We own this language and it owns us back

Aunty Lilly got all excited on Sunday and yelled up and down the terrace house, waking Uncle Albert and my cousins with:

Ben's face come out newspaper! Ben's face come out newspaper! Ben's face come out newspaper!

My grumpy cousins grunted their replies, hop­ing she’d leave them alone so they could go back to sleep. But Aunty Lilly, all essited and more repet­i­tive than the karang-guni man, per­sisted:

Ben’s face come out news­pa­per, you know?

Aunty Lilly won’t know what it’s all about if you told her this pidgin called Singlish is to be strongly discouraged. Or that schools will have to buck up and teach proper English, they say. Or that simply passing English exams at Cambridge GCE O and A levels isn't good enough now.

Just when (lin­guists and lin­guis­tic hob­by­ists please cor­rect me — yes, Daryl, you) this pidgin was on the cusp of turning into a cre­ole, a ver­i­ta­ble lan­guage of its own. And they’re kewwing it! The fuckers!

Just when we’ve almost acquired a real mother tongue and a national lan­guage that’s con­gru­ent with our migrant her­itage. Nabeh, our fore­fa­thers (limpeh) came here, appro­pri­ated every­thing and made it their own, ok? Ban Singlish and you might as well ban chicken rice, kaya toast, hainanese cof­fee, satay, mee siam, laksa, rojak and ice-kachang. While you’re at it, this purist binge, you might as well tell every­one the real rea­son for the cres­cent moon on the national flag. Not the ‘young nation’ and the Jack­son Five spiel.

Aiyah, dunno lah. All’s I care about is that there are ety­mo­log­i­cal gems like the fol­low­ing float­ing around:

Dur­ing ‘live-firing’ range train­ing in the Army in National Ser­vice (another national insti­tu­tion, hey, why not ban this too?), sol­diers who are really, really bad shots are called ‘Bobo shoot­ers’, by their instruc­tors and comrades.

Now, I used to think that the word ‘Bobo’ came from the Hokkien rude root word, ‘Boh’, mean­ing ‘don’t have’, ‘don’t got’, or ‘noth­ing’, but an old Army hand recently left a comment in my Army team blog and explained otherwise:

BOBO is an adul­ter­ated ver­sion of WOWO. WO stands for ‘Washed Out’, i.e., hope­less in shoot­ing (like our national soc­cer team), can’t get a sin­gle hit.

Dur­ing those days, there were the eng­lish edu­cated and the chi­nese edu­cated. There were even the Hokkien pla­toons (where they can’t even con­verse in Man­darin). There were malay, tamil and other lan­guage speak­ing soldiers.Those days ===> 60s and 70s.

We wore name tags with dif­fer­ent coloured back­grounds from 1975. Green for Eng­lish, orange for Man­darin, red for Hokkien, yel­low for Tamil, blue for Malay and pur­ple for oth­ers (like Teochew speak­ing). The back­ground colour is for your main lan­guage. It would be green if you are eng­lish edu­cated. Then, if you could also speak man­darin pro­fi­ciently, a lit­tle orange colour is added to the right end of the tag. You could add sev­eral colours if you speak sev­eral lan­guages proficiently.

Back to BOBO. As the chi­nese heli­coptered (deroga­tory term to describe the chi­nese edu­cated by the eng­lish edu­cated) usu­ally mis­pro­nounced eng­lish terms, they pro­nounced WOWO as BOBO. We used to joke about it but some­how the term appar to stick since. Trust me. I enlisted in 1973.

Orange for Man­darin. How cool is that?

Surf stop: wurh.com (because easy to remember URL)

iTunes' party shuffle is playing a copy of: Lookin' Through the Windows - The Jack­son 5 — Num­ber One Motown, of which I have the orig­i­nal CD and there­fore didn’t steal music.