You know that scene in sci-fi movies when outer space invaders abduct an Earthling to study?
As a child watching the Saturday UFO feature on our black-and-white TV, I felt that the background music peaked in sympathy with my fear: what will the monsters do to the poor fellow?
When I got older, my fear took on another dimension: if the aliens picked the wrong person—a drunk or politician perhaps—wouldn’t they look down on us as an inferior, weaker species?
Reasoning that any alien experiment on a specimen whose brains were fried by alcohol, drugs or worse would come up with an invasion strategy that would underestimate and thus be unprepared for human intelligence and spirit, I decided that it was a good thing then if the UFO conducted their research on the “lowest common denominator.”
Unfortunately, a different logic rules beauty contests. To compete globally with other aspirants for titles representing the world, universe, ecosystem or galaxy, the honor should go to the fairest and, it has been argued, the most gifted.
Stopping to buy oranges one evening, I overheard the spirited discussion at a neighborhood fruit stand. The pretty but English-challenged winner of Binibining Pilipinas World 2008 was being dissected. When I had my 20 oranges, plus a free one, in my green bag, I peered at the young woman in the front-page photo, which my neighbors were raking with their eyes.
She looked very nice. Few women are kind to the eyes in a bikini and high heels. Later, after sitting through another TV rerun of the scene where the beauty tilt winner answers in her fractured English, I thought that even fewer women can dazzle while their foot is in their mouth.
I hope if she is serious about winning that world title, though, she will treat her English with the same discipline she has kept those young limbs sculpted. Misbehaving pronunciation and missing parts of speech can be a phase she can grow out of.
What takes a little more repairing is the spirit.
Unlike the blotchy complexion that peaks and wanes during adolescence, speaking, writing and, yes, thinking in a language that’s not our own requires more than pre-pageant cramming.
But a 17-year-old should have a lot of time to learn and polish. If she wants to, she can.
And since there’s too much advice going around for one young person to absorb, we might as well make use of some of our own industrious kibitzing.
For instance, we could get out and have a life, instead of camping in front of our TV sets or endlessly downloading the massacre of English in YouTube.
Days after I get emailed links to the Bb. Pilipinas incident, three friends send the YouTube link to a so-called Bulgarian singer interpreting Mariah Carey’s “Without You” into her version of “Ken Lee.”
Is this YouTube hit authentic? If the singer really did dislocate the lyrics, should we think all Bulgarians speak like this?
Even without the bikini-and-high-heels thing, a beauty contest is worlds apart from life. Who’s going to jump to the conclusion that a 17-year-old represents 45 million, the estimated number of Filipinas living in the country today?
Only alien researchers on the prowl. And only on TV.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com, mayettetabada.blogspot.com, 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 16, 2008 issue
Showing posts with label English acrobatics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English acrobatics. Show all posts
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Wives’ tales
WHEN I first saw it, I had an electric jolt.
Nibbling the frozen chip of the chocolate dip coating a sundae I was not even supposed to be thinking of, I saw the distant neon-lit letters leap out in the dark: TARZAN BO.
Wow, I thought. Even given the street competition presented by rival bars on this Mactan strip, I wondered about the Neanderthal sensibility inspiring a bar name that implied its habitués, not just Lord Greystoke’s noble ape-man alter ego, had either strong armpits or weak noses.
But as the family car approached the bar, I realized that it wasn’t a weird variant of
English that was the culprit after all.
The letters on the nightclub’s façade originally spelled out: T-A-R-Z-A-N-B-O-Y. The last bulb did not just light up.
Up to now, that malfunctioning bulb has never been replaced. Except for a busybody like me, no one may have made a case of the darkened “Y.”
Or possibly, the vagaries of English don’t preoccupy the owner or regulars of such places. Correct spelling and clear meaning can hardly matter in a place that probably is too dark for reading, I told my husband one night. Do you see anyone bringing a book? he asks without taking his eyes off the road.
As the vanilla was quickly melting, I forgot to reply. What I had wanted to tell him was that I read in Sun.Star Superbalita’s Feb. 21, 2008 issue that Jinkee Pacquiao admitted to “Yes Magazine” that she is now going through the worst upheavals in her eight-year marriage to Manny.
Her husband is dubbed “Pambansang Kamao (national boxer)” for the acclaim and pride he has given the country for his ring victories. In the euphoria after one such victory over a Mexican foe, the buzz was all for hailing Manny as a modern-day national hero.
According to the Superbalita feature, Jinkee says she struggles with the womanizing and gambling of Manny. At parties and bars, she tries to be blind to her husband and his girls until she cannot take it anymore and goes to a corner to cry. Can one be a hero to one’s countrymen while being the lowest form of animal to one’s wife?
