FIFA World Cup 2010, South Africa. The excitement. The tension. The constant sound of buzzing bees.
And everyone kept talking about this crazy new instrument the 'vuvuzela' making all this noise, so exotic and colorful; even the word is wild.
Except that the instrument is totally well-known, at least in the US and at football games, and has been for as long as I can remember. Kids would come back from most any sporting event (ones where you'd take kids with either a pennant, a jersey, a ball, some sparkly thing, or ... well, this thing we currently call a vuvuzela.
What was this plastic trumpet thing called before the -word- 'vuvuzela' appeared? Was it so generically called a 'plastic trumpet'? Is that how impoverished things were vocabulary-wise that we had no more evocative term for it, making it so easy for vuvuzela to take over? So impoverished that I don't think there was even a word at all; we just pointed. Even the vendors may not have known, they just sold those things when people pointed at them. "We're almost sold out of ...those things... We'll be getting a box of ...those things in a few minutes?"
What did we call ... it before summer 2010?