Chop Socky

So, the martial art that I practice is usually referred to simply as “silat,” but it has a longer and more specific name:

Pukulan Pentjak Silat Sera Plinck.

While you might at first glance think this is something served with peanut sauce, each word has a different connection to what it is we mean when we point at it.

Let me break it down for you:

“Pukulan,” whose Malay/Indonesian root is almost certainly “pukul,” means “hit.” Word also can mean to “beat,” or  “beating.”

So for our purposes, Pukulan generally means striking, and more with a fist or something held in the hand.

In our system, the striking is connected to distance and footwork that will allow the blow to land. 

“Pentjak Silat” -- also spelled "pencak," with the "c" now taking the "tj" sound, for reasons having to do with Dutch colonialism and Indonesian nationalism -- is a fighting art from Southeast Asia, mostly Malaysia and Indonesia.

“Pentjak silat” means "the motions of fighting." And generally, are blade- and weapons-based.

“Pentjak” refers more to the form it takes, “silat,” to fighting per se. And it's a fairly new term. A hundred years ago, that wasn't what it was called. Just as Native Americans called themselves by their tribes -- Sioux, or Apache, for instance, and then subdivided those names into others -- Lakota or Chiricahua or Mescalero -- and there were no "Indians," thus did the Malaysians and Indonesians name their local arts.

Lot of them, too, every village had its own styles and teachers.

“Sera” (and in some branches, a “K” has been added to the end, “Serak,” but which ‘k’ is silent) refers to the creator of the art, reputedly one Bapak (an honorific) Sera, a word that has several meanings, depending on spelling and accent. It can mean "hoarse." It also means "owl," and thus "wise," and with the accent on the first syllable, it means to "confuse," or to "scatter confusion," and thus "to decoy" or "deceive." It is also a shade of red.

Pick one, nobody knows for sure. Or maybe they all apply: The creator was a wily, sneaky, tricky, hoarse, red-haired guy.

Sera came from West Java, and there are a lot of antecedent arts and incredible origin stories we’ll skip over for now.

There is much contention about the founder, his senior students, where the lineage went, and who learned what from whom, when, and where. That’s a long and unresolvable fight for another day.

Oral history is sometimes not worth the paper upon which it wasn’t written.

The final word in the title is “Plinck,” the family name of the Dutch-Indonesian-American senior teacher from whom I have learned what little I know of the system.

He didn’t ask for that inclusion; I took it upon myself to add it about a decade ago, to differentiate from branches of our art taught by other teachers.

There are similarities, but what we do isn’t what they do, and I didn’t want people looking at those teachers and thinking we are the same.

I also took it upon myself at the same time to add an honorific to the designation “Guru,” (which means “teacher,”) that being “Maha,” or “great.”

So, the name means, loosely interpreted: 

“The hitting, fighting, martial art from Indonesia created by Bapak Sera, as taught by (Maha Guru Stevan) Plinck.”

Just so you know.