The comic character Tweety Bird is called Piu-Piu in Portuguese, which would sound like Piou Piou. It also means “tweet”, or “tweet tweet” in Portuguese, and it almost certainly has a colloquial usage of which I know nothing – being scared is a possibility, silly another. I spent about two weeks each on business trips to Angola and Mocambique in the mid-1960s, and I went to Botswana six or seven times, but most of these were one-meeting trips, which usually required camping on the roadside going to the meetings, and again on the return trips. We always planned, and invariably succeeded, in hitting a hare for the pot – the fellow I went with was a trained cook, so he did the cooking. When one uses a car to hunt hares for the pot, one has to avoid mangling them.
Some parasitic beasty took advantage of me on one of these Botswana trips, which frightened me greatly when late one night when I was back in Johannesburg, I squeezed an annoyingly itchy pimple on my hip, and a worm popped halfway out and vigorously wiggled its head.
In Angola, a visiting gringo was rare, so the Portuguese treated me as though I were a VIP, and in the large town of Nova Lisboa (it now has a new name) an official of the town council who spoke English was delegated to look after me for a few days. When I asked about his surname, Coelho da Cruz, which means Rabbit of the Cross, I was told that when the Portuguese persecuted the Muslims centuries ago, Muslims who converted to Catholicism often adopted absurdly Christian names (Jews probably did so too). The rabbit was a symbol of birth and renewal, and I understand it is woven into Portuguese Crucifixion-related myths. It's probably the same pesky rodent that doles out teeth-rotting chocolates on the Day of Resurrection (Easter Sunday).
