Novel prizes
August 7, 2006 | 12:00am
An interesting pocket war – if it’s that, at all – broke out last week in our little corner of the digital universe, the one devoted to all things Apple and Macintosh (www.philmug.ph). At issue was a palpably and oddly pre-electronic but still undeniably geeky subject: the matter of minding one’s language and grammar in posting comments and messages online.
To sum up the situation, one reader remarked on the manifest deterioration of our English language skills in the forum discussions he was reading, and wondered if he was right in feeling (and, so far, resisting) the urge to wade in and fix those egregious errors. Some people responded that they wouldn’t mind being corrected – as long as it was done tactfully. Yet others took the other extreme, rejecting any such intervention as being contrary to the Web’s very spirit of spontaneity – grammatical warts and all. Inevitably someone just had to bring in the whole brontosaurian issue of which language to use: "Mag-Pilipino na lang kasi tayo!"
That provoked even testier responses about the Internet, elitism, and democratic discourse, punctuated by tiny shrieks (guess who from) on behalf of clarity and common sense. When last I looked, people were babbling (no offense, folks; the word goes back to the Tower of Babel) in Spanish and Capampangan, proving more than ever the need for some reasonably common tongue, and at that point – having given everyone their literal say to the point of exhaustion (1,509 views and 64 comments) – the moderators sensibly closed the thread to allow the agitated masses to get on with their lives.
I was surprised and sometimes disturbed but not unhappy that this discussion took place. On the one hand, it told me that people still cared about the quality of language (whatever language) and about the importance of coming across as clearly as possible to others – and not just people within one’s closed circle, but to faceless crowds across that great ocean of the World Wide Web. On the other hand, it also made me think about the limits of our linguistic tolerance – about how far we can or should stretch them in the name of generally being nice to all God’s children.
As a professional editor – meaning, someone who makes a living from pouncing on dangling modifiers and sorting out who’s from whom’s – I have to admit to an old urge to stamp on and stamp out grammatical and mechanical errors like they were malignant forms of interplanetary vermin. If doing that sounds like fun to you, then I’d be very much amused, indeed, in this country of ours where – as I’ve often remarked in this corner – the fast-food places all compel you with big signs to "demand for a receipt" and even teachers routinely announce that matters have been "taken cared of."
As a professor of English, I suppose I could write an essay or two about how every such error eats away at the very foundations of civilization, chip by precious chip, and about how vital it is to draw the line, hold the fort, man the guns, and cut the salami (hmmm, one of these things is not like the others). That’s what hordes of English and grammar teachers have done all these years – uphold standards they inherited from their own teachers (often without even knowing why). Today, they can join the chorus of jeremiahs lamenting the decline of English, not so much because of the lost grandeur of the language, but because good English means cold cash in this age of the call center. (I’m willing to bet my retirement pension that if, by some quirk of fate, the American market suddenly became Taglish-speaking, we’d all be rushing our kids and unemployed cousins to the nearest review center to learn proper Taglish.)
I’m not about to quarrel with English’s utilitarian charms, which I’ve dipped into myself for my sustenance, and never mind if the politicians who espouse them often do so in language that provides its own most compelling reason for a National Day of Protest Against Atrocious English. (I particularly remember sitting in the Batasan gallery one evening and listening to an impassioned congressman taking up the cudgels for "the youngs, the youngs of this country!")
But I’d rather hasten to remind people – as I did in that Mac users‘ forum – that the first and most important function of language is communication, and in communication, whatever works, works, whether it be English, Filipino, Taglish, Romblomanon, Sanskrit, or demotic Greek.
If your English is Pepe-and-Pilar simple but basically clear, that’s no problem; if you commit a spelling error or two in the course of dashing off a quick paragraph about the speed with which the new Intel Macs run Windows (but why should you?), that’s no big deal, either. If you’re chatting on Yahoo Messenger and slide into the occasional "u" and "gnyt," I don’t suppose the sky will fall.
But if your English is so, uhm, quaint that it gets in the way of being understood in the way you want to be understood, then, Houston, we have a problem. I remembered this the other day when I peeked into CQCounter to check on who was checking on me (I know, another timewaster I can ill afford, but bloggers will recognize and understand this strange compulsion.) There was this digital trail of some poor soul searching Yahoo for a "Filipino scientist who won novel prizes." Why on earth that search would lead to my blog, I have no idea (I did the same search, and sure enough "Pinoy Penman" was Item No. 20); but I could imagine the searcher’s greater perplexity at finding nothing that even came close to a Pinoy version of Richard Feynman or Linus Pauling. But then of course maybe he or she meant what he or she meant – truly novel prizes, as in a year’s supply of tahong, a trip to Bukidnon in a goat-drawn chariot, two weeks with GMA (and that would just be second prize, the first prize being one week with GMA).
