When I went to the Siloso Beach countdown party, I had two sets of friends with me – from my office and from my hometown. As I conversed with my hometown friends in our local dialect, Chavacano, Nantoy overheard us and asked us to teach him some Chavacano words.
Anne obliged by teaching him what is probably the most popular word in our hometown – let’s call it the C word. “It’s something you tell a girl you admire. It means ‘you’re beautiful and sexy and I like you,’” she explained.
“Wow! What a nice word! Who would’ve thought you could say so many things with just one word?” Nantoy enthused, then started using it in different sentences.
“Hello! C___.”
“I know we just met but C___.”
“Nice dress! C___.”
“It’s dark so C___.”
We laughed. “Why? Am I pronouncing it wrong?” he asked worriedly when he saw our reaction.
“Oh no no, it’s just funny to hear somebody else say it,” Anne assured him.
But that was actually her second lie to Nantoy. I say “second” because you see, kids, the word she taught Nantoy didn’t actually mean that beautiful long phrase she had declared it to be. The truth is, the Chavacano C word is actually the equivalent of the English F word.
Nantoy had been C’d with.
And he wasn’t aware of it, and didn’t become aware of it until weeks later, when we happened to take the same bus to work. He had brought up a Bisaya word that I was not familiar with even though I was Bisaya myself. I apologized for not knowing it and he replied, “It’s okay, duh! You also know lots of words that I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, like Bisaya words?” I asked as I slid into the seat next to his.
“No, I mean Chavacano words,” he responded. “You know so many of them and I know only one.” Then he uttered the C word and I suddenly remembered that after getting distracted by beach dancing and free buckets of booze and stuff, we had completely forgotten to get to the punchline of our joke. We had never told him what the C word actually meant. Oops.
Better late than never, as they say, so I finally told him what it really meant and watched his eyes go big. He wasn’t about to be just a victim, though, no siree. So he pulled out his iphone and decided to turn the tables by sending a message to me and my hometown friends on Facebook.
“A girl slapped me!!!!
I used the C word that you taught me. I think I said it the wrong way. What is the correct way?”
After a while an aghast Anne replied with:
“Oh my God! Is this true?”
Nantoy expounded further:
“I met her at a bar. She said she grew up in ZC. The first thing that popped into my mind was the C word. So I said it because she was a cutie. But I said it with a wink. Maybe it was because of that.”
Nantoy, a high five is not enough; let me give you a high six for that believable tale!
Anne didn’t reply for a long time after that. Hours later, I got a PM from her.
“Was Nantoy serious? Oh no. I feel so bad.”
At this point I decided that I didn’t want the situation to turn as convoluted as that Friends episode where they went “but they don’t know that we know they know we know.” So I told Anne the truth, and I could imagine her huge sigh of relief while typing out her reply to me.
“Eeeesh!!! Haha I didn’t know how to react! I really felt guilty! I couldn’t even eat lunch in peace!”
Hahaha!
This reminded me of two episodes from two of my favorite sitcoms. The first one is the one I mentioned earlier. In one Friends episode, Rachel and Phoebe found out that Chandler and Monica were sleeping together. They wanted Chan and Mon to admit this to them, so they staged a way to get them to do so, by Phoebe flirting with Chandler. Unfortunately, Monica saw through the plot and decided to retaliate by telling Chandler to flirt back. He did, and Phoebe and Rachel were aghast that Chandler would blatantly cheat on Monica till they realized: “They know that we know! But they don’t know that we know they know we know.” So they called Chandler’s bluff and it all came to head in a very hilarious living room forced-seduction scene between the two (seriously, you gotta watch this. Like right now. What are you doing still reading this blog? I said NOW!). In the end, Chandler was the first to cave, admitting that he couldn’t go through with it because he was in love with Monica, much to everyone’s pleasant surprise. Check out those scenes here. Youtube has disabled embedding.
The other episode is one from How I Met Your Mother. Ted had met a girl he really liked in a bar, and he asked for her number. Barney and Marshall told him he had to wait for three days to call her or else he would seem too needy. He finally agreed with them, but he found a loophole – he had agreed not to call, but nobody said anything about texting. So he texted her, and they spent the entire night and the next morning in textversation (sorry, I totally invented that word. But it’s cool, right?). What he didn’t know was that Barney had taken his phone and switched the number with Barney’s work cell so that if he called her, he and Marshall would bust on him. So Ted was actually texting Barney and Marshall, not Holli (which was the girl’s name). Robin found out about this and told Ted, and when Ted found out, he turned prankers to prankees by texting them that he had a confession to make – “I sometimes have gay dreams about my best friend.” Now one of the running jokes in HIMYM is about how Barney and Marshall fight for the title of Ted’s best friend, so they didn’t know for sure who Ted meant by “best friend” and started arguing about why Ted would pick him over the other. It all came down to a head in a bar scene where they forced him to choose between the two of them, and he finally replied: “Holli.”
So I guess what I’m saying is: be careful who you pull a prank on. 😉
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