Lengua Becca

It's funny how language not only conveys meaning, but it also dates you and lets slip out clues about your background and your history.

Of course, we all know what generation people are in if they say SM or if they say Shoemart.  Shoemart means the small hole in the wall in the heart of Manila where stockboys hide in the ceiling and shoes zip out on wires from stockroom to salesgirl.  SM, on the other hand, is its conglomerate spawn, with malls stretching from shore to shore, and beyond.  My parents still say Shoemart, although they may not necessarily be understood by the hipster in the corner.

The pet peeve of people in my generation is Boracay Island.  Aside from the environmental degradation we have come to lament, there's also the diminution of its name to “Bora”.  There's a cringe reaction every time we hear this shortened moniker, and many an online tirade has been seen venting anger at Bora-happy tourists.  Boracay advocates pass judgment on “Bora” users, thinking that they belong to a  wanna be cool, wanna be hip subset.

I was in a serious meeting with a Canadian lawyer, and during the course of our intense negotiations, I said: “What a bummer”.  Canadian counsel burst out laughing and said, “Bummer?  What era are you from?” For the life of me, I couldn't even tell what the source of this carbon-dating was, since bummer had been a favorite expression since forever.  And of course, she was right, because nobody in my circle, except a couple of Assumptionistas who I blame for this lapse, uses bummer anymore.

Bummer probably falls in the same category as “jeepers”, which Robin used in the days before everyone speculated that he and Batman were actually an item.  Maybe now, he uses rubbers, not jeepers.

Which leads me to the observation that Manila denizens almost never use “rubbers”, they use the generic term, probably in meek compliance with the Generics Law, “condoms”.  Unless the speaker is American, or trying to be. Or Catholic priests, in which case they probably say “instruments of hell” or some such cute substitute.

I get confused even by the LGBT crowd. I remember advocates were particular about saying gay men and lesbian women.  There was this weird variation called “womyn”’, which I never quite figured out, and then activists expanded the recitation to include bisexuals and transsexuals, so that they wouldn't feel left out.  Ok, “marginalized” is the politically correct term.

Now, here we are fast forward in the 2010's decade, and gay marriage is in the horizon.  We look at the coverage, and journalists don't want to recite the whole gamut.  So they just use LGBT, and the weird thing is, when talking about lesbians, they just resort to saying “gay women.”  As in gay men and women.  What happened to the lesbians?  Even gay publications have resorted to this shortcut, and it's a wonder we haven't had internecine warfare amongst the men and women over this insidious co-opting.

Speaking of which, Filipino teens and tweens use “becky” to refer to gay people, a practice that I can't quite bring myself to subscribe to.  Which of course dates me as outside that generation, but who cares.  To my fuddy duddy ears (ha, dated myself again!) 'becky' sounds a bit harsh and derogatory.  Of course, “bakla” isn't that nice either, or even “bading”.  Perhaps someone can invent a nice new Filipino word for becky.

Even “Ladlad”, the political party of gay activists, has faced intense criticism, both from straight and gay supporters.  They think the name itself, which loosely means, flaming out of the closet to the max, was the cause for the defeat, since it was too in-your-face.  Voters were turned off, supposedly, by this too radical confrontation of gay prejudice.  I would hazard the guess, however, that the critics are from the older generation, since the tweens have grown up with Ladlad already established in the political scene.

With the relentless pace of technology, I have to prepare myself to explain “apps”, “unfriend” and “subscribe” to my elders, who don't belong to the Facebook generation.  Hashtag?  Um, yes, that's something to do with Twitter.  Doesn't it?