Category Archives: folk simile

Aum Namh Shivai

Nationality: Indian
Age: 52
Occupation: CPA
Residence: Glendale, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

“Aum Namh Shivai”

This is Sanskrit phrase/mantra. Aum means Shiva, another word for God. It means God is infinite, God is love. Aum has several meanings, including love, infinite, life, peace, etc. Aum can also interchange with “Om,” which is the more commonly recognized version of the word, but because it has so many meanings, the phrase, “Aum Namh Shivai” can mean different things as well, including “God is life, God is peace,” etc. My father would keep repeating that as a mantra, especially if he was doing something especially meditative; he told me it’s a phrase we say to be grateful and to also center oneself.

My dad and grandfather say this when they’re meditating, especially during breathing exercises in yoga. So when my dad was teaching me yoga breathing, he was telling me to find a mantra to repeat and focus on.

Dhoop Chaun

Nationality: Indian
Age: 52
Occupation: CPA
Residence: Glendale, CA
Performance Date: 4/25/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi, Punjabi

“Dhoop Chaun.”

Dhoop Chaun is a phrase that literally translates to “sun shade.” My father said, “My grandfather used to say, ‘Dhoop chaun’ and it means ‘sun shade’ and represents light and dark and ups and downs in your life. It’s like sometimes it’s up ands sometimes it’s down, there are challenges, opportunities, there’s joyfulness, sadness, life is a mixed bag. My Nana Gi told me that.”

Nana Gi in Punjabi is your maternal grandfather, so my father’s mother’s father used to tell my dad this phrase when he was very young. He was trying to instill in my dad from a young age that life is not all happiness and sadness, it’s not just black and white. I think it’s a really great phrase that definitely has other translations or meanings in different countries, because I’ve heard variations of this phrase, like “No mud, no lotus.” It represents the same thing, that life is both the sadness and joy, but the good and the bad, and that the two must exist in harmony together.

Mascotgate

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/19/17
Primary Language: English

This was told to a group of friends while talking about funny or weird high school experiences.

“So at my high school, at the end of junior year, you pick a mascot, and the mascot is a mix of a pop culture figure and an animals, so like “Swanye West” or Swan F Kennedy, and i don’t know why those are both swans but those are easy, but um, uh, one time they did a movie, “Fight Cub”; “Moose Lee”, “mean squirrels”, um, and so you then you use them for your senior mascot and you get shirts based on that, and you also your yearbook will be entered on that, so when they did “moose lee” they made it look like an action movie, so like first people submit things and then we all vote on them, and the largest vote was “Genghis Kangaroo” like Genghis Khan and a kangaroo, um, and this had been submitted, and voted for number one, and it works like you vote for one and whatever gets the most votes wins, um, but then, oh yeah, so I was on term council which is like student council for each grade, and people were really mad, like I don’t want this, it can’t be Genghis kangaroo because I hate it but he’s also a mass-murderer, and like a pillager and a rapist, and we don’t want Genghis Khan representing us, and like all of those are obviously fair arguments, but like you could have said this at any point, like Genghis kangaroo could have been taken out at any point and we didn’t have to wait until it won, for then everyone to say why it’s fucked up? and then, we had a bunch of meetings at term council for what to do, what won the democratic vote, and there have always been rumours that it is a “termocracy” meaning that term council did shit without consulting the students and that we didn’t care about them, which was crazy because the meetings were open, so like anyone could come, so then you chose not come, and then we make decisions, and then you get mad about those decisions? so then we had a forum. and the forum on whether to like, like a forum to vote on whether we should re-vote and like take Genghis kangaroo out or go to the other high vote, and then on the high school meme page, there was a shit ton of memes, like conspiracy theory memes that were like, like “we’re going to have a forum to vote on whether to have re-vote a second forum for the first forum to vote on the third forum” and just like wrecking term, and like wrecking all the things that we were doing, because like what else do you want, because if we had just chosen ourselves and didn’t have a forum then they would have said “termocracy” but like when we had the vote on the revote they said this is nonsense and i think what ended up happening is that we had a forum and we just ended up going with the one which was the number two, which was TroutKast, which was a combination between Outcast the band and trout the animal, which was really good and everyone loved and  mascots were trout with the outkast costumes and then the yearbook got to be like a road trip, album tour type thing, like a cross-country tour. So it worked out.”

Analysis:

To me, what is most interesting about this story is the folklore that spread through the students through their “Meme page” as way of communication. The dubbing of the student council as a “termocracy” also shows the different levels of students and their awareness of the world, as if high school is like a much smaller country and the leaders are turning it into a dictatorship.

오비이락 烏飛梨落

Nationality: Korean American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Torrence, California
Performance Date: April 20, 2016
Primary Language: Korean
Language: English

My informant is a student who originally came from Korea, but moved with her family to Los Angeles since her middle school.

 

烏飛梨落

오비이락

Bird flies away, Pear drops off.

 

My informant told me Korean also use this kind of  four-word phrases to convey some philosophy as Chinese people do; many of them are written in Chinese characters but pronounced in Korean.

For this specific one, she said, “You didn’t do anything, but something happens coincidentally, then people think you did it.”

It is quite interesting to me that there are many metaphors like this in asian cultures, which I think more or less relates to their hieroglyphic language (especially traditional Chinese) that allows them to randomly connect two things that share similar features together.

 

Hijo de la Chingana- La Malinche

Nationality: Mexico
Age: 30
Occupation: Nurse
Residence: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Performance Date: April 24, 2016
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Origin: Mexico

Told by: Araceli Del Rio

“So in Mexican vernacular you have the phrase “hijo de la chingada” and “vete a la chingada” which is the equivalent of saying “son of a bitch” and “go to hell.” But the word chingada is derived from a woman referred to as La Malinche. Who was a Nahuatl woman who became the lover/translator for Hernán Cortez. He led the Spanish the conquer the Aztecs. And she lives in infamy as the ultimate traitor. The woman who told her people to trust the Spanish. And would lead to the slaughter and ruin of the Aztec Empire. So saying hijo the la chingada is worse than “bitch.” It’s like the son of the worst traitor imaginable to your people. Same with “vete a la chingada” which is like, “go to the land of traitors.” People say this to each other when they want to offend them, obviously. It’s a swearword.”

Analysis: This is a form of folk speech that is obviously informal, and designed to inflict the greatest insult possible. That it dates back to ‘traitor’ rather than an animal (in English conceptions of bitch), reflects the values of Mexican culture as valuing loyalty above all. Not only that, but it reflects the scars that the colonization and conquest of Mexico by Cortez and the Spanish left in the cultural consciousness, and how it still affects the people to this day.