National Tendencies
Via Alex, I came across this story explaining one facet of England’s defeat at the hands of Croatia two days ago:
Tony Henry belted out a version of the Croat anthem before the 80,000 crowd, but made a blunder at the end.
He should have sung ‘Mila kuda si planina’ (which roughly means ‘You know my dear how we love your mountains’).
But he instead sang ‘Mila kura si planina’ which can be interpreted as ‘My dear, my penis is a mountain’.[^1]
That really made me laugh. Turns out, the Croatian team loved it too. It apparently helped to relax them before the match, which in turn supposedly lifted them to victory in the second half.
The article goes on to explain how the English opera singer was mortified and tried to apologize.
“It was the last thing that I would intentionally do, and all I can say is if I have offended any Croatians, then they have my deepest apologies.”
On the contrary, Henry is becoming a cult hero in Croatia… “The Croatians think it’s great, and they’ve invited him to come over and sing at Euro 2008…”
Such stories convince me of the validity of national stereotypes. There’s something in the soul of a Balkan slav that reliably lights up at unexpected ribaldry. It’s true of all the peoples of former Yugoslavia (with the possible exception of the Slovenes, who have a more Teutonic attitude towards humor). It certainly helps explain my own predilection for the filthy and lewd.
This reminds me of something humorous that happened at my Peace Corps swearing-in ceremony in Negotino in early 2003. To show to the local community, which included then-president of Macedonia Boris Trajkovski, that our group had become adequately assimilated in Macedonian language and culture during our three months of training, two members of our group were asked to make speeches — in Macedonian, of course. Now granted, over the preceding three months we had all taken an intensive course and lived with local, non-English speaking families, but it was obviously a daunting task in front of a good slice of the local diplomatic community, included the US Ambassador, who was himself fluent in Bulgarian. Our two best exemplars and quickest language learners were selected. One, a guy who had taught himself Polish and Hungarian (?!) did fine. The other, who, like most of the rest of us had never touched a Slavic language before, meant to give the crowd inspiration by saying “sakame da stimulirame ogan” — “we want to stimulate a fire,” but instead, what came out was “sakame da stimulirame organ” — “we want to stimulate an organ.” The reception hall exploded in laughter and, if you ask me, it made our welcome all the more hearty among the Macedonians. The poor girl, however, not so well acquainted with the South Slav love of ribaldry, never quite recovered and it was off-limits for humor with her for the rest of our two years there.