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We’re just fairly creative, is all. But if you are an outsider looking in, it admittedly could look like we’re intentionally trying to make it hard for you to follow the conversation in a bar the Friday before a big sporting weekend.

Each of our national squads has at least one nickname with no apparent connection to the official name, at least no connection that English speakers (or French, or Spanish, or Portuguese, or anybody other than maybe Swahili speakers) could be expected to grasp. That single, common nickname is by no means the only one. This is a country with more official languages than you can shake a stick at, and several regional dialects for each of those. If you want a correct and exhaustive list of all the alternatives then you’re going to need a lot of determination and a fast car. New names are popping up constantly and fading into and out of vogue unpredictably.

In general, though, this thoroughly useful and utterly accurate (correct only at the instant of publication, no liability implied or accepted, caveat lector) guide should get you through.

Bafana Bafana: The national soccer squad. The name literally translates at “The Boys”, which once upon a time caused a minor stir because of the Apartheid-era insult of calling every black man, regardless of age, a boy. Like we told a former President when he brought that up: screw you if you can’t tell a term of endearment apart from an insult. We have a fierce sense of ownership towards these boys, and only a nincompoop wouldn’t be able to see that.

amaBokoBoko: The national rugby team, officially designated the Springboks (though that should actually be the Springbokke, if you really want to impress with your linguistic skills.) The Springbok is a diminutive antelope with laughable little horns that makes for remarkably tasty biltong – but it’s more acrobatic than a dozen monkeys overdosing on caffeine. You may not respect it at first sight, but good luck trying to catch it.

Proteas: The national cricket team, and one of the very few that doesn’t have a cute nickname. The Protea is our national flower which, though reasonably pretty, has no athletic, acrobatic or war-like connotations whatsoever. It’s not even very poisonous. The name is the result of a post-Apartheid compromise that will hopefully be rethought some day soon. We recommend “The Howzzzts”, which you have to admit would be pretty damn cool.

Banyana Banyana: Sounds familiar, right? Translates as “The Girls” and, as you’d expect, refers to the national women’s soccer team. We don’t take women’s soccer particularly seriously around here, much like the rest of the world, but when Banyana plays an import game we’re all suddenly supporters.

amaKrokoKroko: The Paralympic team. This one was also controversial at one point, for all the wrong reasons. It derives from “crock”, that very British word for an old and feeble person. However, the team originally adopted this as their own nickname and proceeded to infuse it with a lot of irony by performing better than some of our supposedly able-bodied athletes. Nobody except the most far-out politically correct types will be offended if you use it.

amaGlug-Glug: The national under-23 soccer side. The name comes from what was once a phenomenally successful TV ad for chemicals company Sasol, which at the time sponsored the team. It’s either very cute or hugely insulting when you consider that, in the ad, the phrase “glug-glug” was uttered by a baby.

If you’re planning to visit our sunny shores for the Fifa Soccer World Cup 2010, you’ll have to make peace with our national instrument, the vuvuzela. Even if you won’t be going to any of the actual soccer matches, even if you won’t be visiting a fan park, even if you won’t so much as set foot in a sports pub, if you are in this country any time in May, June, July or August 2010, then the vuvus will find you.

To outsiders the vuvuzela is an oversized plastic horn with a long, thin neck and a range of sounds that stretch from “screech of the annoyed harpy” to “geriatric cow in heat”. To you it is something that blares, honks or brays at an astonishingly (and annoyingly) loud volume. It is possibly something you think you are entitled to complain about.

To us it is a penis substitute.

In a manner of speaking, that is. The vuvuzela is the end result of a spectator arms race at local Premier Soccer League matches, especially those between the two mega teams: Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. In South Africa, you see, we don’t hold with that pansy-ass melodic singing they do in stadiums in Europe. We don’t politely clap our hands. We don’t whistle. We just make as much sheer noise as we possibly can.

Fans at local matches used and discarded a number of traditional and derivative instruments on the evolutionary path which reached its summit in the vuvu. In the vuvu we have it all: the maximum volume that won’t get you beaten up by the guy next to you, an affordable (even disposable) instrument and the ability to carry a rudimentary tune. Honestly. It has about the same kind of range as the bugle.

Now in South Africa soccer is primarily a black sport, in the sense that local league matches will have audiences as close as damnit to 100 percent black. That isn’t a problem; most people who pitch for rugby matches are white, and everybody is okay with that kind of racial preference for certain sports.

But during the Fifa Confederations Cup this year – a kind of miniature preview of the Wold Cup – we had a surprisingly large number of white people attending soccer matches. You know how it goes; when it’s a big international event everybody is suddenly a fan. Thanks to the Confed Cup we had a mixture of white and black in the stadiums, much as will be the case in 2010. And some of those white people, not being accustomed to them, complained about the vuvuzelas.

It hurts their ears, they said. It’s not fair to the foreign teams who aren’t used to playing under such a barrage of noise, they said. It spoils the television broadcast for foreign audiences, they said. It isn’t civilised they said.

These are roughly the objections we expect to hear from you, the visiting foreigner who has not acclimatised to the vuvu. And to you we say the exact same thing we said to our local white people: screw you.

The vuvuzela is part of how we play soccer in this country. If you want to come into our house to watch the games, then you can bloody well do so under our rules, and the vuvu rules. Even the Fifa administrators know better than to even suggest that we think about considering the possibility of banning vuvuzelas from stadiums, because that just ain’t gonna happen.

So consider yourself told. If you want to be grumpy about it, be our guest. On the other hand, you can choose to participate instead. If you can vaguely vibrate your lips then you can play the vuvuzela, and we’ll sell you one for just about no money at all. You may discover, as have a pretty impressive number of our new, white, local soccer supporters, that it’s a great deal of fun when you’re part of the problem.