Diversity Is our Strength

The title was too good to pass up

Introduction

It is one of my pleasures when writing to discover interesting expressions that say much more than they appear to on the surface. I love finding words and phrases that are both accurate representations of what was said and symbolic of a facet of the culture that they come from. Today, I wish to share some of them with you.

English

Turns of Phrase

The phrase “a turn of phrase” is a very interesting one. For a language that enjoys being “straightforward”, “forthright”, “straight to the point”, and “straightlaced”, the expression “turn of phrase” is an acknowledgement that sometimes, simply saying something will not do. Deception is not preferred by the English language, with embellishment, lying by omission, or sarcasm being preferred.

It shows how direct and plain-spoken English is by default, that we have a way to explicitly mention we’ll stop telling the truth for once.

Filipino

Dito, Diyan, Doon

Literal Translation: Here, There by you, and Over There

Translation with liberties: Here, there, and Over There

This is actually a hard one to translate into English because the word “diyan” just plain doesn’t exist in English. “Dito”, besides being the name of a telecommunications firm, means “over here”, or “right here”, referring to things and places that are near the speaker but not near the listener. “Doon” means “over there”, more precisely, refers to things and places that are far from both the speaker and the listener.

“Diyan”, however, is something different and something very interesting.

“Diyan” refers to things and places that are far from the speaker, but near the listener. This is one that usually causes issues, because it doesn’t really have equivalents in other languages. The boundaries of where something is far from the speaker and near the listener are vague as well – if you’re on the first floor and I’m on the third, and I’m speaking to you, the first floor is clearly “diyan”, the second floor is not or is ambiguous, and the third floor is “dito.” Deciding when to use each of these words is more a matter of feeling than a hard and fast rule.

What’s most revealing about this structure, however, is the linguistic assumption that the speaker and the listener each know where the other is. Being able to refer to the relative distance between the speaker and the listener assumes that they know where the other is. Filipinos are generally assumed to know (either via asking or hearing about it) where those they speak to are[1], showing that our culture puts great emphasis on keeping in touch.

If you know someone who speaks Tagalog, you can show the following quote to them and they can probably explain it better than I can:

Ang salitang “diyan” ay tumutukoy sa mga bagay at lugar na malapit sa nakikinig pero malayo sa nagsasalita. Wala pa akong alam na mga kantumbas ng salitang ito sa wikang dayuhan. Naisip ko na maaari lang ang sailta na “diyan” sa isang wika kung inaasahan na ang lahat ng gumagamit ng wikang ito ay alam ang lugar ng kinakausap. Nasa ating wika mismo na nakikialam ang mga Pilipino sa isa’t isa.

Ibig Sabihin

Literal Translation: Love say

Proper translation: What you meant to say.

Here’s one that’s easier to understand and explain. “Ibig Sabihin” uses the words for “love” and “to say”, with the words together having the meaning of asking what you meant. In the same way that an English speaker might ask “what did you mean?,” a Filipino speaker would ask “ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?”.

What this shows is how close what the Filipino says is to their hearts. If you wondered why Filipinos take a lot of things personally[2], even criticism at work that doesn’t seem to be personal, it is literally written into our language to do so.

Another interesting homophone for the Filipino word for love (also mahal) is things that are expensive (also mahal). English has the same connotation with the word “dear”, as in “my dear” and “to sell dearly”.

Again, it may be easier to have a Tagalog speaker explain:

Ibig kong sabihin na ang paggagamit ng salitang “ibig sabihin” ay kakaiba kapag inihahambing sa pagkasalin nito sa Ingles. Napapakita ditto na ang lahat ng sinasabi ng mga Pinoy ay galling dapat sa puso, katulad ng pag-ibig. Nasa wika natin mismo ang pagiging pusong mamon.

Mas karaniwan ang paggamit ng “mahal” para sa mga minimahal na tao at sa mamahaling gamit. Ito naman ay merong katumbas sa Ingles – ang salitang “dear”, na ginagamit para sa mga irog at sa mga nakakaubos sa laman ng bulsa.

Kapampangan

Dakal pang kakanang nasi

Literal translation: (He/She’s) gonna eat a lot more rice

Proper translation: (He/She’s) got a long way to go.

Strap yourselves in, because this one has layers.

I’ve only heard this expression once, in the context of a young junior lawyer suffering a major setback in a case he was handling. Almost immediately, it was said of him that “Dakal pang kakanang nasi”, or, quite literally, that he has a lot more rice to eat.

As rice is the staple food of the Philippines, the first-order symbolism is obvious. It says that the person being referred to is going to eat a lot more rice before they get good at what their job is, showing just how far they have to go. “He’s got a long way to go” is a sufficient translation here.

