Sign language

Confession time: Years spent in the media trenches have turned me into an eagle-eyed sentence sleuth. Since the written word is the currency in which I mostly trade, I tend to pick holes in everything I read. I think it’s involuntary, but I can see through hastily written magazine articles; not to be all Jeremy Piven (read: a dick) about it, poorly constructed blog entries also give me the hives. In these godless days of DIY syntax, being a stickler for grammar is both a blessing and a curse.

There are times when carefree spelling errors boost my desire to jump off a cliff, so to speak. Barreling through a rather seamy part of the city, I spotted an advertisement for “skin feeling” and “hair rebounding,” beauty treatments so avant-garde and exclusive that they are not offered elsewhere in Manila. Industry peeps, take note: “I would like my skin felt and my hair rebounded” is a request you should expect to hear in the days to come. Basic English fail.  

Sic-Based Razzmatazz

Locked out of my apartment one night, an episode I am not too proud to recall, I came across a sign cobbled by someone with a presumably deep learning curve. “Please don’t throw you’re cigarette butts here,” it read. The muffled sounds emanating from below the surface were apparently from my grammar shoulder angel, keeping the dream of literacy alive from underneath a bed of stubbed-out Marlboros. See, we may curse the heavens that your sounds like you’re or whatever. Any detail-oriented kid who finishes first grade, however, will tell you that it’s no excuse to mix the two up.

Thankfully, I’m not the only one who has witnessed this sic-based razzmatazz. A friend was all too happy to share the spoils of an afternoon shopping trip: a photo of a sign she saw in a department store. Her enthusiasm, while somewhat disturbing, was definitely understandable: “Free tunk top for every purchase worth P1500.00.” What was this magical “tunk top” and why were they giving it away? Yes, even trained individuals grasp at the occasional straws.

Unique Admonitions

Our unflappable editorial instincts never rest. Back on the road, other similarly inclined buddies tell me about unique admonitions they’ve seen on buses plying Edsa (“Don’t closer to me!”), among others. The most enlightening of the lot would have to be a notice for a fledgling educational institution. “YAC also offers: Private tutorial in voice lessons, visual arts, theater arts, journalism & assistance in all kinds of students’ school projects.” You’ve got to hand it to those who are willing to help enrich others while setting their own needs aside. It’s so…selfless. I’m surprised that no one from the Harvard University Press has thought of compiling these millenial koans in book form with scholarly footnotes. I suggest they do so stat.

“While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense, except that we can see dead punctuation,” Lynne Truss stated in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a best-selling treatise on punctuation. “No one understands us seventh-sense people. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to ‘get a life’ by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.”

And like most of the characters in that film, English in the public sphere looks to be dead. If it isn’t, the people behind grammatically unacceptable signs are making sure it kicks the bucket soon. Fellow sticklers, get ready to edit.