Corporate life: Misreading subtexts

(Goodbye (and good riddance!) to corporate life and all that. Disclaimer: The "I" here does not necessarily refer to me, and the events and characters in this essay may be a work of fiction. Haha!)

I have this habit of lifting up the spirits of my co-workers around me by acknowledging them openly when they do something that I find genuinely laudable. It’s my way of encouraging people whenever I feel they need some encouragement. No, I’ve never been from HR, but I thought I was just being a typical supervisor, or just trying to be a good co-worker.

I had been cautioned by a well-meaning friend that, in the corporate setting, this attitude of 'up-building' people’s confidence is supposed to be bad. But I didn’t care when I heard that. There’s the risk of being accused as a pleaser, but it felt good making others feel good about themselves, so who cared about risks.

I also have this closely related habit of building up people’s confidence by telling them my comparative faults and weaknesses. For example, I tend to make my praise extra-audible when I find out that, unlike me, a coworker doesn’t suffer from stage fright. Again, in the corporate world, I’ve been told that’s a no-no; what you said about you could be used against you.

And indeed it was true, as I would find out later. Take the case I had with my coworkers D. and N., who were suddenly plucked out from the ranks to be the sudden top managers, bypassing me and several other supervisors. Presumably, these two guys had a qualification I and my co-supervisors lacked: the overconfidence of a big mouth and who knows what else.

So, for constantly praising people I looked upon as worthy, this was what I apparently got: I almost got ditched and, worse, saw myself reporting to these very same individuals and even composing memos for them – when they used to be technically under me! I and several others were very much embarassed to find ourselves outranked without being duly informed, or at least without our egos being properly massaged as precautionary measure. It was a crazy, humiliating situation I couldn’t take for long I just had to resign.

But the manager who did the incredible restructuring of staff was the one who’s really ridiculous. She failed to see that it’s only the really confident who are able to give sincere praise to others – audibly and within other people’s earshot, too, if need be. And it’s only people with healthy self-respect and self-confidence who are able to make fun of themselves or take themselves lightly.

Resigning posthaste was a nice way of extricating myself from the organization, though. It’s where I spent my best years, albeit learning almost nothing for it, if I didn't exert my own efforts to constantly look after my own self-interest and self-growth as well. Thanks to this company, my real day job since Day One has always been to work on outsourced projects (US-based) in different capacities (both rank-and-file and supervisory positions) – abstracting and indexing, legal data processing, even dabbling into corporate information analysis even if I wasn’t an IT guy. I learned a lot of things, alright, but not the areas I really intended to learn. I also had a taste of communicating directly with my American counterparts via speakerphone, which is a little like being in a call center job. When I was about to train for a medical/legal transcription start-up, I was about ready to leave.

Thankfully I was able to make it a point to apply for a position in other companies and be hired and trained before finally and irrevocably shipping out. Without such foresight, I was in danger of being left facing a blank wall - jobless and helpless. I’m grateful that I was able to get out of that tremendous blow to my human dignity with my self-respect and self-confidence fully intact. I am grateful enough that that episode did not have to damage my 'bad habit' of lifting people up.

What’s with lifting people’s spirits anyway? Is it a case of being too honest, or needlessly honest, as in cases where you are asked to enumerate your character weaknesses, aside from your character references, during job interviews? No! Call it an annoying do-goodism, but I have this feeling that people who don’t believe in themselves enough should be encouraged. I think that each person has the potential to be really good at something, so if he or she is properly pushed, 'true talent will out.' Being very talented plus being very lucky, not to mention very confident, are a rare combination in the real world. In the real world, talent alone is not enough. People also need a little encouragement. So I thought it would never hurt to lift people up. I've had a first-hand of experience of not being encouraged enough as well as being discouraged more often than I needed to be, so I knew the feeling so well. I didn't want to inflict what I'd been through to anybody.

Alas, it never occurred to me that trying to be nice for the sake of it can be used as a negative point against myself, when somebody up there in the hierarchy applied my own observations against my favor. If I need to underline the point, note that I was not giving my unstinting praise to people – colleagues above, below, and at a level with my position – as a form of flattery. I really meant it when I said to D. that his booming voice and presence could be put into good use in sales. I meant every word when I told N. that his gift of gab could come in handy not only as a future televangelist, but also when it came to dealing with difficult clients. In short, I didn’t offer good words to kiss people’s bottoms. All that bending would be too counter-productive, a total waste of precious energy.

