Listen, that whole\u00a0chaotic mood swing\u2014last week, or the one before, who even knows\u2014was extreme. A\u00a0tight Friday wrap\u00a0that pulled a cosmic all-nighter, spilling over to Monday and Tuesday just to keep the momentum? My biological clock, doing pushups in public, decided to lead with that late energy, and no wonder it seeded this entire piece. A blessing in disguise, or maybe just a prank from time itself.\u00a0 You’re not wrong.\u00a0That sophomore year wasn\u2019t a curriculum; it was a cosmic vibe check that kept failing.<\/p>\n
We were re-upping that mood, filtering the relentless state of lateness, deep, existential dread, and the crushing linguistic panic that went from\u00a0English terror\u00a0to the silent, suffocating archives of French, Latin, and Greek. The whole atmosphere was a chaotic, utterly unbothered existence, a pure mess. The\u00a0raison d\u2019\u00eatre\u00a0of the numbers\u2014the undeniable, clean, analytical logic of math, economics, and accounting\u2014was the\u00a0locus standi, the thing that had the right to exist and hold court. Meanwhile, the words? They were just background noise, a collective\u00a0t\u2019s Greek to me\u00a0murmur, an overwhelming, dissonant drone that felt like a\u00a0solecism\u00a0against my very attendance, a profound grammatical error committed just by showing up to a place where language was a hostile foreign entity.<\/p>\n
My English class was the epicenter of the absurd, a pure taunt. It became a dramatic absence, a helpful void that, with the kind of high-irony only the universe can pull off, was the closest thing I got to a helping hand. I\u2019d slip in, always late to the party, navigating the relentless\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u00a0of finding the key under a mat that wasn\u2019t there, a pure, distilled, and almost comforting absurdity.<\/p>\n
The teacher, a chalk-dusted, beautiful genius whose diction could bench-press syllables and whose gaze carried the silent scars not of the intellectual revolution, but the 1970s Ethiopian one, simply never came to class anymore. The whole semester, the entire structure of the learning objective, dissolved into an\u00a0ex post facto\u00a0(retroactive) fantasy: we\u2019d get the grades after our M.A., or maybe after the actual heat death of the universe\u2014a completely\u00a0willy-nilly\u00a0promise hinged on a generous, mythical grade. This system\u2019s credibility? It was as solid as a\u00a0Johnsonese\u00a0sermon being pithy, which is to say, absolutely nonexistent. Our afternoon sessions dissolved into what we affectionately termed\u00a0Chat hour\u2014a blessed, coffee-fueled sabbath of unearned confidence, where we were the masters of our own syllabus-free domain. This whole setup was\u00a0ultra vires\u00a0(beyond powers), wildly outside the bounds of academic contract, but we accepted it, no further questions, as the department\u2019s\u00a0stare decisis\u00a0(the law\u2019s memory habit, the way things were always done).<\/p>\n
The truth is, the silence of that room was more oppressive than any lecture. It wasn\u2019t an empty room; it was a vast, psychological testing chamber. Every time I walked in, I felt the unsettling chill of being observed\u2014a camera hidden in the marvels of the marbles cladding OCR, ILS, its tiny red light blinking, filming my confusion and late arrival, a silent witness documenting the pathetic lack of education. It was a classic\u00a0Hitchcockian setup: the tension lies not in what happens, but in what doesn’t happen, and the certainty that we were, somehow, being judged for our collective intellectual failure.<\/p>\n
The true linguistic panic, the\u00a0paramnesia\u00a0(false memory) of ever having been intellectually capable, truly began when the French and Latin anxieties started creeping into my English failure, like a ghost in a language machine. It all started with the\u00a0Dictionary Fiasco. I got the initial, exhilarating\u00a0vu jamais\u00a0moment\u2014the unsettling feeling of utter novelty and clarity\u2014when a friend handed over a “very simplified,” “very current” Merriam Webster-type dictionary. It was the absolute antithesis of the heavy, archaic tomes I usually faced, a slim, modern promise of instant linguistic competence, designed, I swear, for someone who scrolls through life in 30-second bursts and requires only the most surface-level understanding of existence. It was the promise of a\u00a0final boss move\u00a0against my linguistic inadequacies, a silver bullet against my acute, paralyzing sense of being a\u00a0Latinless dolt\u2014a linguistic plebeian who couldn’t even parse the prepositions. But friendship politics are a brutal sport, and with the devastating cruelty of a fleeting moment of clarity, he retracted the gift. He handed the slim, modern promise of linguistic competence to a high school student who probably thought \u201cstare decisis\u201d was the latest Instagram filter. Those images, once circulated among Soviet-era students, flashed back in the memory of that moment.<\/p>\n
