“Only on Guam”
Your sitting in your car stopped at an intersection waiting for your light to turn green. Across from you is one of Guam’s proud men in blue sitting in his cruiser waiting for the same. You see the light for the other street turn yellow. As you patiently begin to prepare for your turn to go through the intersection, you watch the adjacent light turn red. Much to your amazement, you see two cars in the adjacent flow of traffic zip through the intersection as if the red light was a warning for motorists to hurry on through before any other cars get a chance to come barrelling through the intersection. You look at the police car across the intersection thinking to yourself, “Go get ‘im, Smokey!” But alas, you slouch back in disappointment as the officer sits there in his cruiser, oblivious to the blatant moving violations that just took place. Deflated, you say to yourself, “ONLY ON GUAM!!”
Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Guam surely can recognize this familiar phrase. It’s a mantra that locals use in reference to many of the unusual oddities that are unique to our quaint little island. On rare occasion, one would use it in a positive sense, like . . . um . . . Wow!! For the life of me, I can’t think of a good positive example right now. But anyway, coming back to my point, it is usually used in a negative connotation and pokes fun at how here in Guam, you could get away with things that you couldn’t get away with anywhere else, just because people around here accept it as normal practice.
But I digress. My thoughts for today are actually about the phrase itself – “ONLY ON GUAM”. I find it humourously coincidental that “only on Guam” would you even say the phrase “only on Guam.” (I would have used ironic instead of coincidental, but extensive research into the proper usage of the word irony has only left me confused as to whether this would be an acceptable use of the word.) By anyone else’s standards, we would say “Only IN Guam.” But we Guamanians say “on Guam” in every place that anywhere else, any other english speaking person would say “in Guam”. But mind you, we only use it when referring to being in Guam, nowhere else. Try it for yourself. Would you say, “I live on California?” or “My cousin has been on Hawaii since last year.” Even our nearby cousins don’t say, “I’ll be on Saipan for the next two weeks.” Isn’t that weird?
I’ve brought this up to many people who live here and I’ve always gotten the same kind of reactions – “I never realized that.”; “You’re right! Why do we say that?”; “We’re not the only one’s who say it that way. What about . . . hmm. I guess your right.” Even people that have moved to Guam from other places have obtusely adopted this Guam-speak without even realizing it. Now keep in mind that I am not saying that this is improper english, as essentially, the phrase is correct. Being that Guam is an island, you literally would be considered on Guam or off Guam. I just find it odd that “only on Guam” do we make that distinction.
Now I’ve brought this point up to several people, both local home-grown and of foreign origin. And like I said, many had never put much thought into it and hardly even realized that Guamanians make that odd differentiation. Which leads me to wonder if my strange fascination with this grammatical anomaly is a healthy thing. Nevertheless, when I go on to my next question and ask why they think that we say it that way, I usually just a get a dumbfounded look and some incoherent grunt as an answer.
Of the few discernable conversations that I have had about this, I have come up with at least two theories to the origin of saying “ON GUAM”. The first has to do with the fact that a very common term used here in Guam is that a person can be considered to be off-island when they are outside of Guam. This term is commonly used when describing a period of time in which a person normally residing in Guam would be away from Guam. Comparable statements used by non-Guamanians would be out of state, or out of town. The term off-island seems very logical and actually makes for a convenient term for referring to travel abroad away from Guam. Now the opposite of that, when a person returns or is not absent from Guam, would logically be called being on-island. Could this unique terminology used by locals living in Guam have spawned the odd usage of the term on Guam?
The second theory doesn’t have much to support it. But I remember a particual song from my youth. I don’t even remember who it was made popular by. . . maybe Jimmy Dee, or maybe I remember a Jesse Bias remake. But what I do remember is there is a lyric somewhere in the song that goes something like “On the island of Guam . . . where the coconuts grow . . .” That’s all I can remember about the song so if anyone recognizes it, please give me a hint. It’s a well known local song sung by a well known local artist. I’m just really bad about remembering song titles and artists. (My friend Jas can attest to that.) But again, I digress. Could it be that this song had such an influence on local slang and conversation that the phrase “On the island of Guam” became the “proper” way to refer to being here in Guam? I know, it’s a weak theory, but it seems like a cool backstory, so I thought I’d at least bring it up.
Well, whatever the origin of the phrase; and despite my concession that it is NOT improper grammer, I have committed myself to make it my own personal crusade to campaign to the people of Guam to rise up from the cobbled ruins of the past. We are not inhabitants living on top of some tiny little landform which we cannot even refer to as a place that we live “in”. Okay, maybe Guam is a tiny little rock in a vast expanse of ocean. But let’s not remind ourselves everytime we make reference to the place we call home. Say it with me, “ONLY IN GUAM!! ONLY IN GUAM!! ONLY IN GUAM!!”
