My favorite thongs

A few weeks ago down in Sydney, I picked up a newspaper and discovered a new word: “stoush.” Two rich and pretty sisters (always guaranteed to wake me up with the morning coffee) were embroiled in a catfight, but before I could even get to the sordid details, I got stuck on “stoush,” which I’d never seen before, least of all in a headline. Now I, of course, was in Australia, whose people — like ours — speak English, or some variety of it that makes perfect sense to the locals, as any language should, but which can perplex the casual visitor.

We Filipinos grow up thinking that anything other than Standard American English (and its pronunciation) is strange, so it comes as a surprise for us to go to places like Australia and New Zealand, to open our mouths and speak in our MTV-American accents, and to see the natives cringe in disgust. Australians are particularly proud of their tongue (as are the Kiwis; I once got a lashing from a Wellington cabdriver when I suggested that he sounded like an Australian). Thanks to cable TV and to CNN’s news anchors, we can now revel in the glories of Australian English without having to fly eight hours to Sydney, although I doubt that many Filipinos will want to listen to it for more than a few minutes at a time.

It isn’t just the corkscrew nasality of Australian English we find forbidding; as with any language, there’s a whole slew of new words and phrases to learn. It’s easy enough to figure out that a “barbie” means a barbecue and not some ponytailed plaything, and you can probably guess what “have a naughty” means (and, no, I didn’t, in the absence of a willing sheila), but a “mozzie”? A “yobbo”? (That’s a mosquito and an “uncouth blue-collar person” to you.)

I didn’t come across all these lexical gems in Sydney (whose majestic Harbour Bridge, incidentally, is known to many as the “coathanger”), but a little trawling around the Net will bring you a trove of “Strine” expressions. (“Strine”: Australian slang and pronunciation, and “the world’s most advanced English dialect, according to, uhm, “http://www.convictcreations.com” www.convictcreations.com; if you still can’t guess where “Strine” comes from, you’re linguistically hopeless.) If you really want to know what an Aussie means by endearing words like “freckle” and “bush oyster,” go look them up in the Australian Slang Dictionary (http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html), which is enough for me to qualify Australian English as the world’s most colorful, if not exactly the most polite. (I’m sure the New Zealanders would agree, especially since the Aussie term for them is “sheepshaggers.”)

“Stoush,” as it turns out, goes a long way back, as a commentator named Kel Richards observes: “There was a time when stoush was both a noun and a verb: to stoush someone was to bash them or fight them, while a fight was called a stoush. It probably had its highest currency in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In typical Aussie fashion, the Great War of 1914-18 was called ‘the big stoush.’ The earliest citation is from a report in the Bulletin in 1893. The source of the word remains a mystery, but the English Dialect Dictionary records a somewhat similar word ‘stashie’ meaning ‘uproar’ or ‘quarrel.’ So stoush may have started life as an English dialect word that immigrated, changed, and then lived on here while it died out back in the British Isles.”

That’s a great story for a word that doesn’t even sound good, but the informality’s typically Australian, and “stoush” does take up far fewer inches on a headline than “encounter” or “confrontation” (“fight” should do just as nicely, but then again, why fight when you can stoush?). Thus, the Aussie media will be full of news like “Political stoush continues over oil prices” and “Geeks get personal in standards stoush.”

Me, I prefer to run away from a stoush, even and especially when I’m abroad, so I spent much of my free time in Sydney walking benignly up and down George Street — the city’s commercial center — in search of a good Chinese noodle shop. Those strolls introduced me to more signs and more ’Strine. I learned, for example, that nobody wears briefs in Australia; they wear “trunks,” whether they’re swimming or not. More to my surprise, even big potbellied men like me could go around in thongs — as long as we wear them on our feet, “thongs” to Sydneysiders being slippers or flip-flops to us.

Weeks later, in Boracay, I would look over an array of rubber slippers at a shop in D’Mall, suddenly needing a new pair after my gout-afflicted right foot couldn’t squeeze into the old one. I gave out another yelp when I saw the price of the only model large and soft enough to baby my paws, but eventually I forked over the money and hobbled onto the sunswept beach. Almost immediately my aches vanished as I surveyed the horizon. “Now those,” I said, “are thongs.”

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For those who’ve been asking, I’m glad to say that Soledad’s Sister (Anvil Publishing, 194 pp.) is now on the shelves of National Bookstore, selling for P275 the newsprint copy. (There’s a pricier version on better paper at P495.) And while it’s out in a form that I think Filipino readers can intuitively appreciate, it remains a work in progress, as my agent, Renuka Chatterjee, is still out selling foreign rights. (Very wisely, she has also signed up Charlson Ong. Grab him, I told Renuka, before somebody else does.)

This is a new and very interesting process for me, something we Filipino writers generally aren’t used to—the back and forth between the writer and the agent/editor and the negotiation over what needs to be revised, expanded, or clarified. I realize and accept that, without giving away too much or slipping into exoticizing, some things do need to be made more explicit for foreign readers to enhance their enjoyment of the text. I’ll write more about this in a future piece, this novelty of agents and editors that should become standard practice as we explore the foreign market.

So the first international edition, when it comes out (and I can happily report that the novel will be published in Italy by Isbn Edizioni, for starters), will be just slightly longer than the present one. It’s actually the kind of story that could go on and on, but as one of my favorite quotations goes (and this is from Paul Valery talking about poetry, although it could well apply to the novel), “A poem is never finished, merely abandoned.”

We’ll have a formal launching for the book next month, on July 22, in UP. Stay tuned!

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.