In other words, dear boys and girls, relax and enjoy the technology. If things get so bad they can’t be understood, then that’s the time the mods (who, we can only hope, know better) should step in and fix things, with a light and painless touch. Playing grammar police on the Web will be like being a fireman at a pyromaniacs’ annual convention. For those of us seriously contemplating a career in editing and proofreading, I suggest a one-semester internship on the floor of the House of Representatives, just to make sure that you have the skill, the will, and the sense of humor to take all the slings and arrows of outrageous grammar that the profession has to offer.
An awareness of good and better language is always welcome – a fine and urbane touch, like a knowledge of good wines (or better yet, an appreciation of the power of words to reshape reality); but the plain truth is, most people can live without it, and as the cliché goes, it’s the thought that counts. Take care of that thought, and find the best (read: often the simplest and clearest) words to put it in; but never let the fear of making a mistake shut you up. As you get older and with more practice (oops, I think I just put on my professorial cap), you’ll learn (1) not to speak too soon, and (2) to say something sensible, or at least something funny, when you open your mouth.
As will inevitably happen when you spend too many of your waking hours mulling over the merits or otherwise of Intel processors and lossless compression, you’re bound to make a mistake in saying what you mean – and someone equally insomniac is bound to catch you making it. And then someone else is bound to turn your mistake into an issue, which may not be all that bad, if I can turn it into a column-piece like this one.
And lest I forget, let me invite you to tonight’s special staging of a Filipino innovation on a classic Japanese theater form. To celebrate 50 years of friendship between the Philippines and Japan, the University of the Philippines Center for International Studies is presenting "Okina/Ang Paglalakbay ni Sisa" at the UP Theater at 7 p.m.
Okina, the oldest prototype of Noh, consists of dances designed to win the help of the gods in obtaining peace and prosperity in the land and long life for the people. "Ang Paglalakbay ni Sisa: Isang Noh" sa Laguna was written in Japan in 1973 by Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, now university professor of UP Diliman. This is Lapena-Bonifacio’s re-interpretation as a Noh play of Jose Rizal’s "Sisa" character from the novel Noli Me Tangere. "Borrowing from the Noh allowed Lapeña-Bonifacio to make possible what was impossible in Rizal’s novel," the program notes say. "By making Sisa come back from the dead to re-tell her story, her ghost is able to speak out and confront her sons’ aggressor, Padre Salvi."
Six Noh masters will lead the performance, including Dr. Naohiko Umewaka, associate professor of the Shizuoka University of Art and Culture and Japan Foundation visiting professor for Japan Studies of the UPCIS. Matinee performances will be held at 3 p.m. on Aug. 12 and 13.
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html
To sum up the situation, one reader remarked on the manifest deterioration of our English language skills in the forum discussions he was reading, and wondered if he was right in feeling (and, so far, resisting) the urge to wade in and fix those egregious errors. Some people responded that they wouldn’t mind being corrected – as long as it was done tactfully. Yet others took the other extreme, rejecting any such intervention as being contrary to the Web’s very spirit of spontaneity – grammatical warts and all. Inevitably someone just had to bring in the whole brontosaurian issue of which language to use: "Mag-Pilipino na lang kasi tayo!"
That provoked even testier responses about the Internet, elitism, and democratic discourse, punctuated by tiny shrieks (guess who from) on behalf of clarity and common sense. When last I looked, people were babbling (no offense, folks; the word goes back to the Tower of Babel) in Spanish and Capampangan, proving more than ever the need for some reasonably common tongue, and at that point – having given everyone their literal say to the point of exhaustion (1,509 views and 64 comments) – the moderators sensibly closed the thread to allow the agitated masses to get on with their lives.
I was surprised and sometimes disturbed but not unhappy that this discussion took place. On the one hand, it told me that people still cared about the quality of language (whatever language) and about the importance of coming across as clearly as possible to others – and not just people within one’s closed circle, but to faceless crowds across that great ocean of the World Wide Web. On the other hand, it also made me think about the limits of our linguistic tolerance – about how far we can or should stretch them in the name of generally being nice to all God’s children.
As a professional editor – meaning, someone who makes a living from pouncing on dangling modifiers and sorting out who’s from whom’s – I have to admit to an old urge to stamp on and stamp out grammatical and mechanical errors like they were malignant forms of interplanetary vermin. If doing that sounds like fun to you, then I’d be very much amused, indeed, in this country of ours where – as I’ve often remarked in this corner – the fast-food places all compel you with big signs to "demand for a receipt" and even teachers routinely announce that matters have been "taken cared of."
