Christopher Torchia & Lely Djuhari
TUTTLE Publishing
Tokyo Rutland, Vermont Singapore
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Torchia and Lely Djuhari
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011921096
ISBN: 978-1-4629-1057-1 (ebook)
This title was previously published as Indonesian Idioms and Expressions.
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Indonesia
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Printed in Singapore
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Contents
| Introduction | 5 |
| Part I: Life Forms | 9 |
| 1. Creatures | 10 |
| 2. Characters | 27 |
| 3. Body Language | 45 |
| Part II: Power and Conflict | 61 |
| 4. Authoritarian Rule | 62 |
| 5. Money and Politics | 79 |
| 6. Protest Fever | 101 |
| 7. A History of Violence | 118 |
| Part III: Traditions | 145 |
| 8. Faith and Fortune | 146 |
| 9. A Matter of Taste | 165 |
| 10. Family Affairs | 186 |
| 11. Wisdom | 204 |
| Part IV: Modern Life | 213 |
| 12. Around Town | 214 |
| 13. Insults and the Underground | 233 |
| 14. Hanging Out | 251 |
| 15. Tech Talk | 273 |
| Sources | 279 |
| Index | 281 |
Introduction
Diam seribu bahasa. Quiet in a thousand languages.
A rough translation might be: The silence is deafening. It evokes barely repressed anger, or the haughty indifference of a beauty with many suitors.
Nongkrong. This is a casual phrase, a reference to the Indonesian custom of hanging out, sometimes by squatting on the roadside.
Mengadu nasib. Tempt fate. Countless Indonesians do this, converging on Jakarta in hopes of finding something better in life. Some succeed, many don’t.
These and other expressions offer one of the best windows onto the Indonesian culture. Slang, titles, proverbs, nicknames, acronyms, quotations and other expressions reveal its character, in the words of its people. This book of expressions looks at Indonesia with the help of its national language, bahasa Indonesia. It describes Indonesians and their fears, beliefs, history and politics, as well as how they live, fight, grieve and laugh.
Indonesian is a variant of Malay, the national language of Malaysia, and many of its expressions come from the Malay heartland of Sumatra island. Indonesian has also incorporated terms from Javanese, the language of the dominant ethnic group in a huge nation of more than 17,000 islands, most of them uninhabited. Hundreds more ethnic groups with their own languages are scattered across the archipelago, and many Indonesians speak bahasa Indonesia as a second language, or mix fragments of it into the local tongue. Still, schools in far-flung regions teach Indonesian, and its role as the language of government and the national media make it a unifying