Double Dead
A while ago I wrote a blog post about the charms and unusual quirks of Philippine English – which is clearly a separate dialect of English, on par with American or Aussie English. Furthermore it’s spoken by 100+ million people. The unique quirks of Filipino English are often witty and – voluntarily I believe – funny.
Dead, More Dead, Double Dead
Today I’d like to add a Filipino English phrase which I learned some time ago: Double Dead.
Imagine you are a farmer, and you are raising a pig. There are considerable stakes in that pig: you had to buy pig feed to fatten the animal, which by the time the pig is almost ready for slaughter, that investment in pig feed, and in pig-raising time & effort will be considerable for a small farmer.
Then the pig, unexpectedly, dies. Pigs get sick just like humans do. The pig might have caught a viral or bacterial infection, and perished as a consequence. Tragic for the pig, and costly for the farmer. What to do? One option is to pretend that all was more or less fine, and proceed with slaughtering the already dead pig. The dead pig is hence once dead from its dead from sickness, and once dead from being slaughtered. Double dead.
Naturally, the “double dead” meat is not highly prized. I like the term, it’s honest. There is no political correctness about “double dead”, it describes the situation of the pig as it is. Not more-than-once-passed-away, not no-longer-with-us, multiple times. So, my recommendation is, avoid the double-dead meat on your plate, but embrace the linguistic spirit of “double dead”.
If you like my writing, please check out my latest book “The Lives of Gobies”
