Adscititious elflocks

Allow me to ramble a bit this week. I’m writing this column under extremely trying conditions–i.e., another birthday-cum-karaoke party in the house across the street. Yup, it’s the same house that I reported on a few months ago for precisely the same offense, a case of auditory asault and battery compounded by (or "complexed with," as they used to say of rebellion and murder) atrociously mangled lyrics. At that time, a short-tempered Australian neighbor–bless him for his cultural insensivity–put us all out of our misery by hurling rocks in the offending direction, an act of heroism that may have gotten the poor bloke deported back to Wollonggong.

"Carmelita" may have been the chanson of choice the last time around, but this time’s it’s "Mr. Lonely," a song that relies heavily on one’s ability to mimic a mutt separated from a bitch in heat by a roll of barbed wire. (You know the concrete-piercing refrain: "Oooowwwwwahhhhh–I am a soldier, a lo-hooonely soldier, away from home, with a wish of my owwwowwn...") I want to ship this lonely soldier down to Basilan, to give him some interesting company.

Hmmm, a girl’s taken over the mike. What’s she going to sing? Let’s give a listen: "Every night in my dreams I see you, I feel you / That is how I know you go on...." Omigad, it’s that song–the on-and-on song! I know I’m being punished for having gone on record, a few years ago, as saying that I actually liked the Titanic movie (well, for the special effects, anyway, not to mention Kate Winslet’s, uhm, remarkable buoyancy.)

Let’s think of pleasant thoughts–something more palpable than Ms. Winslet, shall we? What about this gorgeous machine right in front of me?

A couple of Saturdays ago, some two dozen of us Macintosh addicts–known collectively as the Philippine Macintosh Users Group or Philmug–gathered at the home of one of our leading members, Martin Gonzalvez, to hold what turned out to be a riotously enjoyable auction and sale of computer odds and ends, from fully functioning desktops and printers to ancient computer games and dead mice and defective keyboards. It was geek heaven, and we were hoping it would last forever.

It was also an occasion for yours truly to publicly present his new toy–the newest Mac laptop, known by its rather inelegant name of Dual USB iBook. After pecking away for years on what are kindly called "legacy" or "classic" machines, I finally took the plunge last month, emptied my piggy bank (and some), and got me a bells-and-whistles iBook in New York. The thing has the best screen in the business, and it is a screamer, aside from looking like a thin slab of white marble (yes, it’s white, polar white). (For the techies among you, the specs are: 500 mhz G3, 192 MB RAM, 10 gigs HD, 12.1-inch TFT screen at 1024 x 768 XGA resolution, five-hour battery, 4.9 pounds, OS 9.1 loaded).

So it was with some surprise that my fellow Philmuggers–after the obligatory oohs and aahs as my machine ran rings, turned somersaults, and jumped through hoops of fire–discovered that I was using no more than Microsoft Word 5.1 as my word processor. I got the iBook for surfing, but–at a time when nearly everyone else has moved on to Microsoft Office 2001 or some such behemoth–I’ve opted to stick with a word processor that flashes the date it was born every time it launches: November 4, 1992. That’s ancient, antediluvian history in computer time.

Well, I have a very simple reason for using Word 5.1, aside from the even more basic fact that anything newer costs a mint of money (legally, anyway). Like many old programs, it’s small, fast, and tight, capable of running on a smidgen of memory and of doing pretty much everything you want it to do–which means, in my case, to encode and save manuscripts with a minimum of formatting.

I’ve set things up so that every time I open Word 5..1, I’m looking at a white screen as close to a blank sheet of paper as I can get, with only the barest of rulers around the edges to remind me where I am in the document. I don’t expect–I don’t want–a word processor to provide me with documents that sing and dance, nor to spot my mistakes and to correct them for me; I find that tall, thin fellow who pops up in the corners of newer (and Windows) Word versions, ostensibly to help me, extremely annoying. It’s like trying to drive down EDSA with someone in the backseat screaming "Go right! Go right! And watch that dump truck on the left!"

I’m not too vain that I wouldn’t use a spellchecker for large and important documents like books that I edit for other people. (Word 5.1 has a spell-check, and you can customize the dictionary by adding your own entries, like words in Filipino.) Let me say this about spelling: no matter how good you think you are, you’ll slip up at some point. Grammar and usage can be left to your own expert judgment, but spelling is simply one of those things where the machine will beat the human hands down. Still, a spell check is best done after, rather than during, the writing, when it’s least likely to intrude into your thought processes.

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of computers and writing, another program I’ve found invaluable to my work has been the CD version of the American Heritage Dictionary, which I bought (yes, actually paid for, and not in Greenhills, either) before I had a CD drive and so had to port over to my hard disk megabyte by megabyte. It’s well worth the hard-drive space it hogs, though. If your work involves words, you should have a dictionary at your fingertips, and not just any old dictionary, either, but a professional, heavy-duty one like the American Heritage (which I also use in book form). The American Heritage comes with a built-in thesaurus and a Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, but the real bonus for me is a feature whereby an obscure word I’d never heard of pops up every time the program opens, a word like elflock (elf•lock n. 1. A lock of hair tangled as if by elves. Often used in the plural).

I don’t know about you, but I want a dictionary with more words than I can or should possibly use. My own personal test of how comprehensive a dictionary is has always been whether or not it contained the word "adscititious" (ad•sci•ti•tious adj. 1. Not inherent or essential; derived from something outside). It’s a word my old Shakespeare professor introduced to me, but which I haven’t really been able to use all the 15 years since I first heard it, except to choose ponderous dictionaries by.

This brings me to my test for encyclopedias. This is easier: just go check out what a particular encyclopedia says about "Philippines." If it isn’t up to date, or if it says something patently wrong, then the chances are it’s probably just as sloppy or skimpy with the other entries.

Speaking of "Philippines," one rather unusual Internet source of information about us isn’t even a Filipino website but an American one–the Central Intelligence Agency, as a matter of fact, which keeps tabs, for reasons we can only surmise, on every country in the world. Clicking on www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/rp/html will lead you to the CIA’s Philippine file, where you will discover, among other interesting facts and factoids, that our total area is exactly 300,000 square kilometers–298,170 sq. km. of land, and 1,830 sq. km. of water.

As of July 2000–that’s a year ago–our estimated population stood at 81,159,644 people. Filipinos had 1.9 million landline phones in 1997, and 1.96 million cellphones in 1998, 11.5 million radios in 1997 and 93 ISPs in 1999. So the data’s about two or three years old, which probably explains why the CIA hasn’t updated a more than trivial item in its online report on our government: it still lists our chief and head of state as one Joseph Ejercito Estrada. One other tidbit that will surely need updating, post-Abu Sayyaf, is the CIA’s estimate of Philippine military expenditures in FY 1998, set at $995 million. But then the CIA helped set up the Abu Sayyaf, so they should know.

But I don’t know how I got here from my neighbor’s caterwauling; I have a feeling that this whole piece has been an exercise in being adscititious, for which I beg your indulgence, hoping that a passing elf will tease and tangle your hair into an elflock, the exact word for which you will then have me to thank.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com...