Major Major
A day after the heartbreaking hostage-taking incident that ended in the death of the hostage taker and eight tourists from Hong Kong, Miss Philippines Venus Raj was in Las Vegas competing for the Miss Universe crown. In the final segment of the competition, she was asked by one of the judges, actor William Baldwin: “What is one big mistake that you made in your life, and what did you do to make it right?”
According to Philippine newspaper reports, he said “the biggest mistake,” but I’ve reviewed that segment of the show on YouTube, and I can swear on a stack of dictionaries that he didn’t use the superlative. From YouTube, I have also made the following transcript of Venus’s answer:
“Thank you so much, sir, for that wonderful question. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Good evening, Las Vegas! You know what, sir, in my 22 years of existence, I can say that there’s nothing major major, I mean, problem that I have done in my life, because I’m very confident with my family, with the love that they are giving to me. So, thank you so much that I’m here. Thank you, thank you so much!”
With that reply, as Karen Flores of abs-cbnNEWS.com noted only hours after the event, Venus Raj “left something for the whole world to remember—the term ‘major major.’”
If a native English speaker had used that term or said those words, we probably would not have noticed anything unusual. After all, Americans who live in the Wild Wild West and long for the green, green grass of home say “big, big mistake” all the time; multiple Grammy winner Missy Elliott raps that “I’m really, really hot”; and—here’s the clincher—as far back as December 28, 2003, a Boston Globe report quoted U.S. politician Mitt Romney, then newly elected governor of Massachusetts, as saying that his advisers “had made a major, major error in judgment.”
But since this was a Pinay beauty queen who was “spokening English,” we immediately assumed that she was resorting to Taglish, or transliterating a Tagalog expression into something funny and wrong and stupid and only remotely resembling the Queen’s English.
If that was a transliteration, I would have thought that Venus’s term major major (that’s the way it’s spelled in early Philippine newspaper accounts, as two words with no comma) traces its roots to sobra-sobra, which itself is the Spanish-influenced version of the malalim na Tagalog compound labis-labis. But Internet denizens and online commentators were almost one in saying that it’s an Englishing of a swardspeak buzzword: bonggang-bongga.
As fashion designer Rajo Laurel wrote in his Twitter account immediately after Venus uttered her immortal lines (reportedly re-tweeted by more than 100 twitterers), “Venus Raj’s answer in Filipino” goes: “Wala po akong naging problema sa buhay ko na BONGGANG-BONGGA!”
Whatever it means, the term major-major (which, since it’s Taglish, I prefer to spell as one word, hyphenated, following standard Tagalog orthography) is now a major-major addition to the lingua franca. And for this we have Miss Universe Fourth Runner-Up Venus Raj to thank, or blame, in a major-major way.
(First published in YES! Magazine, October 2010. Reprinted with the author’s permission.) – ?