Every platform teaches you its own vocabulary — feeds, stories, subs, raids. Fine. But RockYard is named after a Guyanese institution, and the institution came with a language of its own, older and better than anything a product team ever invented. If you grew up in Guyana, this page is a smile. If you were born abroad to Guyanese parents, this page is a translation of your childhood. And if you're a creator, it's a menu — every word below is a stream waiting to happen.
- The yard
- Not the lawn. The living heart of a Guyanese home — the ground between the house and the fence where everything actually happens: cooking, washing, quarrelling, celebrating, growing things, minding children and animals. Life happens in the yard; the front room is for wakes and visitors.
- Bottom house
- The open space beneath a house on stilts. Shade in the day, shelter in rain, hammock territory always — the best room in the house without being a room at all. Half the great domino games in Guyanese history were played in a bottom house.
- Gyaff
- To talk — but more than talk. A gyaff is unhurried, wandering conversation with no agenda and no clock: part news, part joke, part philosophy. "Come leh we gyaff" is an invitation to the oldest social network there is. A phone on the step and a good gyaff is a stream, and it earns like any other.
- Lime
- To hang out, deliberately doing nothing, together. You can lime at the seawall, lime by the corner, lime in the yard. The lime is the event; no further activity is required or expected.
- Cook-up
- Cook-up rice: rice, peas, coconut milk and whatever meat the week provided, all in one pot. The traditional Saturday pot, and the dish most requested by homesick Guyanese everywhere. When a RockYard cook goes live on a Saturday morning, this is usually why.
- Pepperpot
- The national dish: meat slow-cooked in cassareep — a dark cassava sauce Amerindian in origin — with cinnamon and pepper. Made properly at Christmas, kept going on the stove for days, and argued about (whose grandmother's is best) for generations.
- Wiri wiri
- A small round Guyanese pepper, ferociously hot, gloriously fragrant. One whole wiri wiri dropped in the dhal changes everything. Handle with respect; wash your hands before touching your face. You have been warned in writing.
- Dhal ghotni
- The wooden swizzle stick used to whip cooked split peas into smooth dhal. Ask any Guyanese abroad which kitchen tool they could not replace in a foreign shop, and this is the answer.
- Paling
- The fence around the yard, classically of zinc sheets or wooden staves. Neighbourly news travels over the paling faster than any feed ever refreshed.
- Standpipe
- The public tap that once stood in every village — where water was fetched and, more importantly, where everybody's business was discussed. The standpipe was the original comment section.
- Kiskadee
- The loud yellow-breasted bird calling its own name from every wire in Guyana — kis-ka-dee! The unofficial soundtrack of every video ever filmed in a Guyanese yard. Do not edit him out; abroad, people cry at that sound.
- Backdam
- The farmland behind the village, past the last houses. "Going backdam" means real work — provision grounds, cane, cattle — and any stream filmed there is instant gold for viewers who spent childhood mornings walking that dam.
- Just now
- Soon. Eventually. Possibly never. A national unit of time, untranslatable and unbreakable. "The stream starting just now" — and the yard understands.
- The double blank
- The most feared tile in dominoes, and — in the right hands — an instrument of psychological warfare. Every yard has one player who keeps it back all game, every game. Ours did. This platform is partly his fault.
This dictionary will grow — send the words we missed to our WhatsApp and we'll add them with credit. Better yet: pick one word above, put the phone on the step, and make sixty seconds about what it means in your yard. That's a reel. That's the whole assignment.