To his credit, my Filipino boss, the part-owner, treated me well when I declared that I wanted out. My American bosses, on the other hand, gave awkward signals that they could be losing a good human resource, and started sending out feelers that they wanted me to stay. They did so through the same manager, who awkwardly cornered me all of a sudden at the water cooler one morning, offering me a fantastic salary increase that equalled that of the two new managers if I stayed.

Let me tell you, I am used to a lot of insults in life, but I never got more insulted than that day. The whole world knew that I needed money, lots of it, and I didn’t have a problem keeping that as a non-secret. But even during the last moments that we worked together, my manager failed to see that it’s not all about the money! (Not surprisingly, my manager belonged to a family of politicians.)

It’s such an insult for one’s person to be appraised in terms of the cash flow, but business is business; I perfectly understood that cold, calculating side. But it’s a lot more grievous an insult to be reduced as an android or a cyborg with a tag prize neatly stamped on its forehead. It hurt that I ended up being presumed as too money-oriented (‘mukhang pera’). My manager, and the American owners, thought I would bite the carrot stick being dangled right in my face. Politicians have a good expression for this sordid strategy, if only in a vulgar way: “Pera-pera lang naman yan, eh!”

All those years working and living with this manager and her chosen people, treating them as friends and family, and you wake up one day suddenly being diagnosed with the wrong set of character weaknesses, possibly slandered, not to mention bypassed just like that, and made to report to people who were ostensibly not better qualified than you were, who were even defended to be in possession of qualities that you allegedly didn’t have – self-confidence! The manager didn’t see that, although a person may have stage fright, he is just trying to be humble and discreet and kind when he declares his weaknesses out loud. And he can afford to be confident precisely because he is aware of his strengths and limitations, because he is able to have a balanced look at himself. Otherwise, the act of lifting others up would be plain sadomasochism.

This account does not reflect fully the nature of my/our falling-out with this manager. There's also the dimension of affairs of the heart getting in the way. (N. had been wildly rumored to be the manager's paramour, but let's not get into this.) The thing is, it was clear the manager failed to see the sign of self-confidence behind my all-too-audible owning up to my own limitations.

I am now happily employed, thank God, by a new competitor of my former employer. I am struggling with my new job as online English writing tutor, where I am instructed to praise the finer points of a student's work. I am still a part-time freelance writer. I’m thinking about doing my tutoring job fully home-based. I'm thinking about finding other full-time jobs and having this one just a part-time job. I'm thinking about leaving, flying off to the States once and for all, by hook or by crook. I’m tired of office politics for now that I want to take an indefinite leave from the kind of work world I got so used to. Meanwhile, I try my best to be happy for all the colleagues I've left behind.

Me, misjudged

Sob story: How the small-minded remarks of those closest to you can hijack your self-esteem almost irremediably

Sometimes the people closest to you have the capacity to offend you the most. I don’t know if this line is cliché; what I know is that it is quite incomplete.

What I know is that the ones who've offended me the most are people close enough to me to be able to utter a seemingly innocuous imbecility that turns out to be deadly. What I know is it’s small minds within my vicinity who judge me rashly that tend to offend me the most.

I try my best to be a forgiver, but I make it a point to write down and document every crime, if only to make sure I won’t be inflicting it on anyone dear to me.

One of the most unforgettable types of offense was the one time I bought some almond-topped croissants for breakfast and someone told me I’m “sosyal,” which actually meant I’m being “pa-sosyal” (social climber?) – someone trying very hard to be what I was not or would ever be. It meant that I should stick only to the humbler, locally made breads that I knew. They always say that truth hurts, but that the morning, I also found out that lies also hurt. I was offended, not because I was accused of the truth, but because I was wrongfully accused. If I was offended, it’s because I was thought of so low by, of all people, someone I expected to be affirming me.

