What does the Gungan word weesong mean?
Since starting this “International Talk Like Jar Jar Binks Day” project a few years ago, one of my primary tasks has been documenting all of the Gungan words and phrases that have ever been said in any Star Wars project. I’ve watched the films many times and gone through all of the episodes of the Clone Wars in which any Gungans appear. I’ve read through the scripts of the films and the novelizations. I’ve tracked down prequel era books that featured Jar Jar. I’ve created a database of Gungan words and their meanings, which has grown to include several hundred entries. But there’s still one word that continues to perplex me. And that is “weesong.”
Jar Jar Binks and the other Gungans speak a lot of Gunganese in the Star Wars films and other media. Most of it is easy enough to understand, either because it’s close enough to English to ascertain or because of the context in which it is said. Additionally there are reference books which help out, most notably Ben Burtt’s excellent “Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide” which has translations for many of the Gungan words we hear in the films, and many more which we don’t. But when Boss Nass says “Dis army of Mackineeks up dare is new weesong” I’m really at a total loss for what weesong means.
Is “weesong” a word unique to Gungan like “heyblibber” or is it some gunganized English word or words that I’m just not getting?
The thing with most Gungan words is that you can usually figure out the general idea of what they mean through context. For example when Jar Jar says he crashed the “boss’s heyblibber” you can guess that a heyblibber is some sort of vehicle even if you don’t know that it’s a luxury Bongo (as the Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide tells us). My best guess for weesong based on the sentence it appears in is trouble or bad news or something along those lines, but really it could be anything.
So I’m looking for help. Do you have any thoughts on what “weesong” means? Is it defined in a source I’m not familiar with (my Internet searches have only turned up a few threads posing the same question)? Are you George Lucas (or Ben Burtt, or whoever came up with the word) or have you had discussions with him about it? Send me an email at mesa@talklikejarjarday.com or leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts. I’d really like to have an entry for weesong in my Gungan database, but as it stands I don’t feel comfortable adding it in there.
Update: We believe we know what weesong means now.
Tags: gungan, gunganified, jar jar, jar jar binks, star wars, starwars, weesong, weesong meaning