Robot

Basically another name for what was formerly known as an automaton, referring to human-type mechanical beings.

See also Automata

Use in South Africa

The word Robot is used in the standard meaning, described above, to refer to human-type mechanical beings.

However, besides this standard meaning, the word Robot also has a more specific meaning in South Africa, being the preferred term to refer to traffic lights (in English, English as well as Afrikaans and other indigenous languages). This came about apparently because the introduction of electric traffic lights in 1936 coincided with the first full production of Karel Capek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots - 1920) by the Johannesburg Reps. People apparently latched onto the term to refer to traffic lights as "robot policemen", which then got truncated with time to become "robot". It is still in use in this sense today.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_African_English_regionalisms

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