I WILL never forget my conversations with Duncan, our British friend while still in Australia.
He once said, insofar as he was concerned, the most beautiful word in the English language was “cool.” At the time every Saturday afternoon, he paid me a fiver for an hour to teach him Tagalog.
So as not to be formal (I wasn’t a real teacher nor pretended to be, and the arrangement had only become possible at his insistence), we would always end up stretching our afternoon sessions casually talking about other interesting topics like idiomatic expressions of any language or culture we were familiar with.
So, as breaks to our Tagalog lessons, we’d usually end up discussing funny and odd terms from Tagalog and Visayan (by my end) and then British and Irish (by his). In all, we both learned something new each Saturday session.
Recalling those moments now, I’m still in agreement with him. The sixties and seventies had the best English words or slang ever. (Don’t take your hatchets out just yet, that’s only an opinion.)
From all I have seen and read, the hip literature during that particular period of the Beatles and Dylan were borne of the emerging anti-war culture which generally meant rebellion against any establishment.
The generations then were churning out words like groovy, far-out, hip, bummer, and bad trip. Include cool in the mix, too. If one noticed, most of these are still used today in casual conversations, proving their lasting significance.
Meanwhile, it’s usually during the first month of each year, I would await Merriam-Webster dictionary’s list of new words they’ve included in their latest edition. Trivia ‘nut’ that I am (another 60s slang), I would always wish we had something of the sort, our own update of what’s new in our local dialects.
As far as I know, wordsmith on the ground are rooted to unis, so much that, whatever their findings are, these are largely limited to academe and a few other local groups. So, unless there’s a calling, the time for such is zilch.
However, back in the nineties, we attended a couple of workshops by the Cultural Center’s literature department, and among the aims was discussing the intricacies of our diverse languages.
The most telling indication of the time was dismissing the general belief that Tagalog was the national language. As an offshoot, the real Filipino language allows a mix of dialects in both oral and script usage.
What’s most unfortunate, this is treated mostly as comic relief, often bringing to the surface, supposed-superiority of one local dialect over another. I do not know what became of those workshops. Shelved somewhere, perhaps, for their being anti-status quo.
In the end, all this may have started lightly with English cool, far-out, and groovy. But seriously, isn’t it time somebody came up with a serious study about our emerging language and dialects, one that we could use in schools, instead of the stale ones we and our grandparents had?
As for new words and slang from each generation, that mish-mash, with a few English and Spanish thrown in, is already a rich pile from where to start.
I once met a pinoy Jesuit who collected street slangs from everyday people he encountered. I likewise know there exists serious research on our culture, arts, and regional dialects.
Even as these mostly are written by non-Pinoys, copies of these are stored in exclusive sections of our academic libraries. I even doubt if they’re for common reading. If not for anything else, therein lies the problem.
And that is so not cool.