Boxing and basketball may be our country’s favorite sports, but it is hero-making that is actually our national pastime. Unlike others that tear down personalities as quickly as they build them up, we Pinoys have an elastic threshold of blind love for our idols, who fit better the mold of Erap the lover of women and the masses, rather than Mother Teresa the living saint.
In a country where even drainage systems hardly work but actors can become statesmen and statesmen opt to become actors, it hardly surprises anyone that our hopes for national transformation and moral resurgence is pinned not on processes and systems but on whistleblowers-turned-celebrities.
Senate star witness Rodolfo Noel “Jun” Lozada Jr. seems to repulse so far all the character-demolition attempts to discredit his exposure of the graft and corruption allegedly committed in the National Broadband Network deal.
In my books, Lozada passes at least one test: his wife wanted him back. Violeta Lozada filed a petition for the writ of habeas corpus in the Supreme Court after she learned the police and airport officials spirited him away upon his return to the country.
But more than the wife test, literature has a better standard for myth-building. More nuanced and realistic is the anti-hero, a literary character who resembles the villain but denies or suppresses heroic virtues. Which side prevails determines the tale’s end.
In time, our national pastime may encourage our anti-heroes to reconcile pleasing the crowds and treating one’s wife honorably. Let’s hope, for our children’s sake, that our hero-making matures from simply replacing busted bulbs to spotting mistakes in the dark.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Feb. 24, 2008 issue
Nibbling the frozen chip of the chocolate dip coating a sundae I was not even supposed to be thinking of, I saw the distant neon-lit letters leap out in the dark: TARZAN BO.
Wow, I thought. Even given the street competition presented by rival bars on this Mactan strip, I wondered about the Neanderthal sensibility inspiring a bar name that implied its habitués, not just Lord Greystoke’s noble ape-man alter ego, had either strong armpits or weak noses.
But as the family car approached the bar, I realized that it wasn’t a weird variant of
English that was the culprit after all.
The letters on the nightclub’s façade originally spelled out: T-A-R-Z-A-N-B-O-Y. The last bulb did not just light up.
Up to now, that malfunctioning bulb has never been replaced. Except for a busybody like me, no one may have made a case of the darkened “Y.”
Or possibly, the vagaries of English don’t preoccupy the owner or regulars of such places. Correct spelling and clear meaning can hardly matter in a place that probably is too dark for reading, I told my husband one night. Do you see anyone bringing a book? he asks without taking his eyes off the road.
As the vanilla was quickly melting, I forgot to reply. What I had wanted to tell him was that I read in Sun.Star Superbalita’s Feb. 21, 2008 issue that Jinkee Pacquiao admitted to “Yes Magazine” that she is now going through the worst upheavals in her eight-year marriage to Manny.
Her husband is dubbed “Pambansang Kamao (national boxer)” for the acclaim and pride he has given the country for his ring victories. In the euphoria after one such victory over a Mexican foe, the buzz was all for hailing Manny as a modern-day national hero.
According to the Superbalita feature, Jinkee says she struggles with the womanizing and gambling of Manny. At parties and bars, she tries to be blind to her husband and his girls until she cannot take it anymore and goes to a corner to cry. Can one be a hero to one’s countrymen while being the lowest form of animal to one’s wife?
Boxing and basketball may be our country’s favorite sports, but it is hero-making that is actually our national pastime. Unlike others that tear down personalities as quickly as they build them up, we Pinoys have an elastic threshold of blind love for our idols, who fit better the mold of Erap the lover of women and the masses, rather than Mother Teresa the living saint.
In a country where even drainage systems hardly work but actors can become statesmen and statesmen opt to become actors, it hardly surprises anyone that our hopes for national transformation and moral resurgence is pinned not on processes and systems but on whistleblowers-turned-celebrities.
Senate star witness Rodolfo Noel “Jun” Lozada Jr. seems to repulse so far all the character-demolition attempts to discredit his exposure of the graft and corruption allegedly committed in the National Broadband Network deal.
In my books, Lozada passes at least one test: his wife wanted him back. Violeta Lozada filed a petition for the writ of habeas corpus in the Supreme Court after she learned the police and airport officials spirited him away upon his return to the country.
But more than the wife test, literature has a better standard for myth-building. More nuanced and realistic is the anti-hero, a literary character who resembles the villain but denies or suppresses heroic virtues. Which side prevails determines the tale’s end.
In time, our national pastime may encourage our anti-heroes to reconcile pleasing the crowds and treating one’s wife honorably. Let’s hope, for our children’s sake, that our hero-making matures from simply replacing busted bulbs to spotting mistakes in the dark.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Feb. 24, 2008 issue
Saturday, February 16, 2008
How much is your English?
One used to chart the market value of English—especially English learned to meet academic or work requirements—by the occupations that were attractive overseas.
