I’d been mulling over something I’d heard at a party for local Pinoys over the weekend – a remark from an American friend, John Holder, who’s married to a Filipina, has been to the Philippines many times, speaks Filipino, and knows the country better than many of us do. John observed how we seem to have a penchant for lacing our prose with big words. "I’ve even come across words I hadn’t heard in years, words like ‘pertinacious’," John said.
That wouldn’t be too surprising, of course, if you’re Jimmy Abad, who occasionally peppers his papers (hmm, that’s a tongue-twister) with jawbreakers like "discombobulate" and "embrangle." But then Jimmy’s a poet and a Ph.D., so he probably has a right more than most others to use words that your average Pepe or Pilar will never meet in a lifetime of reading, much less use in a sentence. His learning and passion for exotic words like "aposiopesis" notwithstanding, Jimmy has been very careful to employ them sparingly and precisely, knowing that the longer words get, the more likely you are to misuse them.
(Before anyone else points it out, let me hasten to admit to one such lapse in my column last week, when I wrote about having a "predilection" for hurting the people I loved the most. I knew the second I sent off the piece that there was something not quite right about that word, but it was too late to fix the problem. The problem is that "predilection" means "a preference or special liking for something," as in "a predilection for chocolates" or "a predilection for wide-brimmed hats" – in other words, for generally positive things. The word I should’ve used was "propensity," "an inclination or natural tendency to behave in a particular way," such as "a propensity to miss crucial shots." This example demonstrates that while two words might look alike and suggest generally similar things, they can have subtle shadings that could change or even subvert what you mean.)
But education – or the lack of it – hasn’t stopped many of us Pinoys from throwing words around the size of sumo wrestlers. Sometimes it’s to show off, other times it’s to intimidate; once in a while, it’s plain exuberance, such as when our old village in San Mateo finally got electricity after wallowing in sooty darkness for many months, prompting the barangay captain to sign his letters with a glowing "Electrifically yours."
Indeed, I’ve always believed that politicians and our tradition of political bombast have a lot to do with the way we think about words and what passes for good (meaning grandiloquent) language. I parodied this in my 1992 novel Killing Time in a Warm Place, where I had the governor introduce Ferdinand Marcos as "a man of indescribable genius, of multifarious talents, of boundless enthusiasm, the culmination, the epitome, the peerless paragon of our achievements as a race!" Elsewhere in that novel I had a character named Mandoy Imoy speak of the narrator’s father (whom you’ll recognize from last week’s piece) as a man of many and mysterious words: "Your tatay," Mandoy Imoy said as I staggered to the gate on his arm that night in Kangleong, "he was a bright boy, what a brain the guy had! We went to the same school, did he ever tell you that? He memorized the whole multiplication table when he was five, and he knew English words nobody had ever heard of, things like, uh, fagelistic or runcimian, you ever hear words like that? What a brain. But he didn’t know money. You’re okay, you have a nice job, you go abroad, I think your brains are all right. But your father – ay, he should’ve made real money, maybe he’s not so smart after all, eh? Maybe he was, uh, fagelistic, ha-ha-ha!"
This week’s "Aha" moment came after I’d taught two stories: "Europe" by Henry James and "The Caballero’s Way" by O. Henry.
If you’ve never read James, here’s a typical example of the prose produced by that Harvard-educated cosmopolite: "Though wasted and shrunken she still occupied her high-backed chair with a visible theory of erectness, and her intensely aged face – combined with something dauntless that belonged to her very presence and that was effective even in this extremity – might have been that of some immemorial sovereign, of indistinguishable sex, brought forth to be shown to the people in disproof of the rumor of extinction."
Did you get that? I certainly didn’t, not until I’d looked at it twice or thrice, stumble as I did over the thicket of those polysyllabic words. But Henry James defined – for his generation and for long afterwards – the standard of literary suavity and composure, encouraging hordes of wannabe Jameses to ape the same Latinate style without achieving quite the same polish and roundness of effect in the end.
Now here’s O. Henry, describing the Cisco Kid’s muchacha:
"As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the gitanas of the Basque province. As for the humming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird."
There’s a verbal flourish here and there, a touch of the exotic: he uses the word "vagarious" and strange phrases (to his insular audience) like "gitanas of the Basque province" but pulls it off by draping the whole production with the mantle of theater. He chooses and uses words more for dramatic than scholarly effect, and I can almost imagine him chuckling with excitement as he wrote these sentences for his public’s delectation. In other words, O. Henry – however his later critics may have deplored his unabashed sentimentality and outrageously contrived plots – was fun, and had fun. He knew exactly what he was doing, and did it to shameless excess.
I can show nothing to prove this now except my own high-school education, but I suspect that we Filipinos read O. Henry more than we did Henry James, if we even got to the latter at all. And as sacrilegious as this may sound, I don’t think we lost much in the bargain, in terms of appreciating stories that feel like they were written by a circus magician rather than by a taxidermist.
The only – the big – trouble is, we often don’t seem to know the difference, trying to sound like one Henry and coming out the other.
Myself, I’ve found that as I get older, my vocabulary tends to get simpler – most of the time. Like a sign in a local car dealership reminded me the other day, "Don’t use a big word where a diminutive one will do!"
1) Contemplate - Kulang ang mga pinggan
2) Punctuation - Pera para maka-enrol
3) Ice Buko - Nagtatanong kung ayos na ang buhok
4) Tenacious - Sapatos na pang tennis
5) Calculator - Tawagan kita mamaya
6) Devastation - Sakayan ng bus
7) Protestant - Tindahan ng prutas
8) Statue - Ikaw ba yan?
9) Tissue - Ikaw nga!
10) Predicate - Pakawalan mo ang pusa
11) Dedicate - Pinatay ang pusa
12) Aspect - Pantusok o pandurog ng yelo
13) Deduct - Ang pato
14) Defeat - Ang paa (ng pato)
15) Detail - Ang buntot (ng pato)
16) Deposit - Ang gripo (Call DIPLOMA if DEPOSIT is leaking)
17) City - Bago mag-utso; a number to follow six
18) Cattle - Doon nakatila ang Hali at Leyna
19) Persuading - Unang Kasal
20) Depress - Ang nagkasal sa PERSUADING
22) Defense - Ginamit ng mga pangsulat sa kontrata sa PERSUADING
23) It Depends - Kainin mo ang bakod
24) Shampoo - Bago mag-labing-isha (11)
25) Delusion - Maluwang (kapag maluwang ang damit, eh DELUSION)
26) Delivery - Walang bayad. Kapag working lunch, eh DELIVERY na ang tanghalian
27) Profit - Patunayan mo
28) Balance Sheet - What comes out after eating a balanced diet
29) Backlog - Bacon saka egg
30) Beehive - Magpakatino ka
31) CD-ROM - Tingnan mo ang kwarto
32) Debug - Ang ipis
33) Defrag - Ang palaka
34) Defense - Ang bakod
35) Defer - Ang balahibo
36) Deflate - Ang plato
37) Detest - Ang eksamin
38) Devalue — ’Yon ang susunod sa letrang V
39) Devote - Ang boto
40) Dilemma - Brownout, a!
41) Effort — ’Dun nagla-land ang efflane
42) Forums - Apat na kwarto
43) July - Nagsinungaling ka ba?
44) Liturgy - What comes after litur F
45) Thesis - Ito ay...