No effort could reverse the decision, not even the most theatrical, woe-begone lament, which left me incredibly short-changed. I could have turned to the old reliables: Amsalu Aklilu and GC Mosbach, an Amharic-English dictionary that ruthlessly could have forced me to be functionally bilingual just to look up and understand one single English word. But I dumbly ignored that, and my search ritual became an agonizing time killer, a pilgrimage to\u00a0Kennedy Library\u00a0(the crossroads\/center where trivia is exchanged), where finding a simple definition became a descent into\u00a0ad nauseam\u00a0repetition and a cosmic side quest. It was a ritual of humiliation, and every search confirmed that trivia comes from the crossroads where people discuss small, insignificant things, and I was perpetually stuck at the smallest, most insignificant of those things\u2014a single word.<\/p>\n
The Dictionary Fiasco wasn’t just about a book; it was about the sudden, sharp retraction of\u00a0agency\u2014the power to know. And the hidden camera from the English class? It seemed to have followed me. I\u2019d catch myself glancing around Kennedy, convinced that someone was watching me fail, watching the sweat on my brow as I flipped between three languages just to understand a fourth. The humiliation was the script, and I was the unwitting star.<\/p>\n
Then came the group work, a\u00a0prima facie\u00a0(first glance) chance at academic and social redemption, led by a student, a rare young man from Iluababora who was effortlessly good with both numbers and words\u2014the perfect synthesis of the two intellectual worlds. My\u00a0Second Big L, my most iconic fail, hit when I read his final draft. I was immediately triggered, profoundly upset by a citation, a Latin-sounding “guru” I was tired of seeing everywhere.<\/p>\n
The shock, the profound\u00a0cacoepy\u00a0(poor pronunciation, poor understanding) of my misreading, was the sudden, awful realization that\u00a0\u201cDitto\u201d\u2014the Latin for \u201cthe same\u201d or \u201cas before\u201d\u2014was not an individual. That self-inflicted academic\u00a0eggcorn\u00a0was truly devastating; the\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u00a0loop of my sophomore year clarified instantly:\u00a0Ditto was the personification of the repetition that haunted me.\u00a0Every single time I saw it, the material was saying, in the driest, most bureaucratic Latin imaginable: This is the same. Nothing new here. The loop continues.<\/p>\n
It was the system\u2019s ultimate, minimalist defense against the\u00a0vu jamais\u2014the avoidance of all novelty. It was the crushing weight of classical language used not to illuminate, but to insist upon the endless, crushing recurrence of the\u00a0status quo.\u00a0It left me with a bleak, almost\u00a0Johnsonian wisdom: some words are indeed more powerful because they are the quiet, unassuming, two-syllable conductors of the looping vibe.<\/p>\n
This paranoia deepened when I realized the chilling implication of the camera imagery: it was like finding the camera hidden in the ceiling only to realize the lens was pointed at another, identical room\u2014and the film was already rolling, capturing an endless sequence of the same mistakes being made by the same students who couldn’t escape the linguistic trap. The whole system was built on the terrifying truth of\u00a0Ditto.<\/p>\n
