"Toto's", "Boy's", "Dodong's", "Junjun's" Participating at Dinagyang Festival
MATTER OF TASTE - by Matthew Sutherland (BBC News)
"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches."
-Proverbs 22:1
When I arrived in the Philippines from the UK seven years ago, one of the first cultural defenses 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'm 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 five.
Fifty-five-year-olds colleague put it. Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy would be beaten to death at a school by pre-adolescent bullies, and never make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names like Babes, Precious, Peachy, or Apples. Yuck, ech ech. Here, however, no one bats an eyelid. Then I noticed how many people have what I have to call "door-bell names". These are nicknames that sound like - well, door-bells. There are million of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of the most 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. 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 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 confused for a while.
Then there is a 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, Buboy, BoyBoy, Baboy (notice the name get worse the more kids there are - best to be born early or you could end up as 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 combination is that they look great painted across your trunk if you're a cab driver. That's another thing I've never seen before coming to Manila - taxis with the driver's kids' name on the trunk...
Another whole eye-opening field for a foreign visitor is the phenomenon of a "composite" name. This includes Jejomar (for, Jesus, Joseph, Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not). That's a bit like me being called "Engscowani" (for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Between you and me, I'm glad I'm not. And how could I forget the fabulous concept of the randomly inserted "h". Quite what device this 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 average weird name. It results to creations like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about Jhun-Jhun (Jhun2)?
How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people named 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 could that be really true? Where else in the world could the former head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin (bless his soul)?
Where else but the Philippines!!
