Oopla! and other Exclamations...

One of the delights of living in a foreign country is finding all the words that are similar, and even getting tripped up by the 'false friends' that may come your way.  But when it comes to little-known exclamations, I always get a great big kick out of them.  


In English, when you hurt yourself, you say Ouch! or Ow!  Everyone knows, starting with your first boo-boos that that's what one must emit in order to convey pain.  In Italian, the word is Aiiah!  And to this day I still think the person means Wow! whenever I hear it uttered.  But that can't be, their word for that is Waio!  It all makes me want to thumb through some old Batman comics just to get a glimpse of the Pow! Bash! Bang! and their Italian equivalents.


When you hear a crowd sing out, Hip, hip hoorah--The über-phonetic Italians will actually shout Hoo-rah and not the American hooray...something that always brings to mind Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Furthermore, in my opinion, this is actually much more correct as I recall when first learning to read and wondering just why it was we said 'hooray'!

Disney's Oopla says Oops!
from Disney Character Central

But my personal favorite is Oopla!  And although urbandictionary.com lists it as Oh, Dear! (just about how more un-hip can you get?!) I think the true translation is Oops! just as it should be...
But looking into all this hoopla I came across Oopla who I gather is a Star Wars figure.  And then there was the guy from oopla.net - someone professing to make sense out of stocks & portfolio issues.  Perhaps his name is intentional...given the huge mistake of allowing our banks to throttle the universe with their derivatives and spreads and subprime mortgages... (and to think...all this time and the world was afraid of Kim jong-il...)


Nonetheless, I still would advise an updated brand name for Mr. Braeckman and his enterprise.