The true break, the actual, meaningful\u00a0vu jamais\u2014the moment of unsettling novelty and clarity\u2014came not from English, nor from the Latin shadow that followed it, but from economics, delivered by the man who spoke the language of Greek logic: Dejene Aredo (PhD). He walked into the lecture hall radiating gusto, the sheer, visible force of his intellectual confidence. This was the man we\u2019d seen grilling MA students, his certainty so complete he could casually distance himself from his lecture notes, treating them as mere suggestions. Then he dropped the bomb, the\u00a0res judicata\u00a0(the final word, the matter decided) of his class that instantly elevated the stakes from a passing grade to the currency of intellectual survival:\u00a0the answer is not only the answers right, it is all about the good argument.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We were shaken in our boots, experiencing a\u00a0promnesia\u00a0(memory of the future) where sound argument, derived from rigorous, persuasive thought, was the only currency. This was the ultimate, necessary break from the\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u00a0of rote learning. The terror was replaced by the exhilarating, terrifying demand for clarity. This was the intellectual\u00a0Columbus\u2019s egg moment.\u00a0The explorer, after being challenged by a shallow courtier who insisted his discovery was simple and inevitable, didn’t reply with words. He took an egg, invited everyone present to make it stand on end, and when they all failed, he simply cracked the shell on the table, leaving it standing firmly on the broken base.<\/p>\n
The sound of that\u00a0squelch\u00a0was the sound of a paradigm breaking. The courtier\u2019s sneer, “Nothing is easier than to follow it,” was the epitome of\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u2014the realization is only simple after the initial act of violation. Dejene was telling us to stop seeking the false comfort and certainty of the\u00a0de jure\u00a0(the law on the page, the rulebook) and master the\u00a0de facto\u00a0(the real-life energy of persuasive thought, the ability to make the argument stand), to be the one who cracks the egg.<\/p>\n
His lesson was a furious, elegant demand for precision of argument\u2014the ultimate skill of Greek rhetoric (logos), the ability to move beyond mere definition (Latin) into persuasive, actionable truth (French Cartesian clarity). It was the only thing that could break the historical, linguistic loop of misunderstanding that led to the devastating\u00a0Mokusatsu\u00a0disaster.<\/p>\n
I realized then the horror was not simply in misreading\u00a0Ditto; the terror was global. The\u00a0Mokusatsu\u00a0tragedy\u2014where a single word, intended by the Japanese government to mean “to refrain from comment” or “wait and see,” was tragically interpreted by the Allies as “to ignore” or “treat with contempt”\u2014had catastrophically altered the end of WWII, potentially culminating in the atomic destruction it was trying to avoid. A single, linguistic\u00a0solecism\u00a0at the highest level\u2014an error of ambiguity\u2014became the catalyst for ultimate violence. This was the\u00a0Hitchcockian climax. The lesson was not about economics, but about the lethal precision of language.<\/p>\n
Dejene\u2019s class wasn’t a vibe check; it was an ultimatum. We had to be the ones to crack the egg, successfully and precisely, every single time, or risk historical, global catastrophe. The looping vibe was history itself, and the\u00a0Ditto\u00a0that had haunted me was revealed as the system\u2019s terrifying tendency to repeat destruction due to a lack of argumentative clarity. The pressure was now cold, absolute, and terrifyingly clear. We were no longer late; we were standing at the precipice of language failure, where silence or ambiguity was simply not an option.<\/p>\n
This final realization, this\u00a0vu jamais\u00a0moment of unsettling novelty, became the\u00a0amicus curiae\u2014the friend of the court with receipts\u2014for my battered soul, proving that the chaos was not a personal flaw but a systemic trap. The relentless\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u00a0of my youth\u2014the Sisyphean scramble of chasing elusive TV cameras at Meskel, then called Abyot Square, only to be told by some stone-faced newsreader that the film wasn\u2019t “washed” or the footage was lost, felt like a deliberate ritual of looking backward. This was the same energy as our window shopping around\u00a0Addis Ababa Stadium, where the pecking order would be music shops, then sports goods, with personal computers from IBM (Afcor) at the bottom.<\/p>\n
