Friday, November 23, 2007 Covington: Jeepney, jitney, Jiffy By Gary Covington Lookin In
WITH my new full-time occupation of haunting various governmental agencies - the BIR, the business bureau, the assessor's office, Bajada SSS et al - I'm making use of the city's jeepney services to flit from here to there.
Snag is, I'm familiar with the major routes but not the numbered ones that vanish down mysterious side streets to roam who knows where. Often, I stand at a street corner, mentally scratching my head, figuring out how to get to this place or ride to that.
Other thoughts butt in too - like what sort of a word is jeepney or another of a long ago encounter with the LTO.
My transport in the late 80s was a small 'owner type' jeep which I'd bought from the guy who'd assembled it--registered, gassed up and ready to roll. Ten years later, 10 years of painless logging on at the LTO later, the inspector of the day, deciding he needed to stretch his legs, quit his desk and came out to compare registration document with actual vehicle.
"That's not a jitney." He said, "That's a Jiffy."
I looked blank. Jitney, I thought, was another of these quaint Filipino made up words. Jiffy? Well, in those days I wouldn't know one if it hit me on the head.
I'll not bore you with an account of the weeks of paperwork and declaring and swearing it took to change one word on the jeep's registration document (a document completed in the first instance by the LTO itself) but I will comment on the words jitney and Jiffy especially as only last week I came across jitney in a novel set in the early 1900s USA. Maybe jitney wasn't a Filipino word after all.
No sir - jitney was (and is) Stateside slang for that form of public transport which sits between the private auto and the regular bus service. In dry as dust prose - a jitney has no fixed schedule, picks up and sets down fare-payers anywhere and will even make small deviations off its set route.
Why jitney? Slang again - nobody knows where from - for a five cent coin, a nickel, which was the then going fare.
So the guy from the LTO was right. My 'owner type' jeep was a private vehicle, not for hire and, as I was to find out later, a Jiffy.
Jiffy - when applied to a jeep and not a moment in time, 1/100th of a second since you ask - is a Filipino word, coined in 1970 when an auto parts manufacturer specializing in jeep spares decided to go the whole hog and construct (almost) from the wheels up a modern Filipino version of the World War Two jeep.
It was a project born of necessity. The supply of original jeeps and spares was drying up - the last batch arriving via the Vietnam conflict - but the demand was still there. An enormous demand thanks to much of the Philippine population owning or running a jeep or jeep derivative.
The company flourished. Today, it brags that it can supply virtually any part for any model jeep from 1942 onwards and - coals to Newcastle indeed - it exports jeep parts to the USA.
Jeep and jeepney -- Jeepney is a combo-word derived from jeep and jitney. Jeep comes from the initials GP, which bless the US Army and its jargon -- stand for General Purpose. The stuff you learn reading this newspaper!
