9 - When Wordplay Goes OverboardGoing by its dictionary definition, the noun
“racket” means “a fraudulent scheme, enterprise, or activity” or “a usually illegitimate enterprise made workable by bribery or intimidation.” More loosely, it means “an easy and lucrative means of livelihood” and is slang for “occupation or business”
(Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary). In whatever sense, though, I have always thought of the word as denoting something socially abhorrent—perhaps even illegal or criminal.
Sometime in September 2005, however, a fellow English-language editor sent me e-mail that disquietingly turned the word “racket” on its head, so to speak. “
May bago po akong raket (I have a new racket),” he said, then proceeded to describe the new enterprise he was engaged in. What he really meant was a new “sideline” that was not even remotely illegal or illegitimate, so I found it disturbing that he should use a normally distasteful word for it. Perhaps such loose usage would be acceptable in informal, face-to-face conversations, but it was very unbecoming to be put in writing by someone who should have more respect for language and its nuances.
IMAGE CREDIT: MUMBLINGNERD.COMI had already forgotten that incident but recently, during lunch with a former associate in the English-language editing business, the peculiar usage popped out again when she asked me this question: “
Ano ho ba ang raket ninyo ngayon? (What is your racket at present?).” I almost choked on my drink hearing that nasty word again! How could such a serious distortion of meaning gain wide currency in our language? What is it that makes even intelligent, discerning people view illicit, aberrant things as perfectly acceptable?
It didn’t take long for me to find possible answers to these questions. Driving through a main thoroughfare to meet a client sometime later, I came across scores of product streamers that posed the following question (or words to this effect) in big, bold letters: “
Ano ba ang raket ninyo ngayong summer? (What’s your racket this summer?).” It appears that the use of “raket” with a positive spin had been legitimized by mass advertising. For shock value and recall, the word had been appropriated to mean “any business” or
“gimik” (gimmick)—one that’s easy and pleasurable to do. In the process, of course, the fraudulent and illegitimate aspects of the word had been glossed over.
In this sense,
“raket” joins the word
“salvage” in having been corrupted in Philippine usage to mean its opposite. The first is from a grim, derogatory word into a respectable, fun word; and the other from a respectable, positive word into an unpleasant, derogatory word. Some of us will probably recall that the verb
“salvage” means “to rescue or save [something] especially from wreckage or ruin,” but in the Philippine context, it has become a euphemism for “to kill or assassinate” or “to execute or dispose of a person summarily and secretly.” This usage grew out from a government task force report that inadvertently used the word to describe the extra-legal executions of thousands of Filipinos between 1975 and 1983 during martial law.
(The Filipino writer Jose F. Lacaba, in a note to the
Double-Tongued Word Wrester, a website that records old and new words from the fringes of English, makes this observation about this inversion of “salvage”: “It began as an anglicization or Englishing of the Tagalog word
‘salbahe,’ whose meaning ranges from mischievous or abusive (adj.) and a notoriously abusive person (noun).
‘Salbahe,’ in turn, is derived from the Spanish word
‘salvaje,’ wild, undomesticated, savage.”)
It is normal for a society to do all sorts of wordplay, of course, but I think the Philippine use of “raket” and “salvage” to denote their opposite sense has gone dangerously overboard. We must draw the line somewhere to safeguard language and our value systems. As the slogan of my favorite English-language website, Vocabula.com, sagely warns, “A society is generally as lax as its language.”
(April 24, 2006)
