Bin Gregory Productions

Cooties

Girls have cooties. Every young boy can tell you this. Girls may claim that it is in fact boys who have cooties, but that is preposterous. I spent much of second, third and fourth grade avoiding cooties. I also had a number of hand-made cootie catchers, but for some reason, they did not catch or prevent cooties, rather they told fortunes and made predictions, like “You Suck.” But! What is a cootie? My friends, a cootie is a body louse, and it is our fourth Malay contribution to English. It comes from the word kutu which means the exact same thing, lice. Don’t believe me? You may say to yourself, this is a contribution the Malays can keep! But it is too late. Our nation’s youngsters are already infected. All I can offer you is this treatment for head lice that my doctor gave me:

Stand in front of your bathroom mirror. Shave all the hair off the left side of your head. Then, set fire to the hair on the right side. As the lice scurry onto the left side, stab them with an ice pick. There! Head lice will now be the least of your worries.

Strange Fruit, pt 2: Mata Kuching

The next fruit I present to you is the mata kuching, literally, cat’s eye. It’s about the size of a quarter, with a thin peel that covers a juicy greyish meat that covers a hard shiny dark brown seed. The fruit is sweet with a musky, almost salty aftertaste. They are inexpensive in season. They’re selling for 3-4 ringgit a kilo, or less than 50 cents a pound.

They are often called longans here, which led me on a little internet hunt. The longan is Dimocarpus longan (previously known as Euphoria longans), and is the premier export fruit of Thailand. However, according to the Purdue Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, the longan does not fruit in Malaysia. Now, that’s odd, because I’ve seen them growing at Ming Kiong Gardens near my son’s preschool, hanging heavy with fruit. The answer is provided by Prof. Wong Kai Choo of the Univeristy Putra Malaysia. (Formerly Universiti Pertanian Malaysia, the Malaysian Agricultural University. They recently changed their name; a sensible move, since as everyone knows, having anything to do with soil automatically lowers your social status by about three pegs. Ahem.)

He explains that the mata kuching is a particular variety of a subspecies of a relative of the subtropical longan. In Borneo, there may be dozens of identifiable races within this variety, the best of which are in Sarawak. All right! These races are categorized into three groups. And the group of races that bear the fruit I’m eating is likely the ‘kakus’ group, the only group that has brown fruit when ripe. Wow. Dimocarpus longan ssp. malesianus var. malesianus r. kakus. A race of a group of a variety of a subspecies of the longan! Thank you, Prof. Wong Kai Choo. But then, he takes a break from his scholarly language to note that the mata kuching “is hardly worth eating”. Well, who are you gonna believe, me or a professor of crop science with a specialty in Malaysian tropical fruit? Don’t answer that.

Malay Contributions to English, pt. 3

Recently, the Congress of the United States of America preserved the pride and culture of our great land by passing a resolution renaming French Fries “Freedom Fries”. Yes, they did. This of course was due to France’s unwillingness to support the war on Iraq. But members of the Coalition of the Unwilling are still at large, infiltrating our national foods and imperiling the purity of the language we use to describe them. Yes, my fellow Americans, I’m talking about that most American of condiments, that most suitable companion to our cherished Freedom Fries, Ketchup! Ketchup, red as the stripes on our flag, is taken from a Malaysian word; Malaysia, a country steadfast in opposition to our nice little war.

After the initial shock fades, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the word for a condiment should come from Malaysia. Europeans went to all corners of the Earth, circumnavigated the globe, just to get spices from the Malay archipelago to put a little flavor into their bland, tasteless cuisine. Pepper, clove, cinnamon, star anise; empires rose and fell in pursuit of these. Why, after all that effort, now that all these wondrous spices are available cheap and in abundance, is American food so dull? I can’t answer that.