There’s a second layer to this that I find incredibly interesting. For those who are poor, the archetypal Filipino struggle meals to fend off starvation consist of provisions like boiled sweet potatoes or adobong sibuyas – basically onions sautéed in vinegar and soy sauce and served over rice. One of these struggle meals is simply rice and salt. Or rice and soy sauce, depending on what you prefer.

Yep, that’s right, it’s just carbs and salt to help it go down.

Though I don’t think it was originally intended as part of the expression, the statement’s second layer implies that in the process of getting that experience, you may have to eat essentially nothing but rice. This shows just how hard things can be when you’re educating yourself and trying to get a leg up, even being reduced to eating just rice with salt or rice with soy sauce.

I don’t know enough Kapampangan to explain this in that language, so I’ll do it in Filipino, as before:

Narinig ko lang kasi yung katagang ito na tumutukoy sa isang baguhang abogado. Kanin kasi yung kinakain ng Pinoy, kaya masasabi mo talaga na marami pang kanin ang kakainin ng isang baguhan bago sila’y maging magaling. Mas malala pa dito ang implikasyon na ang kinakain lang niya habang nag-aaral o kumakayod ay kanin at asin o kanin at toyo lamang.

Mandarin

看开/Kan Kai

Literal translation: Look Open (open as in seeing a door)

Proper Translation: To see with fresh eyes (as in seeing something for the first time again) + To see the light (to realize something that you previously did not see)

看开 is two English expressions in one.

看 (Kan) is a Chinese verb that represents seeing. 看到 (Kan dao) literally means to have seen something. 开 (Kai) is also a Chinese verb, but this one has a very specific meaning. It refers to opening something that can be open or closed, most commonly doors like in the expression 开门 (Kai men), literally meaning open door or gate.

Taking these two together, 看开 has a strong symbolic meaning to have seen the light or to look with new eyes. This expression is most often used as seen here – to convince others to take a second look at their circumstances and accept reality. In one phrase, we get the two English expressions “to see the light” and “to see with fresh eyes”.

肌肉/Ji Rou

Literal translation: Muscles (the physical muscles)

Proper Translation: Muscles (the physical muscles)

肌肉 is a very interesting word in Chinese. Meaning muscles, the character on the left can actually be split into two - 月 (Yue), which means moons or months, and 几 (Ji)，which is used in Chinese just like “how many” is in English. A question like “你们有几个人？”[3] translated literally is perfectly legible in English. The last character, 肉 (Rou), is a generic term for meat, with the specific kind of meat specified by the word coming before it. 牛肉 (Niu Rou), for example, refers to beef.

Taking all of these together, 肌肉 can be read as 几月肉 – liberally read, this means “Meat that takes how many months [to grow]”.

Even the ancient Chinese knew how hard it was to make gains at the gym.

Collective Societies and High-Context Communication

We’re professional amateurs here, so even though we’re talking about language, of course we’re now going to talk about cross-cultural differences in communication. Why wouldn’t we?

The reason I found those particular phrases so striking is because of their symbolic significance in the language – embedded cultural references that only a speaker that lives in the language’s place of origin would know. The symbolic nature of rice and keeping up to Filipinos, or of particular Chinese characters, are obvious only to those who have lived in those places. In contrast, despite English being my best language, I couldn’t think of any in English – “turn of phrase” being one simply because English simply talks so much about being on the straight & narrow.

There may be another factor, so I went looking. I didn’t have to go very far.

Cross-Cultural Collectivist Tendencies

I ran to what is probably the most popular (and probably most criticized) cross-cultural psychological framework there is – Geert Hofstede’s four dimensions of national cultures, later expanded to six. Starting with a company-wide survey of employee values at IBM from 1967 to 1973, the emergence of similar patterns of answers between and across answers was distilled into the six dimensions of national cultures – power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, uncertainty avoidance index, long-term orientation, and indulgence versus restraint. Each of these six axes represent the attitudes that different national cultures espouse, embodied in a score on all six scales. You can see where your country is and compare with others here.

• Power Distance – the higher the score, the more authoritarianism and noblesse oblige are expected – the lower the score, the more democratic the norm is.

• Individualism – the higher the score, the more the individual is seen as a unit - the lower the score, the more the individual is seen as part of a network.

• Masculinity – the higher the score, the less egalitarian and more achievement-oriented the culture is – the lower the score, the more equalitarian and less achievement-oriented the culture is.

• Uncertainty avoidance – the higher the score, the greater pains will be taken to ensure things are correct – the lower the score, the higher the space for improvisation and personal authority.

• Long-term Orientation – the higher the score, the more future-oriented and less concerned with short-term gain the culture is – while the lower the score, the more it focuses on short-term gain and having a good image.

• Indulgence vs. Restraint – the higher the score, the more optimistic, indulgent, and liberal the culture is – while the lower the score, the thriftier, more disciplined, and more generally neurotic it is.

