Biblirium

A “CHORUS of delirium”.

This phrase captures “wild excitement or ecstasy,” according to my computer’s built-in dictionary.

The same reference defines the verb “chorus” as the act of exclaiming the same thing at the same time by a group of people.

This built-in dictionary has never let me down but last week, I disagreed with its implication of a group erupting into concerted fits of instability, incoherence, wordless rapture.

I discovered Filipino dictionaries in this warehouse. And with sincere apologies to my computer’s built-in dictionary, I broke out into a “chorus of delirium” just on my lonesome.

In Cavite is an “outlet store” of a chain of bookstores. It used to have no air-conditioning system, a tic of irritation when for hours, one’s neck or even torso is tilted awkwardly to read the spines of hundreds of old books left unsold since Gutenberg’s invention.

Then someone perhaps remembered that readers are an excitable lot, prone to flights of fantasy or even a “chorus of delirium” when they come upon a much-loved or sought-after title. A cooling system was installed, perhaps to forestall the removal on stretchers of several seekers in an advanced state of shock from their finds, the heat, or both.

So I was sufficiently cooled when I dissolved into another biblirium (“biblion” in Greek means “book”). Paperbacks and hardcovers are sold at P50 each; if you get two, you shell out P75; if four, P125. The search for “one more” is an excuse that my husband takes with extreme prejudice.

The dictionaries, though, were going for P20!

Since I enrolled in a course on translation, I discovered that the English-Filipino dictionary is disappearing from booksellers’ shelves.

This may be another sign of our digitally remade lives. Aside from built-in computer dictionaries, Google and other digital references answer every search for a dictionary meaning, synonym or antonym.

Without cutting trees or breaking our backs, as the digital natives among my schoolmates would say.

But as with all books, dictionaries are more than what they seem. Spanish missionaries thrust into our country, repudiated by clime, ancient beliefs, and their own prejudice and inner demons, compiled the first dictionaries preserving our native tongues.

Scanning the Filipino dictionaries, I realized that many of the authors are/were school teachers whose love for words they sought to translate for younger minds, in need of a school reference that is small, light, and cheap. Hence, the “pocketable” dictionary.

Passion, rapture—not just wordless. Biblirium in a word.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 26, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”