What the heck did "pa-sosyal" mean? It just didn’t make sense to me, then or now. Was acting natural and being myself "sosyal"? Was being adventurous hypocritical? Wow. Terrible. What does that supposed to mean? That I should act more humbly or allow myself to be dictated by what others would think or, worse, act like my inner animal? That I should dirty myself up, dress up in rags, eat dirt, talk dirty, and remember always that I’m dirt-poor? And it's because these are what’s expected of me?

Soon, I began to realize I was being accused of misplaced pride, overestimation of self-worth, presumption, presumptuousness, selfish ambition, and a host of closely related sins. I was only being cut to pieces and, to that person’s mind, I was being put back in my proper place. I was being thought of very lowly, as lowly as that person thought of herself.

**

Another instance that I remember recoiling from metaphysical anguish is during a garage sale when someone innocently referred to my preferred reading materials – the different glossy US magazines I was donating, or dumping -- this way: “Pampatalino ba ‘yan?” (“Are those meant to make you smart (or worse, come off as smart)”?)

It took me some split seconds to answer a silly yes. But after being forced to say yes smilingly and self-deprecatingly, I knew another gross judgment has been passed on my person and character (no matter if it was all unintentional); I just couldn’t put my finger on the Freudian or Jungian slip, but I knew there was some kind of faux pas made somewhere.

It took me a few seconds later to realize that I was being accused of misplaced lust for knowledge. But just like the first time, I had no choice but to give the other cheek -- a very hard thing to do for me because I wasn’t particularly given to humility, either. And it’s a fact that I can have an unquenchable lust for knowledge.

What was just so humiliating was not to be able to defend myself and to prove the person wrong. If humble pie were an actual pie, then I knew its taste very well – awful, bitter like a nasty medicine you ought to take only in liquid form. It’s very frustrating, furthermore, not to be able to explain that I read what I read because I am genuinely entertained and not because I want to show off. It is so injurious to hear a remark that, in a few succinct words, cheapens wholesale the way I conduct myself in life; it reduces everything into a mere posturing – as though everything I do is with the thought of accumulating knowledge in mind, with the aim of impressing people with my intellect. Besides, what’s so wrong about improving one’s self, one’s knowledge?

**

Thankfully, these comments, willfully malicious or otherwise, came few and far between. Nevertheless, when they came, they seem to come at the right moment, attacking me at my most vulnerable. Now I fully understand why that character in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado would resort to foul sleight-of-hand murder on account of a seemingly insignificant slight.

The latest horrendously rash judgment I got was when someone implied to my face that I didn’t know how to manage my time. At least I appreciated the fact that I was directly informed of my inadequacy. But this one was even worse because it was blatantly false, compared to the first two, with no tinge of truth whatsoever. How do I explain to the dense that writing and thinking coherently needs a great deal of concentration, not to mention, lots of time? How do I explain that my current job and current sked are so draining mentally and physically that all I’m left with is nothing else but a little time to do the things I really enjoy doing? This was a lot worse because now I was being accused of laziness and irresponsibility, too.

It made me take a double-take and ask myself, “Am I the type of person who gets offended so easily?” "Am I too onion-skinned?" But I have no other answer except a steely and resounding “I don’t think so!” Call it being defensive, but I survived Citizens Military Training being insulted in public and made to do push-ups, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it! Of course, at that time I wished those UP Vanguard officers who had traumatized me died of instant death, but all that is past now – past comedy, to be exact. The verbal abuse, I would concede, was part of the training for those perceived as sissies or klutz to toughen up a little bit. I’d like to think I’m immune to people disapproving of me. After all, I grew up being looked down upon as the family’s ugly duckling because I was surprisingly too dark-skinned for a clan of part-mestizos. I grew up being derided for being “lampa” (klutz) and worse. I never got the encouragement I needed, except for the kind women in my immediate family, and if ever I did, I knew it’s an act of consolation, an act of trying to deflect the projectiles of pain that went to my general direction. After all, I had my own taste of office politics to consider as well. It’s impossible to shield anyone anyway from cruel people and cruel tongues because people will always be people and wagging tongues will always be wagging, and I perfectly understand that. People will always have myopic vision. People will always be judgmental even when they know they can get easily misled or carried away by emotion. Just like me sometimes, when I think of certain people as slothful, only to get remorseful upon my discovery that they are only apparently lazy -- they are actually asthmatics or diabetics or simply people who are allergic to something or other, people who get tired so easily.

