I received this via email from
a friend .
I tried to locate the source
for permission to publish but was unable to.
I hope that the credit given
is adequate.
This is apparently from a
publication since it
included an Editor's note. It has not been edited in any way.
A
Rhose, by Any Other Name
By
Matthew Sutherland
(Editors note: Matthew Sutherland's
essay on the phenomenon called
Manila traffic got rave reviews among readers.
Through this column, he hopes to give us glimpses into our
own culture by writing about all things Pinoy from an expat's point of
view.)
"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches"
--(Proverbs 22:1)
When I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago,
one of the first cultural differences to strike me was names.
The subject has provided a continuing source of amazement and
amusement ever since. The first unusual thing, from an English
perspective, is that everyone here has a nickname.
In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have
nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood
we tend, I am glad to say, to lose them.
The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both
girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as
overbearingly
cutesy For anyone over about
five. "Fifty-five-year-olds with names
that sound like five-year-olds", as one colleague put it. Where I
come from,
a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy would be
beaten to death at school by
pre-adolescent bullies,
and never make it to adulthood. So, probably,
would girls with names like Babes, Lovely,
Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech ech.
Here, however, no one bats an eyelid.
Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call
"door-bell names". These are nicknames that sound like -
well,
door-bells. There Are millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are
some of the more common. They can be, and frequently are, used in
even more door-bell-like combinations such as Bing-Bong,
Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Even our
newly-appointed chief of police
has a doorbell name - Ping.
None of these door-bell names exist where I come from,
and hence sound unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear.
Someone once told me that one of the Bings,
when asked why he was called Bing, replied "because
my brother is called Bong". Faultless logic. Dong, of course,
is a particularly funny one for me, as where I come
from "dong" is a slang word for? well, perhaps
"talong" is the best Tagalog equivalent.
Repeating names was another novelty to me,
having never before encountered people with names
like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or Ning-Ning. The secretary
I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one: Leck-Leck.
Such names are then frequently further refined by using the
"squared" symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2.
This had me very confused for a while.
Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a
theme when naming their children. This can be as
simple as making them all begin with the same letter,
as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy. More imaginative parents
shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance or rhyme,
as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse
the more kids there are -- best to be born early or you could end up
being a Baboy). Even better, parents can create whole families of,
say, desserts (Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers
(Rose, Daffodil, Tulip). The main advantage of
such combinations is that they
look great painted across
your trunk if you're a cab driver.
That's another thing I'd never seen
before coming to Manila taxis with the
driver's kids' names on the trunk.
Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor
is the phenomenon of the "composite" name.
This includes names like Jejomar (for Jesus, Joseph and Mary),
and the remarkable Luzviminda (for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao,
believe it or not). That's a bit like me being called something
like "Engscowani" (for England, Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland). Between you and me, I'm glad I'm not.
And how could I forget to mention the fabulous
concept of the randomly-inserted letter 'h'.
Quite what this device is supposed
to achieve, I have not yet figured out,
but I think it is designed to give
A touch of class to
an otherwise only
averagely weird name.
It results in creations
like Jhun, Lhenn,
Ghemma, and Jhimmy.
Or how about Jhun-Jhun (Jhun2)?
There is also a whole separate field of name games --
those where the parents have exhibited a creative
sense of humor on purpose. I once had My house
in London painted by a
Czechoslovakian decorator
by the name of Peter Peter. I could never figure out if
his parents had a fantastic sense of humor or no
imagination at all -- it had to be one or the other.
But here in the Philippines, wonderful imagination and
humor is often applied to the
naming process, particularly,
it seems, in the Chinese community.
My favourites include Bach
Johann Sebastian; Edgar Allan Pe;
Jonathan Livingston Sy; Magic
Chiongson, Chica Go, and
my girlfriend's very own sister, Van Go.
I am assured these are real people,
although I've only met two of them.
I hope they don't mind being mentioned here.
How boring to come from a
country like the UK full of
people with names like John
Smith. How wonderful to come from
a country where imagination
and exoticism rule the world of names.
Even the towns here have
weird names; my favorite is the unbelievably-named
town of Sexmoan (ironically
close to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else in the
world would that really be
true? Where else in the world could the head
of the Church really be
called Cardinal Sin? Where else in the world
could Angel, Gigi and Mandy
be grown-up men? Where else could you go
through adult life
unembarrassed and unassailed with a
name like Mosquito, or
Pepper, or Honey Boy?
Where else but the
Philippines!
If you have any interesting stories that speak to "You Just Have to Laugh"
or "Only in the Philippines" please send it to me via email at mailto:gracespace@pacbell.net
with your permission
for me to publish it..
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