Why do South Africans call traffic lights 'robots'?

When I worked in Ireland back in '08, there was one chef who would rag on me for calling traffic lights “robots”. He thought it was the funniest thing ever, but it had never really occurred to me to think of where this random South Africanism originated from. read more

Traffic lights are actually called robots in many countries and not just South Africa only. The automatic function of the traffic light resembles that of a robotic machine and hence the name. But here is an interesting take I found on this topic. read more

When I worked in Ireland back in ’08, there was one chef who would rag on me for calling traffic lights “robots”. He thought it was the funniest thing ever, but it had never really occurred to me to think of where this random South Africanism originated from. read more

This is a list of words used in mainstream South African English but not usually found in other dialects of the English language. For internationally common English words of South African origin, see List of English words of Afrikaans origin. read more