Mika – "Boum Boum Boum" (2014)

Boum boum boum

Même les Américains comprennent

(Or, in English, “Boom boom boom/Even the Americans understand.”)

I read an article in the New Yorker today by an American woman who had to learn French because she married a Frenchman.  (If she had just shaved her underarms and showered regularly, she could have landed an American husband and skipped learning French.)

There were a number of bizarre facts in that article, including the following:

—  “In Archi, a language spoke spoke in the village of Archib, in southern Dagestan [which is a part of Russia], a single verb — taking into account prefixes and suffixes and other modifications — can occur in 1,502,839 different forms.”  (I’d like to check the author’s math.)

— French is one of the easiest languages for a native English speaker to learn because somewhere between a quarter and a half of basic English vocabulary is derived from French words.  According to the U.S. State Department, it takes an American about 600 hours to learn French, but 2200 hours to learn Arabic or Mandarin.

Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hoover

— Speaking of Mandarin, Herbert Hoover and his wife were fluent in it.  (The Hoovers lived in China for several years; he was employed as a mining engineer there.  The couple spoke Mandarin to each other in the White House when they didn’t want anyone to know what they were saying to each other.)

— Knullrufs is a Swedish word used to describe the way one’s hair looks after having sex.

Knullrufs?

— In French, all nouns have a grammatical gender.  In other words, they are masculine or feminine for purposes of grammar.  Une chemise, which means “man’s shirt,” is feminine.  Un chemisier, which means “woman’s shirt,” is masculine.  If that doesn’t prove that the French are nuts, I don’t know what does.

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“Boom Boum Boum” was a 2014 hit single for Michael Holbrook Penniman, Jr., who records under the name “Mika.”

“Boom Boum Boum” translates as “Boom Boom Boom” – which means “makin’ whoopee” (a euphemism that host Bob Eubanks used regularly on The Newlywed Game).

Here’s “Boum Boum Boum”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: