Before You Grow Old

We are all gulity, sometimes, of bungling around without knowing where the head is or where hangs the tail. Dök tahu ppala èkör is normally used to describe such caper, when a person goes on blabbing out of their depth, or when a person intrudes in the middle of an argument and takes the wrong end of the stick, so to speak. Cats sometimes do this when they chase their own tail, but perhaps they are not all that clueless, perhaps they are having fun, it's hard to say. We'll have to think about Wittgenstein and his lion here.

The head (ppala) and the tail (èkör) are chosen here because they indicate direction, the head being on top in a person and in the front in an animal. If a person had a tail it would no doubt be placed in a part generally described as his back, but in an animal the tail is definitely its rear. So a person who does not know the head from the tail, dök tahu ppala èkör, does not really know the flow.

But you could do worse than chase your own tail. Take the kid who kicks the bin and pelts the dog and runs the stick on the picket fence at the bewitching hour. Dök jjuruh haröh, which is several grades below the clueless, for here is a deficiency in the department of pe'el. Now pe'el is from the Middle Eastern area, فعل (fe'el), which means behaviour.

“Tengok pe'el tu!” are words of warning, “Look at that behaviour!” and the pe'el could run a gamut of things - söngör for one, goes beyond funny. A söngör boy is funny beyond the bounds of acceptability. He pulls faces at Pök Su, the village elder, he laughs and jumps over Mèk Som's basket of kerepok lèkör, he giggles as he taunts all and sundry. A söngör person is never an adult and is almost always a boy. Then there's the headless chicken of a behaviour, nanör that is, a runner here and there sans direction or purpose, incorrigible behaviour beyond naka, beyond söngör and eventually heading for the Henry Gurney School.

"Dök jjuruh haröh sunggoh budök tu,” lacking in decorum (jjuruh) is he, lacking in direction (haröh) is that boy, and really, really so.

“Lekat pah ttua, kö'ör!” Kö'ör is an anxiety word, a fear that something will be so. Until adulthood that is – lekat pah ttua, when – God forbid – they become part of kaki hanyar, the flotsam and jetsam of our ordered society.

Kids these days

Spots in your eyes, the ustaz looking younger by the day, and blots appearing in your landscape: a crowd of budök- budök le ning. These — they tell me — are the hallmarks of senior citizenry.

“Budök-budök le ning!” says Mök Möh, shaking her head slightly. “The kids these days!”

Budök le ning are just probably kids on the tiles, doing their contemporary fandango in the eyes of disapproving adults. It implies in some ways a deviation from the accepted norms of decorum and respect, a wayward act like kicking the cats, or scaring the goats or walking in front of some senior folk without going into that hunched gait. A little into the söngö it may be, but söngö is a part of growing up.

Winstedt in his Malay-English says there is songar in Javanese which brings an act into the arrogant and the haughty, but the Trengganu söngö is merely a child’s play of showing off to draw the attention of the agitated Mök Möh, though it can go a bit over the top.

These acts are acceptable as long as they have not transgressed into the two (or three) döks that are violations of proper conduct or senönöh. Dök cakne then is the path to ruin, the opening of the doorway of neglect. Cakne in fact is the opposite of that, i.e. taking heed and paying due regard. "Cakne gök sikik cakak orang ni!” Listen please to what I am saying, or you’ll fall into the mini abyss of dök cakne and that’s just next door to dök jjuruh — improperly behaved — and who knows where that will take you next?

It's difficult to place the starting point of this budök-budök le ning act as there’s a wide possibilty that the present admonisher was himself the budök of his day, and his then chider the budök of the years before that. But savvy adults always draw the starting line to this general decline of youthful behaviour to a convenient date that is sometimes fixed by giving a sideway glance to another disapproving adult. ”Kita dulu dök ggitu pong!”, or, with more emphasis still, ”Kita dulu dök ggitu setabok!” Pong is the associative or the emphatic word (standardspeak pun), I was not at all like that, but setabok is probably from the longer standardspeak seketil habok, not in the least: “I was not one teeny bit close to that!”

Now, the fellow adult standing close and giving a supporting nod to all those disapproving words thus far may have stalled a bit when it came to the kita dulu (“in our day”) part. Well, he was the chider’s schoolmate, you see, so he’s turned his head momentarily to the side to cough or give a smirk. Useful now to look again at that standardspeak word seketil: it is, after all, ‘a pinch’, and a pinch of salt it is perhaps.

So what do you do with the wayward child? You may want to snub him in the hope that he’d just fade away. This is the buat dök treatment that is often translated into local Englishspeak as “make donno” or the more colourful hybrid, buat donno. Often this neglect will produce a bigger and louder act of söngö, so as more fat of the buat dök is thrown into the fire, the more söngör the act becomes and on and on in this chain of counteracting doses until it reaches a breaking point. A kuté (standardspeak kutil, a word sharing the same origin with ketil) may be called for if the offender is of primary school age. If slightly bigger, Mök Mök may call for outside help, “Mari kita beratang kerejöng!” Kerejong is the physical equivalent of the strait-jacket, when a person is pinned to the ground with hands and legs restrained, sometimes by parents, sometimes by complete strangers; and beratang is a joint-venture word. Come, Mök Möh seems to be saying: “Let’s hold him still to the spot!”

From the above it is clear that from budök-budök le ning to dök jjuruh haröh is indeed a slippery road. The latter is beyond kuté, beyond kerejong, and beyond debök even, which is sad. Debök is the sound of heavy fruit falling on the ground, or of a fist or open palm meeting someone’s back at great speed.

There was a place somewhere in Kuala Trengganu that became known as the ‘bad school’ (seköh jahat), not because the school was bad but because it was a transferred epithet. A reform school is what some folk called it, a centre for the seriously bad, and there they’d place all the dök jjuruh haröh kids that they could catch, and all who’d graduated from söngör to levels above.