Are you in 'mudical' mood?

Are you in 'mudical' mood?

During the recent Lebaran festivities marking the end of the
fasting month, I spent, unintentionally, more time than usual
wondering why many English words have infiltrated Bahasa
Indonesia.

I discovered that the answer was simply because there are no
substitutes for them. Street vendors and linguists have not tried
to call "tissue" by any other names but tisu as an economic
necessity due to competition and not kertas penyeka (cleaning
paper), for instance.

I was amused to discover that the media here are willing to
call a reporter just a "reporter" instead of, peliput from the
verb meliput to cover in journalistic terms. "Reporter" sounds
alike and is spelled in the same way, unlike marka, as in street
marks for preventing road accidents.

Foreign house wives had to cope with the absence of their
maids or cooks during Lebaran because almost all of them had been
given permission to go mudik, to go to their villages for a
family get-together as the Lebaran tradition calls for. At this
point, I came up with an interesting idea just to keep the
balance in the exchange of words between Bahasa Indonesia and
English.

Why do we not take over the word mudik and spell it
mudic to be pronounced myudic to make it sound
like Indonesian-English if we are homesick and urgently want to
meet our relatives. Mudic for a new English word is acceptable
because it sounds like music. Of course, don't associate it with
"nude" (less with nudist!).

So Indonesians trying to sound English may ask their foreign
guests who want to travel to their homelands to meet their
families over Christmas or New Year: "Are you in mudical mood? In
other words, are you very homesick and urgently must see the
green-green grass of home and long to meet familiar faces? The
suggestion to use the word mudic may only be acceptable to those
foreigners having spent some time in Indonesia.

I like to suggest purists in Bahasa among the media people
change "reporter" into repoter (without "r" ). While the
Indonesian word repot means very busy, doing a particular job or
all kinds of jobs, which is true for any reporter.

GANDHI SUKARDI
Jakarta