the man i don’t want to see for the third time

I don’t know his name. I don’t even care. But since I’m gifted with a functional brain, I could still remember his face even without the picture. But since I purposely took his picture without his knowledge, then perhaps I’m admitting that I’d better memorize his face, even in side view.

This is a vignette dedicated for this person with whom I felt a sense of contempt, and of disgust. This is the story.

I was riding the jeepney going home when this man happened to be the driver’s “kondoktor” (a driver’s noisy assistant who takes charge in collecting the fares of passengers and who prolongs our agony of waiting for more passengers by pushing them towards the vehicle – I was one of their many victims but that’s another story). In one of those stops wherein he called for passengers and led them to the vehicle, he tried insisting that the jeepney could still hold one more passenger before finally driving off. However, one of the passengers, a female, exclaimed and said to him, “It’s already too full for one more person. We can even barely move our butts here!” The passenger said this with an irritated voice. She was right anyway. This man still persisted but to no avail.

Finally as the jeepney rode on, this man showed his arrogance, grumbling out loud probably because he was pissed off by the female passenger who argued with him. He would roll his eyes away from that woman, or stare at her with a look of scorn and disgust. i could feel his hot ears burning in madness.

I was observing him, and right at that moment, I just wanted to kick him off from the doorway so that he’ll fall off the road and then get smashed by a speeding truck. He was on the verge of disrespect and it angered me that he reacted that way; he didn’t want ot be corrected.

The second time I saw him was when I and two of my classmates were riding a motorcycle. He was the driver. I’m glad nothing happened though but the memory of our first encounter came back to me and i felt that same disgust I had that day in the jeepney.

I just wish I won’t see him the third time.

the death of a language

Just very recently, I read Earl Shorris’ essay entitled The Last Word. There, he discussed about the condition of language in general, a condition that almost all of the world’s different, unique languages are facing: their doom to silence. In one part of that essay, he mentions the linguist Michael Krauss saying that as many as 3,000 languages, comprising half of all the words on earth, are doomed to silence in the next century.

Suddenly, I remembered Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth wherein he explained that in a few years to come, when global warming still rises to its peak, ice poles would then melt, increasing water level until it reaches the shores of big land masses, and afterwards covering them entirely in the face of the earth. Shorris’ essay is not about global warming, of course. But I see the same phenomenon in his discussion about the language and its fate after a few more years. Soon, these different languages would only be part of history, entirely covered in the face of the earth.

Of the languages what I mean is the different, indigenous languages of each region of each country in the world. Shorris even added further that of all the arts and sciences made by man, none equals a language, for only a language in its living entirety can describe a unique and irreplaceable world. Such statement is true. Language creates its own reality, as one of my professors had said. Language is a man-made tool used by humans wherein all the complexities of all cultures around the world came into being, no matter how distinct they may be. It is what we use to indicate a name for a specific thing, say a tree, or a flower, or a stone.

Shorriss’ central focus is the Yu’pik language spoken in the Yukon and Kuskokwim deltas in Alaska. He reported that the single most prominent feature is the television being set in the homes of the Yu’pik poor. Not that we should put all the blame on televisions for diminishing the value of a particular indigenous language. However, television is just one of the many products of globalization and Shorris pointed out that globalization homogenizes every nation, evry village, no matter how remote. Among the other products of it are movies, music, and the Internet. Unconsciously, the danger lies in every home.

What’s there to be afraid about, anyway? you may say. I was thinking about what Shorris said and what my profesor said. Being a Filipino, I could not easily shove off the idea that what the Yupiits are experiencing is similar to all the indigenous people in the Philippines. I am still talking of language here. I have to admit that my native language approximately ranks third in my standard of language proficiency, English being the topmost, and then Tagalog. He calls it The Hierarchy of Language, and pronounces hierarchy as ‘higher archy’. Suddenly, I was caught in a sudden realization: unknowingly, I have been starting to silence my own, native language.

The phenomenon is, in fact, very alarming. Seldom do I read literatures and other publications that devote into using my own language in my own place. It is only verbally alive. It is the English language that dominates the world today, and it is the same language that is required by all companies from every applicant, all schools from every student and teacher, all books from every subject. Slowly, there appears that impending fear of losing that unique, irreplaceable, fine texture of language, not just in my own country (Philippines) but for the whole world as well. Perhaps, Shorris is right when he said that to save languages, to provide some use, might require wars or nationalistic urges but it need not come to that point.

For now, I am sharing this for the mere purpose of awareness and a constant reminder at the same time of the condition of the languages that might seem inferior to English but, for the natives, surpasses the English language at all. Perhaps when my mind is made up and when I can gather more bases for my stand that I can share an original opinion that would be both informative and persuasive.

the problem with teachers who speak online jargons

During a class discussion about the value of creative writing as a tool through other arts forms such as the visual arts, music, and the performing arts, I was suddenly faced with a lot of terminologies I have never encountered yet in the course of my reading simple literature stuff. I have to admit that even though I belong in this different generation of web blogging and where the spirit of this age speakes the language of speed, I still have to comment on teachers adapting the language of the internet into the classrooms.

I’m afraid one of my teachers is like that, and the problem is that I could not understand what she is trying to say after all. Perhaps she only adores accounting on her experiences in blogging and all her frenzies to the class that she slowly overlooks the language she uses. I still have to understand though that the reason why she does that is because the course demands her that knowledge to be imparted to her students. However, the problem I see there is that the old way of teaching slowly diminishes into our view and we are suddenly faced with a different kind of knowledge that’s still beyond our capacity to learn, quickly. As for me, I still have to go inside an internet cafe just to get in touch with my e-mails, at least. And learning those new online jargons turns the experience not as a chance to widen my knowledge more and appreciate it, but creates another kind of paranoia and fear knowing that I still lack the sufficient knowledge in handling these programs.

What I’m simply trying to say here is that young teachers should not make it a means of imparting academic knowledge jargons usually found online. The prospect of using them is good though, but there are certain limits and teachers should be aware of that. Besides, these teachers may not know what’s playing in the minds of their students, whether they’ve understood them well, or not.