{"id":1019,"date":"2010-11-13T03:49:36","date_gmt":"2010-11-12T17:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/?p=1019"},"modified":"2010-11-13T03:49:36","modified_gmt":"2010-11-12T17:49:36","slug":"showbiz-lengua-by-jose-f-lacaba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/?p=1019","title":{"rendered":"Showbiz Lengua by Jose F. Lacaba"},"content":{"rendered":"

Major Major<\/strong><\/p>\n

A day after the heartbreaking hostage-taking incident that ended in the death of the hostage taker and eight tourists from Hong Kong, Miss Philippines Venus Raj was in Las Vegas competing for the Miss Universe crown. In the final segment of the competition, she was asked by one of the judges, actor William Baldwin: \u201cWhat is one big mistake that you made in your life, and what did you do to make it right?\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Philippine newspaper reports, he said \u201cthe biggest mistake,\u201d but I\u2019ve reviewed that segment of the show on YouTube, and I can swear on a stack of dictionaries that he didn\u2019t use the superlative. From YouTube, I have also made the following transcript of Venus\u2019s answer:<\/p>\n

\u201cThank you so much, sir, for that wonderful question. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Good evening, Las Vegas! You know what, sir, in my 22 years of existence, I can say that there\u2019s nothing major major, I mean, problem that I have done in my life, because I\u2019m very confident with my family, with the love that they are giving to me. So, thank you so much that I\u2019m here. Thank you, thank you so much!\u201d<\/p>\n

With that reply, as Karen Flores of abs-cbnNEWS.com noted only hours after the event, Venus Raj \u201cleft something for the whole world to remember\u2014the term \u2018major major.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

If a native English speaker had used that term or said those words, we probably would not have noticed anything unusual. After all, Americans who live in the Wild Wild West and long for the green, green grass of home say \u201cbig, big mistake\u201d all the time; multiple Grammy winner Missy Elliott raps that \u201cI\u2019m really, really hot\u201d; and\u2014here\u2019s the clincher\u2014as far back as December 28, 2003, a Boston Globe report quoted U.S. politician Mitt Romney, then newly elected governor of Massachusetts, as saying that his advisers \u201chad made a major, major error in judgment.\u201d <\/p>\n

But since this was a Pinay beauty queen who was \u201cspokening English,\u201d we immediately assumed that she was resorting to Taglish, or transliterating a Tagalog expression into something funny and wrong and stupid and only remotely resembling the Queen\u2019s English.<\/p>\n

If that was a transliteration, I would have thought that Venus\u2019s term major major (that\u2019s the way it\u2019s spelled in early Philippine newspaper accounts, as two words with no comma) traces its roots to sobra-sobra, which itself is the Spanish-influenced version of the malalim na Tagalog compound labis-labis. But Internet denizens and online commentators were almost one in saying that it\u2019s an Englishing of a swardspeak buzzword: bonggang-bongga.<\/p>\n

As fashion designer Rajo Laurel wrote in his Twitter account immediately after Venus uttered her immortal lines (reportedly re-tweeted by more than 100 twitterers), \u201cVenus Raj\u2019s answer in Filipino\u201d goes: \u201cWala po akong naging problema sa buhay ko na BONGGANG-BONGGA!\u201d <\/p>\n

Whatever it means, the term major-major (which, since it\u2019s Taglish, I prefer to spell as one word, hyphenated, following standard Tagalog orthography) is now a major-major addition to the lingua franca. And for this we have Miss Universe Fourth Runner-Up Venus Raj to thank, or blame, in a major-major way. <\/p>\n

(First published in YES! Magazine, October 2010. Reprinted with the author’s permission.) \u2013 ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Major Major A day after the heartbreaking hostage-taking incident that ended in the death of the hostage taker and eight tourists from Hong Kong, Miss Philippines Venus Raj was in Las Vegas competing for the Miss Universe crown. In the final segment of the competition, she was asked by one of the judges, actor William […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}