Mumbo-jumbo ( English Mumbo jumbo - Mambo-jumbo ) - an English phrase or utterance , meaning something that introduces confusion or confusion.
In English, it is often used as an expression for mocking criticism of middle-level management and public service , as well as the presentation of any image that does not really exist in the concept of using this phrase (like a ghost, a god, a supernatural phenomenon, etc.).
Origin and use
T. Carlyle called the ideology of the French revolutionaries (primarily parareligious cults) "conscious mumbo-jumbo." C. Dickens in one of his letters criticized Carlyle for this comparison. Relying, obviously, on the diaries of M. Park , Dickens is inclined to consider Mumbo-Yumbo the defender of husbands from evil wives, thereby having no relation to the revolution.
The expression arose at a time when Great Britain owned colonies inhabited by tribes practicing mysterious rituals, invoking the imaginary idol Mumbo-Yumbo . One of the sources of using this expression in English was the poem of Vachel Lindsay "Congo" ( 1914 ), in which there is the phrase "Mumbo Yumbo - the god of the Congo." It is believed that Mumbo-Yumbo is a transcription from the Swahili language of the greeting “Mambo Yambo”. [one]
In Culture
In Russian, the expression “Mumbo-Yumbo” is widely known from the popular novel by Ilf and Petrov “The Twelve Chairs ”, one of whose characters, Ellochka the cannibal , easily and freely managed with only 30 words. The next step after it was the "highly intelligent" Negro from the cannibalistic tribe "Mumbo-Yumbo" , whose vocabulary is 300 words .
Here is what researchers M. Odesky and D. Feldman write in the comments on the full text of the novel “Twelve Chairs”: “The ethnonym is probably associated with English descriptions of travels in Africa in the 18th century: the authors of these descriptions reported on the cult of the deity Mumbo Jumbo, characteristic of the tribes living in the Niger River region, which punishes women not wanting to recognize the power of men. Ethnographers were very skeptical of such messages, and since the 19th century the combination of “Mumbo Jumbo” has been used in English as a designation of an object and attribute of an incomprehensible (often quack) cult, slurred (or intentionally complicated) speech, and indeed some gibberish. So it was used, for example, by T. Carlylem in the textbook “French Revolution,” first translated into Russian in 1907. Around the same time, the term also entered Russian humor. ” This expression was used in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
Notes
- ↑ Gates, Henry Louis. The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey , in Literary Theory, an Anthology. - 1998. - P. 999. - ISBN 978-1405106962 .