We were never tired of seeing the photos of Bob Marley and Prince, or the posters of Brazil\u2019s 1970 World Cup heroes, with that song naming the Portuguese legends. As we approached the stadium, we\u2019d stop for a long break at Pele Music shop to give our ears to the melody spilling from the loudspeaker. I remember one moment most: the image of\u00a0Bob Marley\u00a0from his last concert, cut from a foreign newspaper, accompanying the news of his death. Little did we know he\u2019d once passed right where we sat. Tewdros Mekonen said that when they were playing at the Ghion Hotel, Bob, just a passerby, jammed with them, giving David Kassa strange, unheard-of key combinations to follow. This was a\u00a0vu jamais\u00a0moment of musical invention, a total reset.<\/p>\n
The thought of\u00a0Kiftet<\/em>\u00a0(alias Gap), an Amharic adopted stage drama by\u00a0Debebe Seifu, now filled my mind. Debebe, a\u00a0vu jamais\u00a0Alexander Pope-laced epitome to whom the word genius can be applied with ease, left a huge gap in writing and its rigorous studies in Ethiopia. He was rescued in his sophomore year from the uncharted sea of Debit and Credit in accounting by the renowned editor Amare Mammo, following an unthoughtful academic blunder in discharging him from AAU.<\/p>\n Distress leading to depression distanced him from the literary scene, the poet who was touted as having all that it takes for a Nobel prize in literature by his Amharic essay pioneer friend Mesfin Habtemariam. Among many others, his contribution of easy-to-use and never-to-forget, exact unique coining of Amharic equivalents for English words are household words in the Ethiopian literary scene. He passed away at the age of fifty, eighteen years ago. His brother Abebe, while bitterly lamenting his loss, underscores Debebe\u2019s unparalleled craving never to settle for routines that Ethiopia\u2019s literary scene failed to tap.<\/p>\n If my memory is not failing me, the story on\u00a0Kiftet\u00a0spins over a professor, so snobbish he was, his attitude left him with no friend in the University, where he had a teaching post. While digging through his academic records, his foes came up with a course in which he had earned an \u201cF\u201d while being an undergraduate ages ago. The \u201cF\u201d was not removed from the record. Therefore, it was decided by the University senate to hinge his stay with them on the result after seating an exam to remove the \u201cF\u201d. He scored \u201cF\u201d again.\u00a0The ultimate academic loop.<\/p>\n This corporate\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u00a0of management manuals being delivered like periodicals to be taken home and never to be heard of was a ritual of insisting on process, regardless of outcome, a pure\u00a0Johnsonese\u00a0defense against action. The poor, genius technician named Girma of ETV, if memory hasn’t failed me, who invented the “application” to shorten the washing time, had his gadget tossed in an\u00a0ultra vires\u00a0move by a boss steeped in the gospel of the old ways. Girma was a martyr to the loop. His\u00a0vu jamais\u2014his blinding moment of invention\u2014was violently rejected by a system whose only\u00a0raison d\u2019\u00eatre\u00a0was yesterday. The\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u00a0was the department\u2019s cash register mentality, a stubborn mechanism designed to remain\u00a0“Incorruptible”\u00a0by actively rejecting novelty, ensuring that\u00a0Ditto\u00a0remained the reigning philosophy.<\/p>\n The real\u00a0vu jamais\u00a0truth, the one that rips the script in half and breaks the loop, comes from outside the suffocating, Latinate archive of the past. The vindication was global, a\u00a0stare decisis\u00a0overturned by universal absurdity: the\u00a0Ig Nobel Prize\u00a0validating the struggle of\u00a0jamais vu\u2014that bizarre neurological glitch of staring at a simple word like ‘appetite’ until it feels profoundly alien and wrong. The prize was given for the experimental, successful induction of this feeling by simply having participants write the same word over and over until its meaning dissolved. This is the Greek truth of\u00a0semantic satiation\u2014when the word\u2019s very sound becomes meaningless, the logic fails, and the oppressive order of the language collapses. This is the absolute opposite of the Latinate compulsion to name and categorize; it is the\u00a0absurdist-flavored\u00a0coffee break moment of finally saying,\u00a0Nah, this word is cooked.\u00a0This silent, internal declaration of, “I am bringing a Napkin,” became the somatic trigger for seizing the unscripted present.