MUCOLYTIC

Stop those ugly business jargons

Seriously now, I propose that whoever invents further an ugly technical word in business or the techie fields should be jailed. Crime: murder of language.

Reading business articles would make you think not enough words have been invented to worry Webster and company. But no, each industrial engineer or manager who wants a say in the reengineering of business seems to feel it his preordained responsibility to add newly minted words and phrases year in and year out.

Let's declare a moratorium.

Whenever outsiders have a big problem with the Visayan language, we can only commiserate. Officially, Vizayan uses all the five major vowels but, in reality, it uses only three – a, i, and o. Okay, five, including e, but only sparingly. Prima facie evidence: Ulo is pronounced olo, uno is ono. I bet uod is ood? Ewan is iwan, elepante is ilipanti. UFC in UFC ketchup is pronounced yo-if-ci.

When Visayans use e at times, more often than not the word actually contains i or the long a. Here are some proofs: Peste is pronounced pisti but amen is emen. Now this one borders on the criminal: I heard someone from the region call a guy named Ricky, Re-ke.

I remember with special fondness the televangelist Bro. Wild Almeda, he who hath said, “Patayen ang papa sa Ruma!” in the same breath as “Patayen ang mga Abo Sayap!” and “Lahat ng repest, drag addekt, komyonest, poponta sa impirnu!”

Listening to Bro. Mike Velarde’s exhortation to the El Shaddai over the radio can be very distracting. Only when you stop laughing and try glossing over the atrocious accent (“Emen, emen! Porehen! Porehen ang Panginoon!”), the odd costume, and the malicious imputation of milking his flock dry, that you find Bro. Mike’s sermons to make a lot of sense -- spoken like a true, good Visayan. (Wait, he's actually Bicolano.)

Makes you think. Pampangos are notorious for the missing h but they’re also guilty of an extraneous h. Classic example: Ham and egg becomes Am and Hegg. Pangasinenses (like me) are pretty much like Visayans, though in a slightly more subdued way. But the Visayans, they are the worst offenders. I have no quarrel with how they choose to pronounce things; we Pangalatoks never apologize for the way we mispronounce things. I think we’re even proudly defiant. My qualm lies in the fact that Visayans (and Pangasinenses) should review their alphabet, i.e., they might want to reconsider deleting some useless vowels?

They’d be in good company. The Hebrew alphabet contains no vowels, only minimal dots and wedges to approximate what we’ve come to know as basic vowels.

I wonder whether the useless vowels were just imposed upon us by the colonizer, and the pre-Hispanic Visayans and the other Philippine tribes just assimilated these into their languages with a lot of grudge? And in rebellious defiance, they chose to use the ‘letters of the law’ but ignored them in practice? Must review the alibata.

The time has come then to reclaim the purity – and dignity - of our enduring languages. (I refuse to dismiss them as ‘dialects.’) Maybe we should restore our ancient alibata scripts? You may believe in linguistic purism, but in a world where entire cultures are thoughtlessly homogenized by Western standards, the suggestion makes perfect sense.

This way, people might stop finding the Visayan mispronunciations, in particular, amusing.

Nothing against SM, really (wide grin)

Everybody says, “Nice shirt!” Nobody ever says “Nice grocery bag!” (Or at least not that I know of.)

If you want a glimpse into – or yet another proof of – male vanity, watch how your officemates ask for nice-looking plastic bags to place something for the home into, in the absence of a more decent alternative. The more vain a guy is, the lesser the chance of seeing him bring home or commute within spitting distance of a buck-ugly grocery bag.

I am not exactly referring to the ubiquitously blue SM grocery bag but you get the picture. Actually the worst of the lot are the Day-Glo green and tangerine Hypermart bags. If the wealthy Sys thought that that was good advertising, they were probably right. But as grocery bag aesthetic versus male vanity goes, the Sys got it all wrong. (My congratulations, though, for the new SM architecture.)

The brightness of their resultant mobile ads is equal in magnitude to the factor of shame attached to toting it for them in public – for free. The Sys should learn from Landmark’s equally ubiquitous but tasteful, because it’s not loud, gray plastic bag. I love Landmark’s gray bags next to People are People shopping bags’ modern design, and those miniature black garbage bags for the minimalist fashion statement. Nothing destroys one’s japorms more than a loud grocery bag. The rule is, if you can’t keep it discreet, make it at least pleasing to the eye. I keep shopping to a minimum, but I have also noticed those Diesel and Bench shopping bags.

Now that’s just from the point of view of the vain. For the non-vanidoso, take this advice: So what if you are caught dead carrying a bright-blue SM grocery bag? It won’t make you less of a man, or less of a human as long as you don’t do it on your way to a date at the Hard Rock Café. (I'd be sure to regard you the way I do another guy in the crowd wearing the same shirt as mine.) This thoughtful line from novelist Virginia Woolf might also give you some strength: “Their eyes, our cage; their thoughts, our prison.”

Unfair to Remember

‘The best remedy for conceit is to sit down and make a list of all the things you don’t know.’ – Anonymous

Modern update of the above: Attend a database programming seminar.

I just did and, yay, what do you know, I found it to be the most humbling thing in my life. Have you ever experienced drowning in the South China Sea? Here, you drown in a sea of jargon, to think that I love jargon. For hours on end, I listened and followed instructions from a guy perhaps five years my junior, who have two major titles to his name, too (MCP, MCSA).

Having no experience in programming, other than basic HTML (if you can call it that), the training/seminar was a punishment only my desire to learn proved alleviating enough. Add to that those monstrous buses in Ayala, with their impatient, distracting, cruel, and criminal blaring of horns. Concentration. That’s what I needed the most at the moment. So many buttons! So many icons! I could only take so much.

Hah! Let’s see. Define the ff. terms and demonstrate their use on Windows XP: Sequel. Macros. Modules. Normalization. Table relationship. Integrity of data. Unique values. Database schema. Import, export data. Access forms. Visual basic. Query wizard. Data access pages. ASP. ODBC. Pivot. OLAP. BDM. [Oracle.] [Crystal Reports.] Abnormalized. Delimiter. Separator field. Camel case. OOP. Autonumber. Datatype. Overnormalized. [Longhorn.] XML. XSD. Command button. Accelerator. Source code. [Java.] Page footer. Subform. Primary key. Expression builder. Single-level validation. [Unix, Solaris platforms.] MAPI. Syntax. Alias. Filter. Boolean expression. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Whaat? You expect me to remember all that? I got a headache for all that, yet I felt so dumb for it! What's fair to remember are the lunches Mac, Andrew and I had at the Enterprise Center mega-posh uber-canteen, hehe.

After making our class go crazy with all that, he gave us this nice coup de grace for a parting shot: “Your system is only as secure as your administrator is trustworthy.”

If I couldn’t hack it with my second lease on working life as, aack, database programmer (God save me), I shall get back to my writing non-career. Wish me luck, will you.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping my mouth shut.

Eye for the weird kid

My eye is trained on my favorite nephew for the moment, X (Hope no family member will ever get around to reading this blog. My sister has Internet connection. I am typing this at home nervously, clandestinely.) The day I visited him, he was biting into a Winnie the Pooh chocolate bar and he laughed as he bit off poor Winnie’s head and arms. He’s not yet three, and already, he’s parents have to watch out and worry.

My favorite niece right now is Z, who’s just turned one year old. She endeared herself to his tito instantly, and effortlessly at that, when she danced the ocho-ocho by bending her young body with the slightest bend you could imagine, and moving her hip immovably. (To think that prissy me hardly approve of this dance!) Got to keep an eye on this one, too.