Mind Your Language | 10 January 2009

When Veronica came to stay, over the New Year, we watched one of those late-night television programmes designed for drunk young people. It was a compilation of popular virals. (Viral has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun, but was added in 2006 as a adjective that describes marketing by word of mouth or email.)

One viral which appealed to me was an entry in February 2008 in a Bulgarian television pop music talent competition. Valentina Hasan sang, in the manner of Mariah Carey, a song that she called Ken Lee. The judges suggested it might be Without You. Miss Hasan, knowing little English, had learnt it from a recording.

‘No one ken to ken to sivmen,’ she began, ‘Nor yon clees toju maliveh.’ This represented, quite accurately, Mariah Carey’s ‘No I can’t forget this evening/ Or your face as you were leaving.’ The chorus went: ‘Ken leee — tulibu dibu douchoo.’

I know how Miss Hasan feels. I remember singing along in 1966 to Sergio Mendes’s catchy Mas Que Nada. Portuguese is the devil of a language for non-speakers to hear accurately. A line of the song which I now find goes, ‘E samba de preto velho, samba de preto tu,’ was, in my version, ‘Es samba pata peyo, samba que pata pu.’ Pata means ‘a duck’ in Portuguese. The real word, preto, means ‘a black’.

I even fell for the classic mishearing of a lyric in English, from the same year, that has given its name to a website for misheard lyrics, Kissthisguy.com. In Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix’s line is ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.’ Like many another I heard it as ‘kiss this guy’. Now I discover from Kissthisguy.com