LONG weekends often bring me to a place where I learn a few useful terms and I am sharing some:
1. Littoral sea -- and I thought it was about how the coastal line is now full of trash or litter like Villar’s dagat-ng-basura. But no, it’s not. The term refers to that part of a sea, lake or river that is close to the shore. “In coastal environments the littoral zone extends from the high water mark, which is rarely inundated, to shoreline areas that are permanently submerged.” A simpler explanation is “the area that is above water at low tide and underwater at high tide (in other words, the area between tide marks). This area can include many different types of habitats, with many types of animals, such as starfish, sea urchins, and numerous species of coral.”
2. Siganid -- the scientific name of danggit. To me danggit had always been that smelly yet delicious bulad but also learned there are two popular species of siganid --- Siganus guttatus (spotted variety) and Siganus vermiculatus (striped variety. So to do the use-in-a-sentence route, I decided I’ll call the bulad as danggit and the sinigang/grilled version as siganid. I do not want to merely sound erudite but poetic as well--- sinigang na siganid is alliteration and has better recall, I think.
3. Lampornas -- I have heard this before but did not bother to really check out its dictionary meaning and Google does not have it either. A friend defined it as “wipe out.” BFAR has banned lampornas and fine mesh nets for fishing obviously because ‘lampornas-ing’ the sea endangers even the fish fry (or baby fish)
4. Namako -- the japanese term for balatan or sea cucumber. This marine lifeform is an echinoderm and eating it is an acquired taste because it is slippery and sometimes called as the ‘vacuum cleaner of the sea’. (‘nuff said)
5. Komorebi -- a Japanese word that has no English equivalent and used to describe sunlight shining through the leaves of trees.
6. Wabi-sabi -- in my mind, something beautifully melancholic is wabi-sabi. I have been taught this word when I opted to keep a wooden chair that was unvarnished but carefully sandpapered. I have used it since then to describe experiences that have been calming, wistful and imperfect yet hauntingly beautiful.
And lastly because I tripped all over the movie ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’,
7. Scaramouche -- I never bothered to understand who or what it meant and learned that scaramouche is “a stock clown character of the commedia dell'arte or the comic theatrical arts of Italian literature. Freddie Mercury could be clever and stupid like the scaramouche. In one of his concerts, Freddie wore the harlequin body suit in contrast to the fact that it was the harlequin that often beat up the Scaramouche.
Bismillah.