Expressions that gotta go this 2009

You know how it is after New Year’s Day. You decide it’s time to chuck out things you can’t stand to look at anymore. You decide to rid yourself of unpleasant sights, sounds and even expressions. You try, but they keep lingering on, fueled by Internet, text message and blog usage. You want things to move on — onward to some bold, new, jargon-free future, where idioms don’t blaze in cyberspace for 12 twinkling seconds, then afflict us all for the next 12 months. 

Failing that, you wish you could go back: back to a time when English (or whatever hyphenated version of English you prefer to speak) was simpler, or at least had a few rules that people occasionally followed.

But this is crazy talk. On to the words and expressions that need to take a hike in the coming year. Maybe some of your Pinoy pals use ‘em; it doesn’t take more than a few hours of trawling the blogs to spot ‘em. Sadly, it takes forever to get rid of ‘em.

This 2009 (or Last 2008): Yes, the Pinoy habit of referring to the upcoming (or past) year with the qualifying pronoun “this” or “last” preceding it, as though we were comparing several possible “2009”s in our midst, is puzzling. Do Filipinos have an innate grasp of String Theory and Parallel Universes? Does their notion of time transcend one single experience of a given year on the earthly plane? Is that why they refer to “this 2009” or “last December 15, 2008”? No, it’s more likely they mean “this year” or simply “December 15, 2008.” Those of us still trapped by old-fashioned notions of space and time may feel smugly comfortable in believing that there is only one possible December 15, 2008 for us humans to contemplate; little do we know that, in the Philippines, time is an elastic concept at best: we can speak freely of “this 2009” and be perfectly understood (no matter which 2009 we happen to be experiencing).

Hyphenate: Now, in this 2009, it’s no longer just a verb; the word “hyphenate” has mutated into a noun to describe someone with so many mind-blowing skills that they take on the dubious title of a “hyphenate.” Don’t know who came up this one, but it’s probably the same person who, in a less pithy moment, decided to slip “slash” between the various titles in the hyphenate’s prefix. Thus we are capable of addressing, say, Angelo as “a restaurateur slash model slash writer slash film-maker slash environmentalist.” Takes up a whole lot more space than “hyphenate,” doesn’t it?

Comebacking: The entertainment industry’s favorite term for someone who — for whatever shady reasons — has been “out of the limelight” for a while but is now slowly working his/her way back by doing various TV “guestings” and “hostings.”

OMG, WTF (and other blog/text shortcuts): It took geezers like myself months to figure out what LOL was supposed to mean. I mean, WTF? Yet I still can’t conceive of a single context where I would resort to using that three-letter acronym to express myself. Thanks to various bitchy websites — even one eponymously called omg.com — we now know that OMG stands for “Oh. My. God.” (spoken in precisely that Mean Girls intonation). And we know WTF stands for, well, “What the *@&#.” And both are, like, meant to convey that one’s general level of spastic disbelief transcends, like, words and stuff, and can only be rendered in three-letter acronyms. Think of it as instant alphabet soup code for people who lack more descriptive language.

I love me some…: Oh, but I do hate me some fake folksy phrases sprinkled in front of my “likes” and “dislikes.” The wonder that is Wikipedia tells us that “I love me some” has been kicking around at least as far back as 1996, when Toni Braxton sang the grammatically suspect I Love Me Some Him. It’s soulful, yes. But when people adopt other people’s catchphrases like macros instead of coming up with their own ways of expressing feelings, it’s George Orwell time. Plus, the song wasn’t even a hit.

Starrer: Right up there with “comebacking” and “guestings” in the showbiz lexicon is starrer, which refers to the movie and not the movie star (because that would sound really stupid). Thus we can say

“Direk So-and-so is set to meg the next Angel Locsin starrer” and everybody knows exactly what we’re talking about. (The addition of “-er” results in many uniquely amusing Filipino expressions, such as “holdupper” and “carnapper,” but that’s a whole different list.)

“I Am Not A…” merchandising: It started with a bag. Then there were coffee mugs. Then, pretty much anything with enough surface area to bear a motto declaring what the product is not. C’mon. How does that Who song go? “Won’t get fooled again”? When people pay big bucks for a new product that announces its green-ness — be it “It” bag or coffee mug — they are actually playing into the consumer lifestyle and making manufacturers very happy, and very rich.

“It” (bag, girl, whatever): Something about the American Idol age has spawned a need among trend-setters to seek shorter and shorter ways of summing up in non-specific terms what they think people are looking for. In Simon Cowell’s case, it’s the “Wow” factor. The “It” phenomenon seems to date back to Clara Bow, Hollywood’s first “It girl” (that’s what they called her back in the 1920s), but now “It” seems like the perfect, two-letter crystallization of everything the consumer powers-that-be want you to believe is missing from your life. Time to lose “It.”

Take it to the next level: A loathsome cliché that somehow crept from corporate power jargon into teen usage. (Or did it worm its way from the gaming community into corporate language?) Either way, phrases like this are the very definition of lazy writing. When you really can’t be bothered coming up with a superlative, but you want to ascribe powers of transcendence to something, this is the non-descriptive cliché to reach for.

Recessionista: Cute the first time we heard it, but you can’t really build a fashion movement on not buying anything, can you? Thrift, like a lot of local fads (such as badminton and pearl shakes), just can’t continue to be that interesting for long. Especially when recessionistas start hearing dishy comments like, “Didn’t you wear that same dress, like, on the last five gimmicks?”

Belo-ed: Yes, we’ve apparently reached a point where a famous beauty clinic owner has become a verb in the local tongue. (As in, “Her chin is starting to overlap into her cleavage. It’s time she got Belo-ed.”) This is when you know things have reached critical mass. But fear not: Pinoy expressions are as mutable as the facial expressions of plastic surgery patients; what’s old becomes new in the blink of an eye. (Note: The expression is even now taking new shape in the wake of recent relationship woes between Dr. Belo and Dr. Hayden Kho.)