In many African societies today, the age of 60 has been redefined from a stage of influence to a stage of irrelevance. Upon reaching this age, professionals, civil servants, and leaders are compulsorily retired, often without pathways for continued contribution. While retirement is a universal phenomenon, in Africa it has taken on a peculiarly reductive meaning: retirement as the end of usefulness. It might strike you as odd that the origins of peculiar are livestock-related, so let us explain. The word’s Latin ancestor, peculiaris, means “privately owned, extraordinary”; it traces back to pecu, meaning “cattle,” by way of peculium, meaning “private property”—cattle of course being a particular kind of private property. Given the monetary value historically placed in cattle, it makes sense that pecu has given us several money-related words, including pecuniary (“of or relating to money”), peculate (“to embezzle”), and impecunious (“having very little or no money”). Peculiar honed in on the “extraordinary” meaning of peculiaris, applying to what is characteristic of only one individual, group, or thing. In modern use that sense is commonly followed by the preposition to, as in “a tradition peculiar to their family.” The “odd” and “eccentric” meanings of peculiar are extensions of that sense, and are now the world’s most common applications.