So as domestic helpers, later teachers, then nurses, we are attractive “exports” because, we are told, we have the expertise and dispositions required for the work.
But most of all, we understand English and speak a version that is better than those other non-native speakers are capable of.
A few idiosyncrasies of our Filipino English have not dented our marketing edge abroad.
My sister, for instance, found a job easily enough despite initially confusing her New South Wales employer with a query about “filling up” the forms. With some concentration, I can remember to tell my students to “fill out” the blanks, but, more often than not, I always slip back to requesting a phone caller to wait “for a while,” instead of the more grammatical and clearer, “please wait.”
Though far from standard, Filipinisms add to the piquancy that sets apart the English we made into our own.
How will this be changed by call centers?
The country is ranked in the top 10 worldwide destinations for business process outsourcing. The Philippine government is eyeing to capture 50 percent of the total English-speaking global market in contact center services in 2008.
The rise of this sunshine industry, as well as the country’s vaulting ambitions, has made call centers the fastest, biggest employer of college graduates. Even many undergraduates have not been able to resist the high salary and other blandishments, settling for a lighter academic load or “resting” from their studies to fit in call center schedules.
The consequent resurgence of an interest in English leaves me with mixed feelings. As a journalism instructor and journalist called upon to edit mostly English compositions, I am relieved in the return of attention on grammar and other standards of English.
If mobile phone dependence singlehandedly twisted English beyond recognition in imperceptible but telling increments, emoticon by emoticon, the allure of call centers has made even the most reading-resistant coed read the newspapers to pick up some kind of English facility or American culture IQ.
But old-fashioned as I am, I wish that it had been literature or journalism that fuels this resurgence, not the cheapness of our labor (the bottomline raison d’etre behind the trend of relocating businesses to our Third World corner).
At the state university where I graduated and now teach, we once lost students during immersion: while doing community work or training at newspapers, interns decided that further academic work was superfluous and less meaningful than organizing communities at the grassroots or working as full-time reporters. One thesis advisee reappeared after months of silence to present a video documentary that had taken him beyond the radar of school and family. What was initially an academic prerequisite started him on a pilgrimage to the countryside and the far reaches of obsession.
Now, the casualties of chronic absenteeism in my 7:30 a.m. class are those working the graveyard shift or those too “amped” after timing out at the BPO enclaves to crawl into bed until just a few minutes before class starts.
Where is English in the sunshine economy?
On top of the homogenized US pop culture propagated by the mass media, call center culture rewards “Americanness,” from trainings to achieve a neutral-sounding accent familiar to North American clients to customer service orientations familiarizing workers in American history, culture and lifestyle.
Decades ago, Filipinos received a good tonic for colonial mentality when the imported goods they bought were “outed” by a tag or label that read “Made in the Philippines.”
In the future, the congenial and unaccented voice replying to a query may be too neutral to be identified for certain as belonging to a BPO worker in Cebu, India or Australia. That may bode well for the country’s employment and the gross national product.
But a future bereft of Filipinisms like “how much is your English?” seems vacuous and lifeless.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Feb. 17, 2008 issue
So as domestic helpers, later teachers, then nurses, we are attractive “exports” because, we are told, we have the expertise and dispositions required for the work.
But most of all, we understand English and speak a version that is better than those other non-native speakers are capable of.
A few idiosyncrasies of our Filipino English have not dented our marketing edge abroad.
My sister, for instance, found a job easily enough despite initially confusing her New South Wales employer with a query about “filling up” the forms. With some concentration, I can remember to tell my students to “fill out” the blanks, but, more often than not, I always slip back to requesting a phone caller to wait “for a while,” instead of the more grammatical and clearer, “please wait.”
Though far from standard, Filipinisms add to the piquancy that sets apart the English we made into our own.
How will this be changed by call centers?
The country is ranked in the top 10 worldwide destinations for business process outsourcing. The Philippine government is eyeing to capture 50 percent of the total English-speaking global market in contact center services in 2008.
The rise of this sunshine industry, as well as the country’s vaulting ambitions, has made call centers the fastest, biggest employer of college graduates. Even many undergraduates have not been able to resist the high salary and other blandishments, settling for a lighter academic load or “resting” from their studies to fit in call center schedules.
The consequent resurgence of an interest in English leaves me with mixed feelings. As a journalism instructor and journalist called upon to edit mostly English compositions, I am relieved in the return of attention on grammar and other standards of English.
If mobile phone dependence singlehandedly twisted English beyond recognition in imperceptible but telling increments, emoticon by emoticon, the allure of call centers has made even the most reading-resistant coed read the newspapers to pick up some kind of English facility or American culture IQ.
