FINO' I MAN ÅMKO'

På'go manana, ma papadda' i titiyas.

(The sun just rose, they're making titiyas.)

Manana means "clear" as in "visible." When the sun comes up and the sunlight makes everything around us visible and clear, it is manana. På'go means "now." På'go manana, it is just now clear and visible.

Padda' is to slap with the open palm. When making titiyas, in order to form the flat pancake, one pats the titiyas back and forth with the two palms of the hands. This thins and stretches out the titiyas. Padda'.

Older Chamorros used figurative speech to talk about socially embarrassing topics like sex.

When two people who should not be doing it, are known to be engaged in such intimate activity, trying not to be caught, hiding perhaps behind a shack or in the woods, some people could say, "På'go manana, ma papadda' i titiyas."

Why?

In the old days, titiyas was the staple carbohydrate people ate, not rice. Corn was much more abundant and grown by almost every family. Rice was harder to grow and fewer people grew it. So every house had corn titiyas, nearly all the time. Rice, less so.

As soon as the family cook was awake in the morning, she or he would make the titiyas dough and padda' the titiyas right before putting it on the iron, so when the rest of the family is awake there is something to eat. People wake up hungry. They're in a hurry to eat something. The sun just came up (på'go manana) and already they are making titiyas (ma papadda' i titiyas).

This haste to eat something, pushed by physical desire to fill the stomach, is being paralleled to sexual urges which two people are impatient to satisfy, even to the point of hiding behind a shack or in the woods, where there is a high chance of being caught.