Third of a Series: Filipinisms Part 2 - Say What?!

And there are other terms that seriously boggle the mind on how they came about. Just the same, these terms are unique to Filipinos and will confuse foreigners.

(picture from http://www.politicususa.com)

For example, sales personnel would say "It's for free" instead of saying "It's free".  Honestly, where did that "for" come from?

Filipinos on phone conversations sometimes say "Come again?" when they couldn't understand what the person on the other end of the line is saying. Why "come"? It is much clearer to be correctly saying. "pardon me" or "Could you repeat that please?"

In the same breath, one would also wonder why Filipinos say "Hold your line" or "For a while" when asking a caller to wait for a bit. The correct term is "Please hold" or the more polite "Could you wait for a while?"

Many foreigners also get confused when asked where the "CR" or "comfort room" is. The more understandable term to use here is "rest room", but Filipinos have used "comfort room" since time immemorial. I am not sure how this came about. Maybe it's because you get comfort when you use it?  teehee...

In accomplishing forms, one would often hear "fill up the blanks" instead of "fill in the blanks". This is a reflection of the Filipino tendency to mix up prepositions.

Then there is the term "in fairness" instead of saying "to be fair". It is used in discussions when someone or something is being criticized and the speaker wants to plug in a disclaimer or a redeeming quality.  For example, someone wore a trench coat on a hot day, one could say, "The get-up seems too warm but, in fairness, he pulled it off and looked great."

One might say that the meanings to the terms can be traced from pop culture, and is thus a passing phase.Some terms still stuck and their references remained in the past. So now, we use them without really undertsanding what they mean.

Speaking of pop culture and language, one can argue about that relationship in terms of Beki Language -- that ever-evolving colorful street lingo often used by homosexuals... but that's a whole new discussion on its own.