Huh?

This is how far removed I am from non-Discovery Channel mainstream TV: I have successfully eluded (and vice versa) this popular fast food chain commercial that compels everyone to chant “Buger! Burger!” at the slightest mention of good fortune. It is sweeping the country and yet I have never seen it.

Case in point. A sample conversation I overhear at work on a regular basis:

Colleague #1: Mareregular na si (insert Colleague #2’s name here) next month!

Everyone else in the room: Talaga? Pacheeseburger ka naman!

Colleague #1: Burger! Burger! Burger!

Colleague #2: Tse! Wala pa akong pera!!!

Can I just say that to an outsider, this will sound completely absurd. But who the heck cares? People seem to think it’s a funny way of coaxing a free meal out of anyone who’s had a recent run-in with luck. Just your average Pinoy humor I guess. It never occured to me how odd our sense of humor is until I took a shot at translating this joke to a Brazilian friend:

Bebentahan kita ng original Rolex. Brand new! Three hundred pesos lang… Pero Motolite yung battery.

I thought it was funny. She didn’t even wince. Something obviously got blown up in translation there, I don’t know. Anyway, I stopped trying.

 

 

 

Pointlessness

There has been a resurgence in LTFRB’s enforcement of the “on duty / off duty” card requirement for Metro Manila taxis. Apparently cab drivers reserve the right to refuse passengers when they have the windshield card flipped to the ”off duty” side.

I need some clarification on this. Is this supposed to restrain them from being picky when they’re “on duty”? Because from my stand point, the policy is just as useful as placing age limits on certain websites. Anybody can easily click the “Yes, I’m above 18″ button. In the same sense, every cab driver can just flip over to “off duty” if they deem your destination too far or too traffic prone (A complaint I never understood the meaning of. Masyadong matraffic ma’am? Leche! E di sa baryo ka magpasada kung ayaw mo ng traffic!)

Maybe it exists not so much to help the issue but to make policy makers seem like they’re taking action. In reality, we’re all just fooling ourselves. Unless maybe the cards are equipped with microsensors that cause the  driver to get stun-gunned everytime he goes on “off duty” under false pretenses. But then she wakes up from the dream and remembers that this is the Philippines.

 

Hukd N Fonix?

Here’s a scary proposition: The mutation of standard written English to text lingo.  

***Thunder…Lightning…Theme tune to the Twilight Zone!***

I can hear the collective knocking on wood of grammar pundits everywhere at the mention of the horror. Allow me to join them. Heck! I’ll whack the thing with a sledgehammer if that’s what it takes to save the human race from that downward spiral.

But with the wreckless abandon the adolescents are treating language, I’m afraid it is a possibility. Think about it. The trend even displays some historical similarities (and history has a funky of repeating itself).

I’m talking about the Middle Ages, pre-Gutenberg press when the literate few spelled however they want, as long it sounded like the spoken word. Here’s an excerpt from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, circa the 14th Century:

A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,

That fro the tyme that he first bigan

When texting, do we not spell the word time much like the Old English tyme and the word there, ther?

The only difference in this scenario is that by the 15th century, the introduction of new technology like the movable type and Gutenburg’s printing press caused widespread standardization of written English as we know it. In the 21st century, advancement is seeing a significant downgrade in our intelligence. Instead of improving along with our gadgets, we devolved into an entire generation of “hir na me, wer na u” school of I-can’t-spell-anything-to-save-my-life.

To further prove my point, here’s another excerpt from one of the random mind-numbing Friendster profiles that made it’s way to our office email spam network: “i dNt bLiv iN dEsTinY. iM abT reALiTy. uR lyf is in ur hands. So uR d 1 hu coMpLic8T iT…” The nasty habit of capitalizing letters at random only serves to add more salt to the wound. 

 So as to not seem too one-sided, I admit to seeing the convenience of shortening words when texting on a phone with a character limit. Time constraints and a tiny keypad will push us to committing the orthographical sin of spelling alteration, sometimes to a point where the word mutates into a form all on its own.

This is with a keypad an inch and a half wide. But longhand text lingo? You better have a very good excuse.