BIRIT by Jose F. Lacaba
MatyagWika
SHOWBIZ LENGUA
Jose F. Lacaba
MAKING BIRIT
The Word of the Year, according to dictionary publisher
Merriam-Webster Inc., is blog. That's a shortened form
of Web log, which is something like a diary, but one that's open to the
computer-literate public. Merriam-Webster reports that blog--defined as
"a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections,
comments, and often hyperlinks"--was the most looked-up word on the
dictionary publisher's Internet sites in 2004.
Blog is English. What could be the Word of the Year in
Filipino, Pilipino, Tagalog, Taglish, Philippine English, or
Pinoyspeak in general?
Unfortunately, we have no equivalent of Merriam-Webster. A few online
word lists keep track of developments in Pinoyspeak,
but these are mostly the hobbies of amateur wordwatchers like yours
truly. So let's just say the table is open for nominations for
Pinoyspeak Word of the Year 2004. That could be a new coinage you
encountered only last year, or an old word that somehow gained currency
or new meaning last
year.
My own candidate for the honor is birit.
Let me cite two examples of the word's current popularity. At
yearend, the country's Number One noontime show, Eat Bulaga, had two
contests to determine who would be Birit Queen and
Birit King. Earlier, in the Philippine Daily Inquirer of October 10,
2004, columnist Nestor U. Torre noted the propensity of local divas to
make birit--which he defined as "to belt out songs with maximum range
and vocal power." Torre went on to lament that "belting and birit" made
the local music scene "so strident and trying-hard,"
besides being a "real strain on the singers' vocal cords and the
listeners' eardrums."
The UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino (2001), described as "the first
comprehensive monolingual dictionary in Filipino," defines birit as
"pilat sa talukap ng mata" in Iloko and "pagpapabilis
ng takbo ng sasakyan."
The second definition could be the source of birit's
current musical meaning, since a race car going high speed does create
a screeching sound akin to high-pitched singing. But let me hazard a
wild guess about lexical origin, closer to the world of pop music:
birit is really a mispronunciation of Michael Jackson's chart-busting
"Beat It."
Don't laugh. There is a well-documented theory that hirit, as in huling
hirit and unang hirit, was originally a term in
softball, a sport brought into this country by speakers of
American English. Hirit! is the command you hear when it's your turn at
bat: "Hit it!"
>From hit it to hirit, from beat it to birit--sounds plausible enough
for me.
YES!
2005 February
MatyagWika
iyong mapagmatyag na kolum! Hintayin din natin ang sasabihin ng
American Dialect Society sa magiging Salita ng Taon nila. Noong 2003,
"metrosexual" ang kanilang pinili. Ano naman kaya ngayong 2004. Abangan!