Among the six dimensions, the important one here is the collectivist vs. individualist axis. One of the commonalities observed with highly collectivist countries is that high-context communication prevails, to the point that companionable silence is seen as normal in collectivist countries, while it is awkward in individualist countries[4]. It’s easy to imagine how that applies to languages. Expressions in languages originating in collectivist countries tend towards short, but heavily loaded with implication, while languages originating in individualist countries prefer more explicit statements of meaning.

The three countries of origin for the different expressions shared today. Note the difference in Individualism scores between the countries involved[5].

While we’ve answered our questions about where the expressions come from, the cultural scales of Hofstede opens up a dangerous realization.

We can look at the same things, but we can’t see the same things.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

It seems self-evident, but “different strokes for different folks” isn’t just folk wisdom. Different people, born different, built different, and doing different things, will naturally end up different. Issues like the Nature vs. Nurture debate are still open questions, and debates on immigration rage all over the academic and Internet spheres of many countries. Solutions are being bandied about as though they are universal to all times, peoples, and places. In our quest for economic growth and demographic stability in the face of falling birthrates, we seem to have forgotten something essential.

We are not interchangeable cogs in a machine or followers of political or religious ideologies. People are people – and while our differences are limited within local populations, our variance as a species can only increase with greater variety in how we are born, raised, learn, and earn, creating a world where we hold less and less in common as a whole. Industrialization and the information revolution have served only to increase the pace of this change, by offering individuals more options than ever before.

The existence of change is the only constant – even the rate of change is not immune to change!

The Great De-Set

Here’s a thought. As the formal power structure attempts to enforce a massive standardization upon us in the form of The Great Reset, the actual conditions on the ground will diverge more and more from the assumptions and ideas embodied by their plan. Suffering from their bloated structure locking them into permanent communication overhead, they will be unable to respond to conditions on the ground. This will cause a generalized loss in credibility in large, centralized bodies, particularly public institutions or large, multinational brands and corporations, and a transfer of power and prestige back to regional institutions and competitors once only playing second fiddle. Trust in the centralized “brain” declines, and the body parts, while not outright rebelling, simply stop following orders, or engage in pro forma compliance, perhaps extending into outright malicious compliance.

Instead of a reset, we might be heading for a De-Set – steadfastly ignored central plans and decision-making bodies paid only lip service, with most decisions actually being made by national, regional, and local power-holders. One could call it, perhaps, the multipolar world, but even within nation-states, there may be divisions. Separatist, individual cultural regions, particularly prosperous ones like Spain’s Catalonia may be able to extract more authority from their central governments.

This is real diversity. Not turning everything into a cultural melting pot, smashing them together in institutions that they don’t fit in and forcing them to compete in a bitter, fruitless culture war of all against all. I want truly different and interesting cultural artifacts from different nations. I want to hear about Japanese kira-kira names, Spanish worker cooperative federations, the sorry state of Scottish hospital food, Chinese lying flat and the interesting coincidence of quiet quitting, and so on and so forth.

Each culture represents a particular adaptive niche, a configuration of social technologies in a manner that allows the rest of us to learn from it, adapt it, transform it, even subsume or supersede it if that need be. In the same way that one uses a diversified financial portfolio, the human race as a whole evolved a diversified cultural portfolio, maintaining a wide range of potential adaptations to situations that will even deploy themselves as needed. To deny this is to go all in on one hand, bet it all on a single number, and make it more and more difficult to adapt to a changing world, with all our eggs in one basket.

What we are told as diversity is a representative, safe, bland, and uniform culture, not so different from a tasteless bowl of plain oatmeal, with the same ratio of oatmeal, milk, and water in every spoonful, with not even the variety of getting a bite with more oatmeal followed by a bite with less.

True diversity is a potluck stew, where everyone picks out an ingredient and tosses it in the pot, each maintaining its distinct flavor, combined into a riotous stew of myriad flavors - each spoonful unique in its combination of meat, soup, vegetable, and seasoning.

Between having a whole bowl of the same thing, or being able to scoop up what I want from a stew, I’ll take the stew. At least you didn’t boil everything into a flavorless, uniform, mush.

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By the way, if you have any expressions you really love, put them down in the comments with a short explanation - I’d love to hear them! Next week, we talk about how we knew - we knew all along this would happen, we just didn’t think it’d be that bad.

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[1] If our Facebook usage statistics are any indication, we are both a nation that loves to stalk and loves to be stalked.

[2] A common expression for overly sensitive or soft-hearted, by the way, is pusong mamon. Mamon is the Tagalog word for sponge cake. Filipinos love food as well, if you couldn’t tell.

[3] “You (collective) have how many people?” – like a server would ask a party getting a table at a restaurant.

[4] From Cultures & Organizations, Software of the Mind, 3^rd edition by Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov, pg. 108-109. I provide a citation because I own this book.

[5] Pampanga is a province in the modern-day Philippines, so it gets lumped in with the Philippines as a whole.