Hong DDa

I like to take photo of witty vanity plates and try to decode the messages.  Some messages are easy to figure out while others are challenging.  At least to me.  It is all relative, of course.  For example, with the photo below, for someone growing up in an English-speaking country where Volkswagon already bombarded with ads for the cute vehicle, it is a dead giveaway.  LIL BUG must be short for LITTLE BUG, as in VOLKSWAGON BUG.  But what if the simple puzzle is shown to someone who is new to the English language?  Further pretend that the person is also new to Western culture.  How would he know BUG here refers to the car model and not to an insect?  Chances are the English dictionary he uses will not have the definition for LIL.  If he is from Viet Nam, he can be thrown off by the use of BUG. The original Volkswagon Bug was marketed in Viet Nam and the Vietnamese calls it xe con cóc or the Frog Car.

The topic of different interpretations reminds me of the hông đa in Viet Nam. The sharp-eyed reader may correctly guesses that the name refers to Honda. When I was in Viet Nam, some thirty-plus years ago, almost any motorized bike is referred to as hông đa. My guess is that Honda had a big section of the motorized bike in Viet Nam back then. Likewise, lam bách ta means any scooter, not just the Lambretta motor scooter. Lastly, GMC automatically means a truck, even the General Motor Corporation makes more than just trucks.

Having spent most of my life in the U.S., I easily associate the word Honda to cars and not motor bike. There's the Honda Accord and I even own a Honda Odyssey. Perhaps because my father used to drive a hông đa, I remember the words the most, even though dad's bike was not necessarily made by Honda. But then again there is also this short song parody that I know and remember well, even if I forgot a word here and there and had to ask my brother for help:

Chiều mưa rầm rầm

Tôi lái chiếc hông-đa đưa tiễng nàng ra đầu cầu

Vừa tới bếnh sông thấy một người mặc cái xà-rong

Đứng xa như đàng ông, đứng gần như bà-bống

which translates to something like

It was a rainy night

I rode the Honda to send her to the bridge

At the river bank there was a person wearing a sarong

Far away it seemed to be a man, but close-up it was a drag queen

Do pardon my written Vietnamese, it has been a while and I do not want to spend too much time correcting typos, if any. Does bà bống really mean drag queen? Let's hear it from some Vietnamese people.

Spoonie

The recent big news at Apple, Inc. is the resignation of Steve Jobs as CEO.  Taking over Jobs' spot is the Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook.  As a Mac-head, I follow Apple news daily so I am familiar with the name "Tim Cook".  The average person may not know who Cook was but now he will.

What is so special about Tim Cook's name?  It is what I call a spoonie - by switching the non-consonant parts of the names you can make a somewhat meaningful phrase, i.e. "Took Him" from "Tim Cook".  Even better, you can make the 4-word phrase "Tim Cook Took Him", perhaps as an answer to the question "Where is the tomcat?"  Like palindromes, spoonies can be very contrived.   Note that I took the liberty to introduce the "kim" sound, just because "Cim" looks ambiguous and probably gets pronounced as "sim" or "chim", whatever that means.

Some of you may already know the word "spoonerism" is the proper term for the word play I described.  I decided to make up the shorter word just because it is just that - shorter.  "Spoonie" may have a dirty meaning in slang but slang is so rich I suspect most normal words have a dirty counterpart in the slang world.  Be sophisticated and rely less on slang words!

As a multi-syllabic language, English is not that great for making meaningful spoonies.  The few that I know are

• crushing blow <=> blushing crow
• popcorn <=> porn cop (a member of the vice squad?)
• take a look <=> took a lake (something a large creature like Godzilla can do?)

Spoonies are very popular in Vietnamese since the language is mono-syllabic.  Every original Vietnamese word has only one syllable.  "Saigon", the older but more popular name for the capital city of the former South Vietnam, was made so to look foreign and exotic.  (Ho Chi Minh City, or Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh, is the official name.)  There is beauty in being mono-syllabic.  Words can be safely uttered without worrying about where one syllable ends and where the next begins.  Think "nowhere" - which syllable take the "W"?  Is it pronounced "no where" or "now here"?  Sure, having words spanning many syllables can be fun for poets and such, but for daily conversation, mono-syllables are great to have.


There are many Vietnamese jokes and phrases made from spoonies but after years of not using it enough, or reading Vietnamese, I do not remember that many but still enough for a blog entry.  Soccer, or "đá banh", is a popular sport in Vietnam.  The spoonie of "đá banh" is "đánh ba", or "to beat up one's father", a big no-no in Vietnam, where children are supposed to have high respect for their parents.  Similarly, "đá chanh", or lemonade, can become "đánh cha", where "cha" is another word for "father".  Along the fatherhood line, "tắm ỉa", or take a dump right before taking a shower, is a spoonie of "tía ẩm", where "tía" is a more endearing term for "father" and "ẩm" means to carry or cradle.  Enough with fathers and their issues...  If you speak Viet and know a Viet person, ask them if they know "con Hương bên đèo", which sounds like a woman named "Hương" who lives by a hill (đèo).  In reality, it is a spoonie for "con heo bên đường", or "the pig by the road".  Likewise, "con Chín bến đò" may sound like a lady, ranked eighth in the family so she's usually known as Number 9 (since the first-born is called #2), switch things around and you have "con chó bến đình", or "the dog by the temple"!  Lastly, many Chinese in Vietnam have roots in the Chaozhou region of China.  Ask a Viet you know if "ngầu lôi tăng kể" sounds like teochew (or Chaozhou language) and the person may agree.  In reality, the phrase is just a spoonie of "ngồi lâu tê cẳng", or "having sleepy legs from sitting too long".


Of course to really appreciate all these word-plays you need to speak the Vietnamese language.  No promise, but I may, might, remotely possible, make a vlog or video log, where I record myself uttering these nonsensical phrases for entertainment purpose.  A very iffy idea.  Writing is hard enough already, videotaping (even without tape) with all the editing and text overlay is even harder, so don't hold your breath.