Hippy-hoppy and Hugby

Hi people. Apologies for paucity of posts recently – this week I’ve been knocked out with some kind of flu that shared many symptoms with Dengue Fever: high temperature, achy joints, swollen glands, intense headache – yeuch! Luckily it wasn’t Dengue, but all the same it was very unpleasant. I’ve been spending most of my time sleeping and complaining (…my poor wife) and so there’s been no time for blogging. But I’m feeling mostly better now, so I hope to get things back up to speed shortly.

During my delirium a memory from a while back popped into my head and made me chuckle, so I thought I’d share:

One of the strange idiosyncrasies of Brazilian pronunciation of English words is that in some contexts an “Eee” sound is added to the end of a word. For example, “i-Phone” sounds like “i-fonee”, “Bob” becomes “Bobby”.

Not long after I arrived in Rio I was talking to a friend of a friend at a party, discussing our tastes in music. “Do you like Hippy-hoppy?” he asked with a straight face. Ha ha, brilliant! If ever a musical genre needed to be given a ridiculous name, Hip-hop is it. I do actually really like some of the old stuff, but a lot of what goes on now is somewhere between sad and laughable – all the posturing and arrogant assertions of general mastery of the universe. I think calling it hippy-hoppy is great. I love the way that the image of cutesy jumping bunnies somehow brings all that materialistic macho bullshit down to size.

Kanye…

Another time I was chatting with a guy in a bar when he asked me a really puzzling question: “Do you like Hugby?”

Well, I had to stop and think this through – what could he mean? ‘Hugby’ sounded like some rather sweet cartoon character – I pictured a fluffy bear that liked to snuggle. But the guy asking the question really didn’t fit the profile – he was one of those big, hairy, masculine types who drank a lot of beer. And then it dawned on me. Of course!

You see, I don’t live in “Rio”, I live in “HEE-oh”. In many cases “Rs” are pronounced like a “Hs”. Still, I rather liked this alternative name for Rugby, not least because it does involve rather a lot of hugging (though I think they refer to it as ‘mauling’ or ‘rucking’ or some such aggressive sounding term).

And isn’t it great what you find when you do a little digging? Turns out Hugby has already been thought of: