When Veronica came to stay, over the New Year, we watched one of those late-night television programmes designed for drunk young people. It was a compilation of popular virals. (Viral has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun, but was added in 2006 as a adjective that describes marketing by word of mouth or email.)
One viral which appealed to me was an entry in February 2008 in a Bulgarian television pop music talent competition. Valentina Hasan sang, in the manner of Mariah Carey, a song that she called Ken Lee. The judges suggested it might be Without You. Miss Hasan, knowing little English, had learnt it from a recording.
‘No one ken to ken to sivmen,’ she began, ‘Nor yon clees toju maliveh.’ This represented, quite accurately, Mariah Carey’s ‘No I can’t forget this evening/ Or your face as you were leaving.’
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