Eureka! I have found a more suitable English equivalent for the Filipino word balimbing, which has sadly metamorphosed from its palatably wholesome image as a vitamin-rich fruit to its sordid-tasting political nomenclature of today.
The word is weathercock. I came across this information from my daily email subscription of A Word A Day, a site for those who delight in words, their marvelous uses and fascinating origins (http://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html).
AWAD defines “weathercock,” a word that dates from the 13th century, as:
1. a vane often in the figure of a cock mounted so as to turn freely with the wind and show its direction (a weathervane)
2. a person or thing that changes readily or often
It goes on to note that the word weathercock is “especially suitable for politicians who change according to prevailing winds.”
Disinterested in politics as I am, I had thought that the balimbing was a strange and unique fruit of Philippine politics. Certainly, you can find turncoats and traitors to the cause in every country, in all spectrums of society. But a coat is only reversible to one other side, and traitors are more often than not summarily executed or relegated to oblivion before they can betray their side a second time. No wonder we found balimbing a better word for local applications.
Here comes the weathercock, pointing in four different directions – which is probably enough for the lifespan of a local politician’s career. No doubt these days, every weathercock is swinging to point (N). And cock is wonderfully apt for politicians – seeing how most of them strut around crowing about this or that.
Still, balimbing is one up on weathercock as the most suitable word, because it has five points, and thus, can switch sides ten times!
Postscript:
Presumably out of shame for having acquired such an unsavory reputation, the balimbing appears to have disappeared from market stalls. This is sad, because I remember how lovely the fruit tasted: juicy and slightly sweet with a barely perceptible tang when just the right shade of ripe, and sort of waxy and crunchy. My mother brought some home maybe 3 or 4 times when I was a child. And the balimbing is now in my priority list of fruits I must let my children taste before Philippine fruits become extinct in local markets. (Well, that’s another story.)
