For a While1

Matthew Sutherland

"Two countries divided by a common language."

-- George Bernard Shaw (on the US and the UK)

1 The very first thing the arriving tourist sees in Manila after the
plane door opens is a sign in the walkway that reads "Watch Your
Steps." This may not sound funny to you, but it sounds funny to me, an
English speaker from England. This is because, in the UK, the
expression is "Watch Your Step," singular, not "steps," plural. There's
nothing wrong with "Watch Your Steps"; in fact, it actually makes
more sense to watch all your forthcoming steps than watch just one
generic step. It just sounds funny, that's all.

2 "Watch Your Steps" is the first reminder for English speakers

from outside the Philippines that English usage here is idiosyncratic,
even unique. Of course, every English-speaking nation has its own
unique set of English phrases and idioms; English is equally
idiosyncratic in say, India, Jamaica, Zimbabwe, or Singapore. There is
no right or wrong way to speak English. The many versions of English
spoken around the globe merely serve to make English an even richer
tongue. However, the purpose of this column is to shed light on
Philippine culture from a foreign perspective, and many Filipinos may
be surprised to find out that some of the phrases they use daily are
unique to this country, and thus sound odd to visitors.

3 If you ask most English-speakers from abroad to pick just one

idiom unique to the Philippines, I reckon 75 percent would select that
stalwart phrase, "for a while." This is the English translation of the
Tagalog, "sandali lang." Whilst the component words of the phrase
"for a while" are clearly English, this expression as a whole does not
exist in the rest of the English-speaking world. In the UK, where I
come from, the idiomatic equivalent would be something like "just a
second" or "just a moment." On the telephone, where "for a while" is
frequently used in the Philippines, in England we might use "hold on,"
"hold the line," or, informally, "hang on."

4 My second favorite uniquely Filipino-English phrase is "I'll go

ahead." Used when leaving a place before the person being
addressed, it is a translation of the Tagalog "mauuna na ako." “I’ll go
ahead” sounds funny to me, because it seems to imply that the
listener should follow. If someone's going ahead, then someone must
be following behind, right? When I first heard my secretary say "I'll go
ahead," I thought she was expecting me to follow her to some secret
assignation! Sadly, this turned out not to be the case: she's now suing
me for stalking here. ("Just kidding!" as the say in the Philippines).

5 In the third place for me comes the phrase "I will be the one to
do that." This is a translation of the Tagalog "ako na lang ang
gagawa." Frequently shortened to just "I will be the one" ("ako na
lang"), this is a Filipino-English way of saying "I'll do it" or "let me do
1
From The Observer, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, 9 January 2000.
it." These shorter versions would be the idioms I would use more
commonly in the UK. I was always taught by my English professors
that the shorter the words used, and the simpler grammatical
construction, the better the resultant English. Perhaps that's why the
four extra words "be the one to," inserted into the already perfectly
adequate phrase "I will do that," sound odd to anyone taught English
in England.

6 Another example of this type of seemingly unnecessary weighty

construction is the marvelous phrase "make an ocular inspection,"
which I caught my girlfriend Kitty saying in the back of the car last
weekend. Ocular inspection?!? Per-lease! What's wrong with "go and
have a look," I'd like to know?

7 From an intellectual point of view, one of the fascinations in all

of this is how these phrases evolved. At some point in history, it must
have been deemed necessary to have an English equivalent for
Tagalog phrases such as "sandali lang." At that moment, what you
might imagine would happen is that the nation would borrow an
existing equivalent idiom from an existing English-speaking nation.
That magic is that, instead, the nation invented its own English
idioms, and by so doing enriched the world of English.

8 I was also massively confused for at least my first two years over
a couple of time-related phrases. The one that really gave me
problems was the phrase "the other day." In the UK, it merely means
"recently," i.e. a few days ago, whereas in the Philippines it means
quite specifically, the day before yesterday. I used to get furious when
I would read in the paper that the Philippine peso closed at a certain
rate against the dollar "the other day." This seemed to me to be a
terribly imprecise piece of information, until I realized that the phrase
was far more specific here than in England!

9 More confusion in the language of the time arises from different

usage of the word "last." Filipinos tend to use the English word "last"
wherever they would use the Tagalog word "noon." This results in
phrases like "last October 26" and "last 1994," which we would not
use in England. Instead, we would tend to say "on October 26" and "in
1994" only using "last" in the context of "last week" or "last year."

10 And lastly, English in the Philippines has spawned some unusual

nouns connected with the world of crime that commonly appear in
newspaper headlines, but which are unusual to me. Where I come
from, "graft" means hard work; "salvage" means rescuing things that
have sunk; and I had to look up "mulcting" in the dictionary. It sounds
like it ought to be something to do with fertilizing flowerbeds but it
turns out to be more about enriching policemen than the soil.

11 Hope you enjoyed your ocular inspection of this article. I'll go

ahead.