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 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

1
From The Observer, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, 9 January 2000.
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.