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Cynthia Oi

By any spelling, ‘oogee’
means the same thing

ONE of my reporter friends called up a couple of weeks ago to ask a very important question.

"Eh, how you spell 'oo-gee'?" she said.

"Hah? Why you like know?" I responded in the vernacular locals slip in to automatically when another pidgin speaker talk li'dat.

She explained that both a television reporter and Harvard-educated Mayor Hannemann had used the term to describe the awkward situation that could result if an official bumped from his job returned to work among his former colleagues and she was thinking of quoting him in a story.

I ventured a guess. "U-G-E-E?" She countered with "O-O-G-E-E." So I looked up the word in an online pidgin English dictionary I occasionally use. That source had it as "U-J-E-E."

Correct? Maybe. Maybe not, because pidgin spelling isn't definitive. As a matter of fact, fluidity is welcome, according to "Da Kine Dictionary," a new compilation by Lee A. Tonouchi, an educator whose advocacy for the language has earned him the aka "Da Pidgin Guerrilla."

"By not standardizing da spellings, da hope of dis projeck is for maintain one sense of all da diff'rent variations of Pidgin voices," he says.

K-den.

It wasn't too long ago that educators and others debated the value of pidgin. To blend into mainstream America, kids were pushed to speak proper English. What happened, at least in my generation, was that we learned to tailor speech to situation. When the teacher asked a question in the classroom, the answer was given in regular English, but when talking with friends and family, the dialect was pidgin -- in all its colorful glory.

Paging through the dictionary, I found terms that conjured a different time.

"Buta kaukau" brought back memories of the cans many households kept in backyards to hold food scraps that pig farmers would collect for their livestock. Though we kids normally stayed as far away from the cans as possible, we'd hold our noses to watch in strange fascination when the slop truck came by and men in rubber boots and boroboros, their faces masked with rags, poured the stinky contents into the big, rusty drums that lined the flat beds.

I haven't heard "pio" used in a long time. It means to put out or extinguish, like in "I going pio da fire in da hibachi." Likewise, "double eye," which in pre-plastic surgery days was achieved when some women and girls, mostly Asians, stuck a crescent of scotch tape along their lash lines to force a fold in the eyelid to mimic a European facial feature.

Among my favorite old-time phrases is "ma-ke die dead" because the combination of one Hawaiian and two English words present an overkill of meaning. There's absolutely no ambiguity.

Pidgin has no shortage of coarse terms, though some are disguised or diluted through misspellings or mispronunciation. In innocent years, I'd see graffiti declaring the "F" word, only it employed an "O" as its only vowel, which puzzled me for a long time.

Some pidgin words would horrify denizens of a politically correct world. "Buk buk," which the dictionary defines as "one flip," or a Filipino; "buddahead," or a Japanese person; "ehtay" and "mahu" for gay or homosexuals; may be seen as offensive, but their origins were descriptive rather than malicious.

The dictionary also contains newer expressions, such as "da bomb" and "phat," that parallel pop culture. Purists may object, but I agree with Tonouchi that pidgin's constant evolution helps keeps it alive. In fact, localisms are finding their way across the Pacific. "Sukoshi," a Japanese word meaning "a little bit," has been adopted by mainlanders, only they spell it "s'kosh".

Maybe someday, a magazine piece about Paris Hilton will described her as "tantaran". Then Tonouchi can send her a copy of "Da Kine" for enlightenment. In the meantime, he should send one to the management consultant who earlier this month talked about cultural challenges in doing business in the islands and cited as one advantage the fact that "most people in Hawaii speak close to perfect English."

Yeah, no?

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