Where Is the Name Ketanji From?

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• 00:02

  From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

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  I'm John McWhorter, and for this edition, I want to talk about Ketanji.

• 00:12

  Of course, that is Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, by the time you hear this,

• 00:16

  I'm pretty sure, will be the newest Supreme Court Justice.

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  I don't want to talk about her jurisprudence or the controversy around what her hearings I want to talk about something extremely nerdy,

• 00:29

  but I think extremely useful for us.

• 00:32

  The name Ketanji.

• 00:33

  Where does it come from?

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  She tells us that she had an aunt who was a volunteer in the Peace Corps in West Africa,

• 00:41

  and the aunt gave her parents a bunch of names,

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  a bunch of West African names to choose from,

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  and they chose the beautiful name Ketanji, specifically Ketanji Onyika.

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  And Ketanji Onyika means...

• 00:55

  Lovely one.

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  The question is, which West African language?

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  Of course, there are, you know,

• 01:01

  more important things on most of our minds than knowing exactly which language Ketanji Onyeka came from.

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  But the truth is that we Americans often are left with thinking of Africa as this linguistically undefined place where,

• 01:18

  you know, there are a whole bunch of languages and we're not sure which ones are there.

• 01:22

  We've all heard of Swahili, but, you know, what about the others?

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