But back to Ketchup! Ketchup comes from the Malay word kicap, pronounced kee-chap. It means a soy-based sauce, some sweet, some salty, some with oyster or anchovy extract, all usually with MSG these days unfortunately, and none with tomatoes. I’ll let Bartleby take it from there:

Sailors seem to have brought the sauce to Europe, where it was made with locally available ingredients such as the juice of mushrooms or walnuts. At some unknown point, when the juice of tomatoes was first used, ketchup as we know it was born. But it is important to realize that in the 18th and 19th centuries ketchup was a generic term for sauces whose only common ingredient was vinegar. The word is first recorded in English in 1690 in the form catchup, in 1711 in the form ketchup, and in 1730 in the form catsup. All three spelling variants of this foreign borrowing remain current.

I have learned to listen closely to distinguish the two words, since my two-year old will sometimes take ketchup on her scrambled eggs, and will sometimes take kicap, and woe unto he who is betwixt the two confused. Woe, I say.

[Image: GorillaAttack/Shutterstock]

A Kuap by Any Other Name

Terap, a local <em>Artocarpus</em> with small white fruits — Terap, a local *Artocarpus* with small white fruits

If Malaysia is the land of odd fruit, then Sarawak must be the capital. I have just as much fun looking at it all as I do eating it. This one is called a ~~Kuap~~ Terap, according to the guy who sold to me. My Malay dictionary doesn’t have it, Google doesn’t have it, SR had never seen one before. It must be in the same family as the durian, but it is even more bizarre. It’s about the size of a football (sorry, American football) but more rounded. It is completely covered in little rubbery stalks about an inch long. The stalks are stiff, with a rounded rubbery ball at the tip. It’s like fruit as designed by the Nerf people. The stalks come out of an inch thick skin. Inside is a mass of little white fruits attached to a central core. The fruits are very sweet, but are just a thin slimy wet skin over a nut. So out of a football sized nerf creature, there is maybe a tea cup worth of actually edible material. It’s tasty enough that I forgot to take a picture of the fruit itself before devouring it all. But I really am surprised that Google, the font of knowledge, doesn’t have any information on this thing at all. So I will start a little gallery of Sarawak fruit for your viewing pleasure. Longans are in season right now, so stay tuned.

[Update: Here’s a picture of the whole fruit. I’ve been scouring the web for any clues about this thing with no luck so far. But I did find a fruit that looks very similar, except that the fruit inside is red. It’s called a Bintawa. See a picture of it here (scroll down).

[Update #2: Terap! Terap, not Kuap. Thank you very much to Lan and/or Ambo for writing with the correction. Terap is in my Kamus Dwibahasa, according to which terap is:

A tree (Artocarpus elasticus) the bark of which is used as cloth, ropes etc. by aborigines; the sap from this tree is used for trapping birds.

No mention about the fruit. The Forestry Department of Brunei Darussalam (website in Malay) mentions terap on a page about traditional forest produce. They identify a fruit-bearing terap as Artocarpus odoratissimus. Either way, that puts the terap in the same genus as Cempedak and Jackfruit as Br. Affendi suggested, not Durian, which I would have guessed from the outer skin. And for my Michigan readers, the Artocarpus trees are all in the same family, Moraceae, as our common (to the point of being a weedy nuisance) Mulberry. So! Does anyone know where to find a quality illustrated botany text for Malaysia/Indonesia?

Path of the Paddle

Ikram Saeed from Canada keeps a blog called Path of the Paddle. If you’ve got the war on your mind, but you can’t take anymore news, check out his peice on war poetry. He’s pulled together a lot of good stuff, including poetic Rumsfeld declamations. He asks,

Why isn’t there famous modern English language war poetry? Is it because, in an age without mass conscription, poetic types don’t fight?

I think he’s onto something there…

Charitable Missions

Metafilter has an interesting thread today about plans by the Southern Baptists to send missionaries to Iraq after the war:

“Two leading evangelical Christian missionary organizations said Tuesday that they have teams of workers poised to enter Iraq to address the physical and spiritual needs of a large Muslim population.”

