Dixels, no matter which village or metropolis we live in. What we also need, if you ask me, is a better name for potholes.
The word “pothole” began to be applied to a hole in the road only in the early 1900s. That doesn’t mean the roads were previously in perfect shape (except perhaps for those built by the Romans), but as there were fewer vehicles on the roads there was less chance of bursting a tyre when driving through an unnoticed cavity. Potholes are undoubtedly easier to avoid when on foot or horseback. (Horses, unlike cars, simply jump over the holes, though I suppose there were probably accidents involving the wheels of horse-drawn chariots and ox wagons and the like.)
I quite like the Afrikaans word for pothole — “slaggat” — which, if my tenuous grasp of the language is correct, means “slaughter-hole”.
Getting back to language, the hyphenated “pot-hole” was previously used either in geology to describe a “more or less cylindrical cavity from a few inches to several feet deep in rock” or in industry, referring to “a pit, a hollow, a deep hole for a mine or from peat-digging”.
The “hole” part of the word is obvious. The “pot” comes from anything deep and round, such as a utensil in which soup and other concoctions are prepared.
Incidentally, the insult “pothead”, now largely obsolete, applied to a person who smoked an excessive amount of marijuana. Pothead might have implied that there was a deep, cylindrical cavity where the imbiber’s brain should have been, but I can’t swear to that etymological definition.
A hole shaped like a cooking pot seems too weak a definition for the craters corroding roads all over the nation. Some may start off as cylindrical, but they come in all shapes and sizes, as insurance companies and mechanics are only too aware. There have been cases when an entire vehicle has been almost swallowed by a so-called pothole.
So what should we call them? I quite like the Afrikaans word for pothole — “slaggat” — which, if my tenuous grasp of the language is correct, means “slaughter-hole”. Maybe that’s a bit extreme, but if we don’t get them when they are young, the granddaddy potholes are going to become a much worse menace than the smallish ones are now. Slaughter-hole seems more apt than comparing them to an egg-boiler.
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