THE NAME GAME 2

In the mad rush to Christmas and the end of 2007, let’s take a holiday from business, numbers, and accounting.

How do you account for the names parents give their children?

http://www.taxgirl.com/thank-god-its-friday/ got me to dig up an email I received a few months back on the funny / weird name games Filipinos play.

A RHOSE, BY ANY OTHER NAME (continued)
by Matthew Sutherland

“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches” –(Proverbs 22:1)

Then I noticed how many people have what I have call to call
“door-bell names”. These are nicknames that sound like- well,
door-bells. There are millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong
are some of the more common.

They can be, and frequently are, used in even more door-bell-like
combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on.
Even our newly-appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping.
None of these door-bell names exist where I come from,and hence
sound unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear. Someone once
told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was called
Bing,replied “because my brother is called Bong”. Faultless logic.
Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I come
from “dong” is a slang word for… well, perhaps “talong” (eggplant) is the
best Tagalog equivalent.

Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before
encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or
Ning-Ning. The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual
one: Leck-Leck. Such names are then frequently further refined by
using the “squared” symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very
confused for a while.

More in the next post . . . . . . . .