The Full List

I think most of us are aware of this phenomenon.  You’re sitting in your car at a stoplight somewhere in the heart of the city. The light is red. All around you traffic is backed up in every direction. You’ve been sitting there long enough to know that pretty soon the light will turn gr… HOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNKKKKK!!!

The driver behind you (7 times out of ten he’s a taxi driver) has blown his horn with a vigor and ferocity that suggests that the driver has a personal and intense dislike for said horn… or you.  You’re so startled that you lift your foot off the brake and start to apply to the gas… Except that the light hasn’t quite turned green yet. HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNKKK!!!  The horn is blown again. Louder and longer this time.  You can vaguely hear a stream of curses coming from the general vicinity of the vehicle behind you.

Jamaica is known the world over for its dancehall music and the innovative dance moves that accompany same, but it always amazes me how famous dances that only 3 or so people know how to do can become!

Let me explain…  How many of the following dances have you heard of?  Della Move, Water Pumping, Slide and Wine, Weed Man Skank, Butterfly, Mock the Dread, World Dance, Bogle, Armstrong, Tatty, the Urkel, Log On, Signal the Plane, Parachute, Pon di River Pon di Bank, Thunderclap, Chaplin, Willie Bounce, Nuh Linga, Gully Creeper. Ok, ok, so you’ve probably heard of many of them. Fine, but how many of them can you actually do? One? Maybe two?  That’s what I thought.

I never quite understood the almost maniacal extent to which dominoes is played at every available moment in Jamaica. On any given night, in any given town, you can find, usually in front of a bar or corner shop, a group of men and sometimes women, silently seated around a sturdy looking table, with steely concentration etched on their faces, intermittently striking the top of said table with the excuse that they are playing this game.

We’ve all seen books, brochures and pamphlets promising to teach us how to “speak Jamaican”. Usually they offer a few hackneyed, sanitized expressions that even my grandmother no longer uses. Jamaican parlance, as spoken on the streets, on the buses and in school yards is vigorous, colourful and politically incorrect.  It is expressive, blunt and used more often to wound than to uplift. We apologise in advance to those who will find that the list below demonstrates a strong vein of misogyny and homophobia in the average Jamaican BUT if you really want to speak like a native, forget the “how to” books, put aside your delicate sensibilities, and add the following words and phrases to your vocabulary:

Bad Mind: Ill will, hatred or envy.  If the average Jamaican is to be believed, bad mind is the source of 99% of all  problems in life.

Bait: A person unworthy of respect.

It’s a documented fact that a love of martial arts movies runs through black people’s veins. This stop-you-in-your-tracks type of visceral emotion is evidenced whenever a Jamaican, usually male, tries to walk past a television playing one of these movies.  Certainly, because of this level of subconscious conditioning, many a Jamaican has bought into the stereotype which suggests never picking a fight with a person of Chinese extraction, or they just may just end up having a taste of the pavement.

Since the dawn of time, men have sought to win over the fairer sex through a variety of means: with dashing good looks, expensive gifts and, of course, through verbal persuasion.  And if truth be told, history has shown that, very often, the prize has gone, not to the man with the gifts of gold but the man with the golden tongue!  In Jamaica, where many of us men are deficient in the wealth and good looks departments, but are well endowed with “sweet mout”, the word “lyrics” has come to mean, not the words of a song, but the clever blandishments used by a man to win over his intended target.

Lyrics, not surprisingly, are beloved both by those being won over and those attempting to do the winning. The receiver loves Lyrics for for the lift it gives to the ego, and the giver loves Lyrics because the reward (the affections of a fair lady) far outweighs the effort (but not necessarily the creativity) expended.