As a professor of English, I suppose I could write an essay or two about how every such error eats away at the very foundations of civilization, chip by precious chip, and about how vital it is to draw the line, hold the fort, man the guns, and cut the salami (hmmm, one of these things is not like the others). That’s what hordes of English and grammar teachers have done all these years – uphold standards they inherited from their own teachers (often without even knowing why). Today, they can join the chorus of jeremiahs lamenting the decline of English, not so much because of the lost grandeur of the language, but because good English means cold cash in this age of the call center. (I’m willing to bet my retirement pension that if, by some quirk of fate, the American market suddenly became Taglish-speaking, we’d all be rushing our kids and unemployed cousins to the nearest review center to learn proper Taglish.)
I’m not about to quarrel with English’s utilitarian charms, which I’ve dipped into myself for my sustenance, and never mind if the politicians who espouse them often do so in language that provides its own most compelling reason for a National Day of Protest Against Atrocious English. (I particularly remember sitting in the Batasan gallery one evening and listening to an impassioned congressman taking up the cudgels for "the youngs, the youngs of this country!")
But I’d rather hasten to remind people – as I did in that Mac users‘ forum – that the first and most important function of language is communication, and in communication, whatever works, works, whether it be English, Filipino, Taglish, Romblomanon, Sanskrit, or demotic Greek.
If your English is Pepe-and-Pilar simple but basically clear, that’s no problem; if you commit a spelling error or two in the course of dashing off a quick paragraph about the speed with which the new Intel Macs run Windows (but why should you?), that’s no big deal, either. If you’re chatting on Yahoo Messenger and slide into the occasional "u" and "gnyt," I don’t suppose the sky will fall.
But if your English is so, uhm, quaint that it gets in the way of being understood in the way you want to be understood, then, Houston, we have a problem. I remembered this the other day when I peeked into CQCounter to check on who was checking on me (I know, another timewaster I can ill afford, but bloggers will recognize and understand this strange compulsion.) There was this digital trail of some poor soul searching Yahoo for a "Filipino scientist who won novel prizes." Why on earth that search would lead to my blog, I have no idea (I did the same search, and sure enough "Pinoy Penman" was Item No. 20); but I could imagine the searcher’s greater perplexity at finding nothing that even came close to a Pinoy version of Richard Feynman or Linus Pauling. But then of course maybe he or she meant what he or she meant – truly novel prizes, as in a year’s supply of tahong, a trip to Bukidnon in a goat-drawn chariot, two weeks with GMA (and that would just be second prize, the first prize being one week with GMA).
In other words, dear boys and girls, relax and enjoy the technology. If things get so bad they can’t be understood, then that’s the time the mods (who, we can only hope, know better) should step in and fix things, with a light and painless touch. Playing grammar police on the Web will be like being a fireman at a pyromaniacs’ annual convention. For those of us seriously contemplating a career in editing and proofreading, I suggest a one-semester internship on the floor of the House of Representatives, just to make sure that you have the skill, the will, and the sense of humor to take all the slings and arrows of outrageous grammar that the profession has to offer.
An awareness of good and better language is always welcome – a fine and urbane touch, like a knowledge of good wines (or better yet, an appreciation of the power of words to reshape reality); but the plain truth is, most people can live without it, and as the cliché goes, it’s the thought that counts. Take care of that thought, and find the best (read: often the simplest and clearest) words to put it in; but never let the fear of making a mistake shut you up. As you get older and with more practice (oops, I think I just put on my professorial cap), you’ll learn (1) not to speak too soon, and (2) to say something sensible, or at least something funny, when you open your mouth.
As will inevitably happen when you spend too many of your waking hours mulling over the merits or otherwise of Intel processors and lossless compression, you’re bound to make a mistake in saying what you mean – and someone equally insomniac is bound to catch you making it. And then someone else is bound to turn your mistake into an issue, which may not be all that bad, if I can turn it into a column-piece like this one.
Okina, the oldest prototype of Noh, consists of dances designed to win the help of the gods in obtaining peace and prosperity in the land and long life for the people. "Ang Paglalakbay ni Sisa: Isang Noh" sa Laguna was written in Japan in 1973 by Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, now university professor of UP Diliman. This is Lapena-Bonifacio’s re-interpretation as a Noh play of Jose Rizal’s "Sisa" character from the novel Noli Me Tangere. "Borrowing from the Noh allowed Lapeña-Bonifacio to make possible what was impossible in Rizal’s novel," the program notes say. "By making Sisa come back from the dead to re-tell her story, her ghost is able to speak out and confront her sons’ aggressor, Padre Salvi."
Six Noh masters will lead the performance, including Dr. Naohiko Umewaka, associate professor of the Shizuoka University of Art and Culture and Japan Foundation visiting professor for Japan Studies of the UPCIS. Matinee performances will be held at 3 p.m. on Aug. 12 and 13.
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