E kuʻu hoaloha! And welcome to today’s episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents! Today we are headed to beautiful, tropical Hawaii, so get out your best swimsuits and your surfboard, because today’s word is: Pana Po’o.

Pana Po’o is a word that means ‘to scratch your head in order to help you remember something you’ve forgotten’. For example, you might have misplaced your hairbrush, and as you are searching for it, you might ‘pana po’o’, or scratch your head as you try to remember where it is. It reminds me of when you are playing the popular computer game ‘The Sims’, and you ask your sim to do something, but as they begin to complete the action, you cancel it, and they are confused about why they walked into the room in the first place. That would be an excellent moment to pana po’o.

Another great Hawaiin phrase is ‘Kūlia i ka nu’u’ which means ‘strive to reach the highest’ or ‘to do your best’. It implies a value in both achievement and excellence, and could be used to describe the feeling you get after an excellent study session, or the motivation to try a little harder to get something done. 

‘Wiki’ is the Hawaiin word for fast. At Honolulu Airport, you will see the Wiki Wiki bus that quickly (or not so quickly, as I’ve heard) transports you between the main and the inter-island terminals.

Probably one of most famous Hawaiin words is ‘ohana’, the word for ‘family’ made popular by the animated Disney film ‘Lilo and Stitch’. However what you may not know is that the word ‘ohana’ means more than just family - it extends from blood-relatives to ‘adopted’ or ‘chosen’ family and carries with it an implication of respect and cooperation.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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