Join me please as I trip down the incomprehensible trail of proper nouns. I ask you this, what is with the peanut? When I owned my hill in southern Colombia I grew peanuts, not on purpose, they managed to grow themselves springing right out of the ground. My only contribution was to sit amongst them, and eat them, raw and delicious, despite the local’s many ways of roasting them or crushing them into ‘butter’. Every alteration only ever enhanced the taste of this simple staple.
While I called them peanuts, the campesinos called them maní, and at each other’s stumbling pronunciations we laughed.
In English it is the peanut, but why? To the best of my understanding peas have no gender specific markings; so what of the nut? In Spanish they are ‘maní’, pronounced like ‘ma knee’. In French, the worst yet, ‘cacahouètes’, pronounced exactly like ‘caca wet’; Quoi?
In Serbia they call them ‘kikiriki’. For real! I’m told the reason for this is they are a newish product to these environs, until one day they came packaged by a brand named Kikiriki, which is at least a, if dubious, explanation.
I still have a long way to go with learning Serbian, but I can manage to pronounce ‘kikiriki’, even while I’m not convinced of its veracity.
Aside form this aberration, however, I find the sound of the Serbian language mellifluous. There exists today a Serb poet by the name of Milos Mitrovic whose work, while I cannot read it in its original language, even in the English translation is so beautiful and clever and sharply funny, I’m that much more encouraged to learn the mother tongue.
image is a fragment of the poem
CAPITULATION
by
Milos Mitrovic
Another talented Serb
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