Kunti Bogel Kemasan Sachet.
If you managed to retain any meaning from the above string of words, congratulations because I’ve clearly been outsmarted here.
This article is about me being stumped by a word that should not have stumped me as hard as it did. This is about terrible cataloguing of neologisms and shallow retellings of internet language communities.
My initial encounter for the phrase “kunti bogel” was none other than a cat twitter account. Much like how I learnt “bokem” and other colloquial terms it’s likely through the ‘net, specifically Twitter, whom I will deadname continuously in this post.
The crucial context and background for this is a TikTok (Warning for Loud) posted on early September this year, in which a sighting of a small Kuntilanak is teased for its small body. Toddler-like, a ‘younger sibling,’ and a ‘mini size’ comparable to sachets. Interest in the term skyrocketed and reached its all-time high during late September.
It is with this context that I too fall into the rabbit hole of trying to find out, not just what it means, but where it came from.
Using my preexisting knowledge in colloquial Indonesian I assumed “bogel” followed the same construction as “bocil” and “bokem.” Bokem (bocah kematian, literally child of death) is a newer term I’ve encountered through the cat forums, used to describe a mischievous and troublesome child. It shares a seat with Bocil (bocah cilik, lit. small child) for being both portmanteaus. But what could the clipped morpheme -gel stand for? We’ll get back to that later.
Picking up the willpower to google what it meant, I was welcomed with a slew of SEO-optimized garbage that clogs any search of colloquial terms in Indonesian. Problem one: most of the articles are written by low-effort publications cashing in on ad revenue. Problem two: the KBBI, as always, will have unhelpful or misleading definitions of words that are used informally.
Even looking up wiktionary, the entry for “bogel” exists, but it also lists that it means “nude” while the etymology section is missing.
In this state of desperation, my friend was telling me about her experience with the word. She knew the term bogel at around elementary school, even back then she had been called using that term to mean short. This gives me enough information to confidently say that the word has been around enough that it was making its rounds at least a decade or so ago. In an act that will further thrust me into the rabbit hole, she manages to find me a paper that includes the definition of bogel as data. In “Penjulukan di Kalangan Remaja” the authors dive into and describe the nicknames they’ve collected from teenagers. Straightforward enough.
Under the rubble of unrelated nicknames and insults I found ONE line describing what I wanted to see. The problem is that 1) It does not elaborate on its meaning, whether it’s a portmanteau, a cultural reference, or a word from a regional language or dialect (a thing the authors do for most other words) and 2) The paper does not elaborate on why they mentioned the term bocil, it is framed like those two words are related, but then that leads back to my original thought, ‘what does the -gel in bogel stand for?!’
Now at this point my non-linguist friend is concerned about my wellbeing. My other friend who is a linguist chimed in and I continued to sink into madness.
If there’s one place where colloquial text is preserved, it’s on Twitter. Sometimes new or made-up words are flagged as non-Indonesian languages, so I narrowed it down to only being Indonesian and hoping that the machine manages to fetch the correct tweets.
Well, scratch that thought, it slipped in Malaysian tweets and confirmed one of the questions I had. Bogel does mean bugil (naked) in Malaysian; it’s not a stretch that places in Indonesia that neighbor Malaysia will share some linguistic traits, one of them, this word.
Okay great, at least the KBBI is not completely wrong (for now). But what about the tweets actually in Indonesian? Well, if you remove “kunti” from the equation you get to see how bogel is used in a sentence, most notably, it is used as an adjective. Bogel is used with a noun. WHY is this important you ask? Well, because words like “bocil” and “bokem” are used as nouns. It is even fucking related to these group of words?
(noun) bocil = bocah cilik (lit. small child. childish or child-like)
(noun) bokem = bocah kematian (lit. child of death. mischievous and troublesome)
(adjective) bogel = ????? (lit. ????. small body, short.)
At this point I’m tired. I’ve ranted about this to my friends and it seems like the affliction of being stressed over this one word is unique to me. Defeated, I keep punching in google queries.
And you know what fucking did it for me. You know what? A Swadesh list for Betawi on Wiktionary that I had yet to come across.
What the fuck. The hyperlinked “bogel” refers to a page I DID VIEW!!! and it ONLY contained references to bogel in Javanese and Malaysian! So I did some more sleuthing, and wouldn’t you know, it is Betawi. There is no “official” online dictionary for Betawi that I can get my hands on, so I’ll just have to take the word of a handful of bloggers writing about it in their spare time.
The 2-day case has been closed. Here is my report.
Conclusions? First, “bogel” is Betawi and it meals small or short. Second, “bocil” and “bogel” are not related, at least there’s no concrete evidence that points to it other than a coincidence. That paper I cited earlier was a red herring. Third, yes there are contexts where “bogel” means naked in certain dialects, but that’s not what the current colloquial Jakartan usage is. Lastly why the hell is google always clogged with SEO-optimized garbage when I’m trying to find word meanings? It’s all shallow and feels like someone fed a 10-second TikTok script into ChatGPT and gave it a prompt to stretchy it into 3 pages worth of “pop journalism” with ads peppered in. So far the sites all explain the “kunti bogel’ phenomenon strictly as a TikTok fad and never really touch on the words themselves. Good night everypony.
References and Further Reading:
Khoiroti, Atik, Rahutami Rahutami, and Suryantoro Suryantoro. “Penggunaan penjulukan di Kalangan Remaja.” Gramatika: Jurnal Ilmiah Kebahasaan dan Kesastraan 9, no. 1 (2021): 37–51.
Do not use the KBBI for anything that’s not writing corporate letters or emails to the boss that you hate.
Before you go here’s a little easter egg of possible reanalyzings of “bogel”
- Bocah + KEciL → Bokel → /k/ → /g/ → Bogel
- Bocah + Gelo → Bogel (from this random blogpost)
