How To Gigil
by Ella DeCastro Baron
Vex Caztro, Crownaday #55, Tiny Godzilla, Godzilla action figure, discarded tiny bouquet found on sidewalk, gold and silver glass glitter, glue, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
How To Gigil
Ella DeCastro Baron | APR 2025 | Issue 44
In March this year, the Oxford English Dictionary added forty-two untranslatable words to its over half a million word collection. One of them is from the Philippines, the word gigil. Pronounced “ghee-gill,” it’s the word for “cuteness aggression.” It can be an adjective or a noun, used as shorthand for OMG I wanna pinch squeeze and take a bite of this totes adorbs…you name it.
It may sound like “giggle,” but that action is localized to just our heads. A gigil is a full-bodied giggle animating all of our extremities while our brains and cores temporarily cross wires, speed up the joy train to a shivering sorta kawaii orgasm, the kind Sanrio besties Hello Kitty and My Melody surely have when they behold each other.
Autocorrect hasn’t read the memorandum of understanding, corrects “gigil” to “vigil.” I’m not discounting the layers there. Gigil wakes us up from slumber, from numb.
Times I’ve been gigil:
Caressing and sniffing wet puppy noses from our cockapoo dog Trixie’s three litters. I gritted my teeth so hard I thought I chompchomped through my own mouth.
MINIATURES of almost any and all! For our wedding one million years ago, our table centerpieces were six-inch cherry wood stained chairs and sage upholstered corduroy recliners. We self-published littow books of our meet-cute and lovin’ philosophies and used the chairs as bookends.
At a writing conference, one of my co-panelists’ sparkly-edgy eye contact and matching lyrical-edgy poetics triggered the school girl giggles and later the bodacious gigils between me and my friends whenever we brought up their name or snooped their socials.
My high schooler showed me a TikTok famous baby whose big eyes and shiny vulnerability pluck my evolutionary gigil strings.
At Zine Fest, I grinned at a zine that was one-eighth the size of a piece of paper. Then a friend pointed to the same bookletito that had been shrunk to fit on my fingernail. I literally thumbed through the same shrinky-dinky zine of micro-poems on Being a Girl. I gigil’d all up and down that book table.
My ancestral altar is dotted with tiny jars of pink quartz pebbles, a matryoshka from a Siberian friend, a one inch ceramic candle holder elephant with just enough jasmine-scented wax, when lit, to sing one nostalgic worship song and utter an earnest but speedy prayer of “Halp Us!” to my Papa, Aunties, and activist ancestors.
This weekend, an out-of-town conference allowed me to lunch with folks I first met in virtual classes and kept Zooming with since 2020. Shelter In Place caved us in; their mycelial love burrowed to nourish me. Each week, we became adapted and adopted kin. These companions (still) offer the antidotes of counter stories, art, grief tending, poetry, craughter (cry laughter), parallel play. They are my go to co-conspirators who willingly dance in the cracks. (Thankful for Brother Bayo Akomolafe’s course-festival, We Will Dance With Mountains). Across the way, we yippity-skipped to squishug 3D bodies. We got to meet each other’s legs WE HAVE LEGS! smooch cheeks, and breathlessly catch up. At long last! Hallelujah baby Jesus!
If you’re open to a suggestion on how to stimulate gigil (must be attracted to miniatures):
Save a Dorito or other chip snack bag. You can microwave it for a few secs and go gigil as you witness it downsize into a micro chip bag, small enough to be a key chain! Yup they may have foil linings. Yup I know the caveat! I’m a believer in the urban legend of the flaming foil-wrapped burrito that torched an 1980s kitchen. Nevertheless, if you want to gigil, trust. This won’t melt your kitchen if you hawk eye the whole process. It does require your full attention or else I can’t promise an intact microwave.
Put the empty bag in the microwave, start it around 30 seconds. It will take much less than even those secs but you can’t restart if it doesn’t happen. You’ll see lightning kiss the bag followed by a sudden SHAZAM! into a thicker, crumpled, but intact chip bag that’s now a fourth of its original size. Press Stop STAT. Enjoy! Again, the investment in this gigil moment is you MUST watch through the window to make sure it doesn’t go too long or kablooey!
Last year, I was reading a truly delight-filled poet’s newest collection, titillated that this book promised I would find more delights! Yes! It’s Ross Gay’s The Book of [More] Delights. In one of his enchanting, everyday meditations, he bumped into a Filipino friend at the airport or another liminal space. They hadn’t seen each other in forever, but as soon as they did, their bodies bubbled up how much they lurve and fanfave each other. They sat at a small table catching up, and in between wordswordswords, they had to take gigil breaks to grit their teeth, flutter fingers and eyelashes, squeeehaw from their gleeful animal bodies. To describe this feeling, Ross Gay referred to a poem by another Filipino friend who introduced him to this word, gigil. Ahh, yes!
Okay. But. Within all this delight [WordHippo’d emphasis: verve, ecstasy, rapture, ebullience, gayness!] he misspelled one of the most known Filipino languages, Tagalog, as “Tagolog”. In the title! I gave him a big scoopin’ bowl of doubt benefits and Googled if he was using a different-yet-acceptable alternate spelling because what do I know? I’m not the award-winniest-poet! I love Ross of Delights!