But old-fashioned as I am, I wish that it had been literature or journalism that fuels this resurgence, not the cheapness of our labor (the bottomline raison d’etre behind the trend of relocating businesses to our Third World corner).
At the state university where I graduated and now teach, we once lost students during immersion: while doing community work or training at newspapers, interns decided that further academic work was superfluous and less meaningful than organizing communities at the grassroots or working as full-time reporters. One thesis advisee reappeared after months of silence to present a video documentary that had taken him beyond the radar of school and family. What was initially an academic prerequisite started him on a pilgrimage to the countryside and the far reaches of obsession.
Now, the casualties of chronic absenteeism in my 7:30 a.m. class are those working the graveyard shift or those too “amped” after timing out at the BPO enclaves to crawl into bed until just a few minutes before class starts.
Where is English in the sunshine economy?
On top of the homogenized US pop culture propagated by the mass media, call center culture rewards “Americanness,” from trainings to achieve a neutral-sounding accent familiar to North American clients to customer service orientations familiarizing workers in American history, culture and lifestyle.
Decades ago, Filipinos received a good tonic for colonial mentality when the imported goods they bought were “outed” by a tag or label that read “Made in the Philippines.”
In the future, the congenial and unaccented voice replying to a query may be too neutral to be identified for certain as belonging to a BPO worker in Cebu, India or Australia. That may bode well for the country’s employment and the gross national product.
But a future bereft of Filipinisms like “how much is your English?” seems vacuous and lifeless.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Feb. 17, 2008 issue
Monday, September 25, 2006
Excuse me, your English is showing
NEARLY everyone I know is leaving for abroad. A few days ago, while walking downtown for my favorite bowl of makimi, a sidewalk sign reminded me why I like staying put.
Amid clashing amulets, the small sign promised a small fortune for the down-and-out: “we buy dead cellphone.”
I like being where things are rarely thrown out, where even scrap has nine lives, and where someone always has a fresh take on English.
During one particular back-to-school rush, I was waiting to hand over to a sales clerk my list of stationery needs. A small slip lying on the glass top caught my attention.
It listed, among other things, “assorted filth paper.”
Before I had time to silence the bells clanging in my head, a clerk snatched the list and handed it back to a woman guarding reams of paper, boxes of crayons, bottles of glue, a bristling mini-forest of scissors and—no one needed to tell me— rolls of felt paper.
No one can surely boast of taking a wilder rollercoaster ride of emotions in so short a time: reading the list dizzied me; recognizing the woman’s uniform depressed me; but seeing the felt paper comforted me somewhat (apparently the sales clerk understood what the list-maker meant, a clear case proving that grammatical slips don’t necessarily sabotage the economy).
However, after piercing the grim scenario—what if the list had been drawn by that customer, and the customer turned out to be indeed a teacher, and one charged with the molding of a couple of hundreds of young minds—I plummeted to the deepest despair, a condition not helped by the sales clerks bypassing my list (perhaps because of the wild-eyed woman clutching it).
But this country somehow runs despite our English.
The worst lapses are not committed always by those who lack a familiarity with or sensitivity to the language. Education hardly provides the King’s language blanket immunity.
Last week, the Philippine Daily Inquirer quoted Lipa City Archbishop Ramon Arguelles as saying that President Gloria Arroyo “cheated but won the 2004 polls.”
The prelate came up with this curious view by pointing out that the president might have cheated (“talaga namang nandaya”) but she did it on a minor scale: “hindi siguro one million (votes) pero siguro mga ilang hundred thousand.”
English is redefined by our politics, or our math, if you will. One million votes can transform a housewife into a moral symbol. At less than a million “stolen” votes, it is not a cheat leading the country but an immovable force, untouched by shame, impeachment surroundings, or pastoral euphemisms.
A creature of habit, I like picking up newspapers to slog through what our leaders try to say without saying so.
For instance, Malacanang’s victory dinner for sympathetic prelates showed that the much vaunted separation of the Church and state is mythical. In their choice of English at least, the apologists of both sides sound alike.
For “malicious insinuations” that impugn the state, substitute “devil’s handiwork” if you are quoting a prelate detecting a conspiracy to stain the Church’s neutrality on the issue whether we are ruled by a president or a cheat.
The gifts, favors and treats the president is reportedly showering on the Church falls under the catch-all term of “political underpinnings.”
The newspeak is unequivocally equivocal, a term suiting the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, whose spokesperson, Msgr. Pedro Quitorio, used the euphemism to defend the browbeaten bishops that went to dinner with the president.
When I have had my fill of the “excessive politicking” bloating the nation’s affairs, I go for the requisite makimi foodtrip downtown. Come to think of it, dead cellphones and filth papers are just friendly Caspers to the real phantoms haunting our English.
(mayette.tabada@gmail,com or 09173226131)
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