Falling in love with words

When people ask why I teach history, my quick answer is that I did not like the way I was taught as a student. This is not totally true; I actually liked my history classes because I was fortunate to have teachers who made history relevant to me. Maybe I teach history so that my students will not be forced to memorize dates, names, places, and events. I want my students to see the story of the nation and where they fit into that story so that they can be liberated from the past.

When people ask how I got interested in history or what made me become an academic, I look back to my high school literature class when one professor introduced us to Middle English and Chaucer. The language was Greek to my classmates, but I marveled at the mere sound of the Canterbury Tales even if I couldn’t make out what the professor was reading. The same was true for Shakespeare. We had to read one play for each of my four years in college, and for close textual study we used the

Folger editions that had Shakespeare’s text on the left pages and woodcuts and the most obscure footnotes on the right pages. I also marveled at these erudite notes, developing in the process my lifelong love for useless information.

When I got to college I was fortunate to have Doreen G. Fernandez (now deceased) as my freshman English teacher, who taught us more than grammar. She introduced me to a new world—to Philippine theater, food, art, and the things that have made my life worth living. I became a writer because Doreen dispensed with grammar after I failed a diagnostic test, where I could not identify gerunds and adverbs. She gave me another test that required me to spot mistakes in a text and correct them. I got a perfect score, and when she asked me to explain how I did it I simply replied: “It sounds wrong.” From then on she just made me write, and I have been writing since.

I did two research papers under Doreen’s supervision. One was a study on how Nora Aunor affected her fans. This required going through movie magazines of the 1970s, and I was probably one of a handful who requested these from Ateneo’s Rizal Library. The stern librarian, obviously a Noranian, actually broke into a smile whenever I showed up for research, and one of the amazing things I found was how a blond and blue-eyed walking doll named Maria Leonora Theresa was imagined to be the daughter of Aunor and her onscreen partner Tirso Cruz III. The doll had its own fans who sent clothes, food, cash and jewelry. This doll was actually venerated like a religious image in a glass case in Aunor’s Quezon City home. It had its own movie and its own float during the film festival.

Then there was the research paper on curse words in Filipino that led me first to the thick

Vicassan’s dictionary and, when I found that wanting, to the 19th-century edition of “Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala” compiled by Fathers Noceda and Sanlucar. I was not discouraged by the Spanish but I was stumped by the Latin. I noted that all the anatomical terms and the rude words in Tagalog were not translated into Spanish but were left in Latin to make them sound more scientific (for example, “puqui” was “pudenda mulieribus”). Perhaps the friars wanted to make these words one step more difficult, one step less accessible, in the dictionary by leaving the terms in Latin.

Handling Noceda y San Lucar in my freshman year was quite an experience because the book seemed medieval with its goatskin cover. Since that time, the “Vocabulario” has become a lifelong friend and remains on my reference shelf

beside the reprint of the 1613 “Vocabulario” by Pedro San Buenaventura and, more recently, the “Vocabulario Tagalo” published in 2000 by

Pulong. This one is believed to be the earliest Tagalog-Spanish dictionary reconstructed from two manuscripts—one in the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, the other in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The words in this “Vocabulario Tagalo” were compiled before 1620, in Laguna, by the Franciscan Francisco de San Antonio, who should be written about more.

This brings me to one of the research or teaching tools that I hope will emerge in my lifetime. I wish to see a Filipino dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary that will provide etymological and historical information on words and usage and will contain Filipinisms in other languages and vice versa.

In the Philippines, for example, the word “salvage” refers to gangland executions or extrajudicial killings. People wonder why “salvage,” which means to save or recover something, has taken the opposite meaning in the Philippines. A historical dictionary will show that what looks like the English “salvage” actually came from the Spanish salvaje (savage), thus the term sinalbaje (was savaged).

Then there are words like seguro which means “sure” or “definite” in Spanish but in the Philippines means “maybe.” The once-colloquial expression “mag lamierda tayo,” that is used to mean “magpasyal tayo” (from pasear, to take a walk). But la mierda in Spanish means “excrement”!

How did it get that way? Questions like these a historical dictionary should answer.

Facebook asks us to post old pictures on Throwback Thursdays and to write about facts about ourselves that others don’t know. This will feed many columns.

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