Nope. He AND his editors missed an obvious error.
Why does it irk?
Filipinos are the third largest Asian American group in the U.S. If you’re anywhere near any healthcare facility, you’ve probably heard Tagalog spoken by nurses and caregivers. What I’m saying is, it was not hard to spellcheck or friendcheck the word Tagalog.
I waited to see if any of his Filipino friends—like the poet he references or maybe the friend he cuckoo for cocopuffed—corrected him with nothin’ but love and graciousness. Maybe it happened and no public correction was necessary even by such a popular publisher of English language literature. Really tho’? Why not?
So now. Gigil–the word Ross Gay refers to in his effervescent piece, and I’m furreal not one tad upset at him for the typo Because his heart! His sensibilities! His words!—have entered the English arena. FWIW, I shall ne’er be mad at him. I openly fantasize a writerly friendship with him. I’ll even bring a baby tomato plant on the flight.
Times when I am mosdef not gigil:
My body cannot take in the news like I used to once upon a democracy. I allow myself snips of snippets, just enough to know how to show up for my students, BIPOC, disabled, and LGBTQ+ family. I know I’ve absorbed enough when my right hand starts quivering. It’s a spiritual signal for me that, if I want to call up love, hope, grief, rage, longing, and protection, I can pray in tongues. If I’m driving solo or on a windy beach walk, I let it rip. I’m an exvangelical who can no longer pray in English, the language of whitewashed Christian nationalism cloaked in Church’s clothing, to which I devoted forty years. It feels, well, what’s the word for “opposite of gigil”?
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) began in 1857 and claims to be the “last word on the English language for over a century.” One of the earliest editors enlisted volunteers and his children to sort through collected words in an iron shed they called a Scriptorium. (Hmm. Is this a prototypical garage start-up business?) Before it became digital, the OED took up four feet of shelf space, weighing 150 pounds—aka the weight of a post-menopausal Filipino American lamenting “borrowed” words from other countries’ native tongues because it is too familiar a colonial strategy.
I have so many feels about this. About how easily the English scriptorium bros “borrow” words they take and colonize from so many countries like Ireland, Japan, South Africa. I’m especially feeling some kinda way about a word from the United States’ first colony between 1899-1946. The U.S. shipped their Americanized teachers to bleach Filipino tongues into English. Ironically, Thomasite is one of the new OED words, too. Thomasites were the nickname for over five hundred American teachers via the U.S. Army Transport Thomas to the Philippines to enforce their benevolent “new public school system,” by teaching Filipinos in English. This is how English became one of the national languages in the Southeast Asian archipelago.
They smooth-talked our people’s healing abilities and enrolled them into English-speaking, Americanized nursing schools they had built. This created generations of disposable labor, exporting nurses to the United States during times of need, like during the AIDS/HIV epidemic and the Pandemic. More than a dozen California nurses are my sister and first cousins. My sister’s first job in the early 1990s was to tend to patients on the AIDS floor where she was informed, had a 100% mortality rate. This is not cute.
Gigil. Is there no English word for being publicly undone by cuteness because there is no cultural value for it in English bodies?
There are other loanwords from the Philippines that the OED…borrowed. A Pinoy is a person who is Filipino. Videoke is our karaoke (also on loan from Japan since the 1970s). Lumpia are Filipino egg rolls but better IMHO. When you see them at a food truck or on a restaurant menu, order a bunch. If you see adobo or sinigang, order those too. You’re welcome.
Kababayan is a small yellow cake or muffin from the motherland. Before that, it has been what fellow Filipinos call each other. “Ka” is from the pre-colonial script, baybayin, meaning “bridge” as between shores. Bayan nods, we’re from the same country. That word, when I say or hear it, firecrackers from throat to heart, heart to ignited vocal chords. It is a promise, a perseverance.
It shares shores with kapwa, a native Filipino value. It is, “I am who I am connected to,” a home place, come-as-you-are, kindred.
Kapwa. Here is a word I am willing to loan, interest free, to the United States’ English lexicon.
Ella deCastro Baron (she/siya/we) is a 2nd gen Filipina American raised on Coastal Miwok lands (Vallejo, California). She teaches Composition, Literature, and Creative Writing. Her books are, Subo and Baon: A Memoir in Bites, and Itchy Brown Girl Seeks Employment. A woman of color who lives with chronic dis-ease, Ella honors sensations, dreams, story, dance, and decolonial truth-telling so we can ‘re-member our long body.’ She conspires with art-ivists to produce kapwa (deep interconnection) gatherings that stir love and justice via writing, art, joy, grief-tending, movement, food (yes!) and community. Her favorite pronoun, now more than ever, is We.
Vex Kaztro, aka Aglibut Bagaoisan, is an artist/writer of mixed pilipinx ancestry. Their work plays with the threads of trauma that erupt from queer neurodivergent identities living in the cozy liminal spaces of a cracked and unreliable memory. They studied filmmaking at City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University.