Never mind going back to church, we’re speaking in tongues all the time
In 1987 rock star Sting recorded a song called Sister Moon on my favourite album of his, Nothing Like the Sun. The lyrics contain a line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun”. The story goes that Sting was once pestered by a fellow who repeatedly asked him, “How beautiful is the moon?” Apparently, after the 17th time the inebriated man asked him about the moon, Sting retorted mysteriously, “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun”. The man apparently “got” it immediately and stopped annoying Sting.
Now, if you were an English literature professor and gave your class an assignment to decipher the meaning of this exchange, you’d probably receive a load of 3,000-word essays dripping with intellectual insights. But I think it was just gibberish between two drunks.
Believe me, I’m very familiar with such ethanol-inspired exchanges. Many a buddy has turned to me with his mouth pulling a Numsa by refusing to perform its speech function and spewed unintelligible garble like, “They will never take my kids from me.” Except the bastard has no children.
I had a university mate who liked to recommend things by punctuating his recommendation with “Try it, it’s good for the ovaries.” He said it’s a line he picked up from Sir Laurence Olivier’s autobiography, Confessions of an Actor. The words, he said, were uttered by Sir Laurence, referring to his love for scotch whisky.
Few things fascinate me more than hearing people utter random, mysterious and garbled gobbledegook. In 2017, the Durban-born socialite whose claim to fame is prancing about in public sans drawers, Zodwa Wabantu, posted a video clip to thank her fans for their love and support. At the end she pauses and then, out of the blue, says “Vaseline”. This left thousands of folks on social media, myself included, perplexed. Well, Zodwa recently launched her own petroleum jelly line. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether the socialite already knew about this or whether she decided to ride the Vaseline wave after the fact.
I guess the same can be asked about Donald Trump’s defining tweet, the “Covfefe” moment. I’m quite surprised that during one of his entertaining White House briefings he’s never pronounced, “I prophesied it in that Covfefe tweet — nobody knows more about Covid-19 than me.”
Zodwa and Trump are in esteemed company when it comes to mysterious social media posts. Popular musician Kelly Khumalo left thousands of her Twitter followers scratching their heads some years back when she posted a tweet in a language that is not one of the 6,500 earthly languages. If my whiskey-eroded memory is correct, she tweeted, “Rabakhashiya ekhelemende!” This is the kind of utterance I fully expect when worshippers flock back to churches next month and speak in tongues.
Some years ago, my ex-colleague at Power FM, Aphelele Musa, is on air
In the 26 years folks have been enjoying the song, no-one has been able to figure out what the lyrics are
and she plays the Boom Shaka hit It’s About Time. When she announces the song she refers to Thembi Seete’s rap on the song as “the 8th wonder of the world”. This is because, in the 26 years folks have been enjoying the song, no-one has been able to figure out what the lyrics are. There are lines such as “the is the place and I’m going to kick the roster”. Further down you get “you’ve got to cease the needs that disease with ease”.
When I posted Aphelele’s cheeky remark about the song, someone suggested that if we were able to crack the code in those lyrics we were probably going to find the cure for cancer.
Kwaito is replete with lyrics whose meaning I have no hope of ever understanding. For instance, departed kwaito musician Brown Dash’s most popular song is titled Ngaphansi komthunzi welanga (Under the shade of the sun). Go figure.
Closer to home, my 12-year-old lastborn Sihayo is prone to such utterances. The eldest, Ntobeko, and I have embarked on a project to collect what we now call Sihayosms.
When he was about six years old I inquired about his elder brother’s whereabouts. Without missing a beat, he pointed towards the bathroom door and demurely responded, “He’s in here throwing brown grenades down the toilet.”
About six weeks into lockdown I tried to lift their spirits by making them fantasise about what they want for Christmas. When it was his turn, he gave me a deadpan look and said, “I want a younger sibling that we can keep in the basement.”
The silence was broken by his 15year-old brother, Vumezitha, responding, “And we shall call him Joseph because that’s a good name for a lastborn confined to the basement in a multicoloured jacket.”
To quote Sting, this column was written “for the lunatics everywhere; for all those whose sanity is dependent on the phases of the moon”.