<\/p>\n I remembered a couple of friends when and where PG labeling was a future tense, ages ago, while watching a video at home with their little kid. A routine had formed\u2014the little soul would be ordered to fetch a napkin, and soon after the kid began walking, I found myself muttering,\u00a0I am bringing a Napkin.\u00a0This internal phrase became the ultimate mental reset, proving the loop is internal and manageable. This mental reset is as powerful as the\u00a0Circadian Clock Nobel\u00a0proving that the body’s time-loop is a program, not an unchangeable destiny. The\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u00a0is the trap of the constantly ticking biological clock, forcing you into predictable cycles; the\u00a0vu jamais\u00a0is the urgent, unscripted reality of the present, the active refusal to follow the tick-tock.<\/p>\n The sophisticated move isn’t to be a\u00a0Latinless dolt\u00a0who cowers before\u00a0Ditto, or a master of obscure, verbose\u00a0Johnsonese; it’s to be a master of the reset\u2014a champion of the\u00a0de facto\u00a0argument over the\u00a0de jure\u00a0rule. The proverb,\u00a0time heals all wounds, is deeply\u00a0sus; the clever, cynical twist,\u00a0time wounds all heels, is the vibe that truly sticks. Because the only way out of the historical, linguistic\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u00a0is to actively seek the\u00a0vu jamais\u2014the clear, unscripted, terrifyingly novel reality of now, forcing the world to acknowledge your\u00a0locus standi\u00a0to exist outside the loop. This is the ultimate\u00a0raison d\u2019\u00eatre. The final shot of the film is me walking into the sunrise, the past firmly behind, a sense of\u00a0promnesia\u2014a clear memory of the future I am building\u2014guiding my steps. The camera pulls back, revealing the road ahead is an exact, freshly paved replica of the road I just left. It\u2019s the same road, the same environment, the same socio-economic loop. But this time, I\u2019m smiling. Why? Because I have cracked the egg. The shell is broken. I know the rule now. The loop is external, but the\u00a0Columbus’s Egg squelch\u00a0is internal. My intellectual freedom is\u00a0res judicata.\u00a0Bet.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Columbus’s Egg moment, the squelch that shattered the table, was Dejene’s gift, the French clarity of Cartesian doubt applied to an argument:\u00a0I think, therefore I argue.\u00a0<\/p>\n The shallow courtier, the one who saw the egg standing on its broken base and sneered, “Nothing is easier than to follow it,” was the very embodiment of\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. He could follow the path, but he could never conceive of it. He lacked the\u00a0vu jamais\u00a0to violate the premise of the challenge\u2014that a whole egg must be balanced\u2014and introduce the necessary,\u00a0de facto\u00a0destruction that leads to the\u00a0de jure\u00a0solution. It was a victory of persuasion through action over passive knowledge, an aggressive assertion that the argument, the breaking of the shell, is the answer.<\/p>\n This is the ultimate\u00a0Hitchcockian finish, the full circle of the loop. I am on the same road, the same scene, but the tension is gone. The camera pulls back, confirming the environment is unchanged, yet I am calm. I know the trick now. I am smiling because the fear of the endless repeat, the fear of\u00a0Ditto\u00a0and\u00a0Mokusatsu, has been replaced by the power of the\u00a0vu jamais\u00a0to break the egg at will.\u00a0I am the reset button.\u00a0The film is still rolling, but I control the editing.<\/p>\n Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Listen, that whole\u00a0chaotic mood swing\u2014last week, or the one before, who even knows\u2014was extreme. A\u00a0tight Friday wrap\u00a0that pulled a cosmic all-nighter, spilling over to Monday and Tuesday just to keep the momentum? My biological clock, doing pushups in public, decided to lead with that late energy, and no wonder it seeded this entire piece. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"editor_plus_copied_stylings":"{}","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1928],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47576","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-bits-pieces"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}