I think the interesting question here is whether it is morally upright to give money in charity when one expects a benefit in return. I don’t think you can deny, though some in the thread do, that conversion to Christianity is among the desired outcomes of the charity. Even if it were not, the mode of giving would still be flawed, for reasons that the great Imam al-Ghazali addressed in the Ihya’ ‘Ulum ad-Din:

“The third duty [of zakat, charity] is secrecy, for this is farthest removed from hypocritical display and reputation-seeking.
…
The Prophet, on him be peace, also said: ‘Let the servant do a good deed in secret and God will surely record it to his credit as a secret; if he reveals it, it will be transferred from the secret list and recorded among good works done openly; if he talks about it, it will be taken off both lists and recorded as hypocrisy.’ According to the well-attested Tradition: ‘Secret Alms extinguish the anger of the Lord.’ God, exalted is he, said:

‘But if you hide it and give it to the poor, it is better for you.’ [2:271]

…
As the Prophet, on him be peace, said: ‘God does not accept from a braggart, a hypocrite, or one who always looks for gratitude.’ He who talks about Almsgiving is seeking prestige, while he who gives for all the world to see is after public recognition; these pitfalls are avoided by secrecy and silence. Some [of the scholars of religion] have taken such an extreme view of the merit of secrecy as to maintain that the recipient should not know the indentity of the giver. Some used to slip their alms into the hand of a blind man, while others would drop them in a poor man’s path or in the place where he sat, so that he could see the gift without seeing the giver. Some would tuck their alms in the poor man’s clothes while he was sleeping; still others would convey them by way of a third party so as to hide the donor’s identity, the intermediary being asked to keep the secret and charged not to disclose it.
…
Whenever fame is the donor’s objective, his work will be in vain, since the purpose of almsgiving is to eliminate miserliness and to weaken the love of wealth. But the love of status has a stronger hold over the the soul than the love of wealth… So what is the use of going against miserly impulses only to yield to hypocritical motives, weakening the lesser only to reinforce the more powerful?”

Excerpted from Inner Dimensions of Islamic Worship, Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), translated by Muhtar Holland. Muhtar Holland has translated many volumes of the Ihya. He is a terrific translator, in my opinion. Amazon has it.

In my village here in Malaysia, this practice is strictly observed. When a person desires to give sadaqa, the head of the village takes the money or food from the donor and delivers it to the poor person’s home. This way the recipient’s dignity is preserved, as is the purity of the donor’s intention. This is the way of moral excellence, ihsan. If the Baptists were sincere about providing for the needy, they would follow these guidelines too.

Malay Contributions to English, pt 2

With the war in mind, here is the next installment: Amok, usually seen as “run amok”. It tends to be used in English to mean out of control, but the dictionary meaning is the same in English as it is in Malay:

In a frenzy to kill; in a violent rage; bloodlust; berserk

Let’s use it in a sentence! “A disgruntled Marine went amok and fragged his superiors’ tents.”

Update: Major Boggs gives us the common American usage, out of control, in today’s New York Times:

“Let’s not get gun happy here,” Major Boggs cautioned the officers under the tarp that was the command center, quickly heating under the midmorning sun. “We are running amok. We’re suppressing him, probably, but we’re not killing him.”

Clash of Little Plastic Army Men

Strategic Forecasting courtesy of Mattel™

If I’m going to buy my child war toys, I can’t really get hung up on the real-world parallels. Either it’s make-believe or it isn’t, right? Still, I swallowed hard when I looked at the sticker set for these green and gray soldiers. I wonder when it was exactly that little plastic army men went from being Stars ‘n’ Stripes vs. Hammer and Sickle to Stars ‘n’ Stripes vs. Crescent and Star? After Huntington’s book? After the First Gulf War? After they started manufacturing these things in some sweatshop in Communist China? That’d be a clever switch on their part, wouldn’t it? What I really want to know is, if my son decides to make the Crescent and Star team win, will the FBI come after him?