For those of you who don't know (yeah, what kind of friends are you?), my family is from Pampanga (mother and father, so I don't register a mestisong identity in that sense) a province within the Philippines nation-state. People who live in Pampanga identify themselves as and speak Kapampangan.
I have a cousin named Adlegrant, Adgrant for short, who immigrated to the U.S. from Pampanga maybe 15 years ago. At our family's annual Christmas party last year, Kuya Adgrant (Kuya is an honorific kinship title given to older relatives or friends, usually of or near the same generation) ate with my Republican uncle Tito Reuben and I in the foyer area of my Ate (feminine version of "Kuya") Anngenn's new house. Since our extended family is too large to sit at one dinner table, Christmas dinner is usually served in a buffet style and everyone usually eats with whomever, with the only particularized pattern of the older eating with the older and the younger eating with their lot. Usually having to deal with the necessitation of communicating in English or Tagalog, the family's opportunity to freely speak the native tongue is a small but important joy within our network. Tito Reuben's Ilocano/English/Tagalog frame of reference casts him as a linguistic outsider to my family of loud and chattering tsismoso Kapampangans who leave the work of conversationally engaging him in English to my Auntie Minda's white husband. Keenly aware of this nonconsensual arrangement of being pegged as the white guy's de facto option for shooting the shit, Tito Reuben opted to eat with two of his nephews.
The combination of my Kuya Adgrant's Down Syndrome and his thick Kapampangan accent makes it very difficult to understand his English sometimes, but he can be an altogether funny and smart conversation if you take time to listen to what he says. In this respect I can relate to him because I have constantly been told that I'm unintelligble when I talk (especially on the telephone), probably because I have a tendency to nervously speak too fast or enunciate the wrong parts of words. For some reason, Tito Reuben was an apt translator for Kuya Adgrant during our dinner conversation (probably because he had heard this story before) around a cafe-style table in the impromptu cosmopolitan locutory, in which my cousin retold the story of his plane ride to Seattle with the warm undercurrent of nostalgia in his painting of the Philippines. After digressing to new subject matter, I learned of one of Kuya Adgrant's favorite words—a word of his own creation, by virtue of which makes him a Kapampangan Shakespeare in my book—borbolen (or bolbolen if you're feeling classy). It took me a while to realize what he was saying, let alone meant, since it sounded a lot like one of my parent's invented terms of endearment for each other, bornebol. Kuya Adgrant's word can be loosely defined as a colloquial pejorative but good-humored evocation of sira buntuk (literally "broken head" in Kapampangan, or "crazy") or sakit sa ulo (literally "pain in the head" in Tagalog, or "insanity").
Dr. Bonus, while substituting for our teacher in Tagalog class last week, ingrained into us by repetition the expression "You're so baboy!" so I can now call out any glutton who is eating piggishly. However, for anybody who says something stupid or just plain acts a fool, I can say "You're so borbolen!" (Better than calling them a dumbass bitch, right?)
Long story short, it's truly a blessing to have amazing kin who can help you get along in this world by fortifying your vocabulary with the softer -isms outside of the English language.
