THE CAT'S PAJAMAS XXXIX

Tad Tuleja

 

A collection of the (mostly) true origins of familiar phrases

 

MUMBO JUMBO

 

This colloquial equivalent for "gibberish" was a 19th century British misconstruction of the West African formal greeting mambo jambo. The mambo part of this greeting survives in a debased form in the Caribbean, where it refers to a kind of ballroom dance. Originally in meant "cosmic dance." It was the universal, divinely-ordered pattern that underlay all human affairs. Jambo meant "Hello" or "Good Day," and it retains that meaning in Africa today. When a 19th-century African said "Mambo jambo," he was being highly formal and very friendly. An approximation of the phrase's meaning would have been, "Welcome. I wish you good fortune in the universe's dance." Anglocentric explorers and missionaries missed this richness, giving us the mispronounced mumbo jumbo as a contemptuous dismissal of "native" speech.