It’s okay to be looked down upon by other people, but to be cut down to size by your own people cuts to the quick and infinitely so. To be NOT understood is but natural, but to be misunderstood by people you’re familiar with and to whom you are very familiar… that’s double the punishment!

But, wait, it’s a triple punishment, actually -- when you realize that these people are most likely the people you’ll also find too impossible to avoid.

I don’t like dramatic confrontations, but if I understand what I was taught about morals and such, then amazingly I am even left with two incredible Christian duties: (a) the duty to tell my offender that I was wronged and (b) the duty to forgive unconditionally thereafter.

Like I said, I try hard to be a forgiving person. But in the case of the people closest to me who insult me, it seems that the only way to ease the pain is to think of the times I have been equally rash in my judgment myself.

An Amateur Birder's First Trip Report

June 19, 2005
American War Memorial
Fort Bonifacio
3:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Bird list by Ned Liuag


Trip Report:

I know it will not be all about mayas (those ubiquitous little brown birds), but I don’t know exactly what to expect about birding, which, to my surprise, is now a verb. I join the bird-watching (birding) trip anyway.

Our motley crew of 20 or so birdwatchers arrive at about 3 PM on June 19, 2005, at the American Memorial Park in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City. A briefing is given by the main birders Mike Lu and Ned Liuag on how to use the binoculars, how to avoid heatstroke (stay under shades), how not to scare the birds away, etc.

Slowly we walk on the downward cemented path of the park. We try to observe closely any movement and listen intently to any sound that we may encounter. A crew from the Probe Team is there to do some footage.

Soon we find ourselves being led on the tour by the birds themselves with their respective bird calls. “That’s a Golden-bellied Flyeater,” Mike, founder of the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines (WBCP), says of the high-pitched warbling issuing forth from the acacias or some other luxuriously crowned tree.

But we can't see exactly where that bird is. We crane our necks and there is only that mysterious trilling.

A few minutes go by and Mike says this won’t be a very productive day. Indeed, the weather is so humid that there must a heat wave. “It will be good if it rains a little,” explains Mike, “because you’ll see all the birds come out in hiding to dry themselves out.”

For the moment, we content ourselves with those we see flying from afar. White-breasted Wood Swallows, we find out, hover in abandon. “It’s easy to mistake them for hawks,” Ned says. “On a lucky day, you’ll also see hawks here.” But raptors (birds of prey), we also learn, are oftentimes bad for birding because they make the rest of the birds flee for cover. Meanwhile, other kinds of raptors – the metallic kind (airplanes!) – give us some moments of funny distraction on this bird trip. (The memorial park is a few kilometers away from the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.)

We trudge on the well-paved path of the Memorial. Pretty soon, a boisterous flock of what we’ll come to know as Yellow-vented Bulbuls come out diving and then flapping their wings over the tree crowns. Now you’re talking! Our guides show us a book illustration of this species and try to give a little backgrounder.

***

We move on to the other side of the park by padding on the soft Bermuda grass, avoiding the ghostly white, solid-marble crosses of some poor soldiers who had met their destiny in some ugly war of yore. Soon our effort is rewarded by the sight of an exquisite wonder – a Black-naped Oriole! This beauty has long pink beak and bright yellow plumage. (Its cry, though, does not match its looks; it goes “aaak…aaak”) It seems to be sunning itself like one vitamin D-deprived Scandinavian at the onset of summer.

I can’t help exclaiming, to the amusement of the veteran birders, that such a creature actually exists in our midst. “It’s locally called the kilyawan,” Nicky Icarangal, a club member volunteers. I can end my trip
right now and come home satisfied just for the sight of this one. “It’s not uncommon,” Mike soon adds, though, dousing my awestruck moment with cold water.

Well, you can start blaming such a blatant misconception on those pesky mayas, known in taxonomy as the brown Eurasian tree sparrow, for giving a bad rep to the rest of the Philippine birds.

Indeed, there are still the other equally engaging species waiting for us to discover. Flitting to and fro in the middle-growth darkness formed by the thick foliage of the trees is a Pied Trill which, Alice Villa-real, another
member, identifies. I am clueless about this one because I fail to track it down. The Chestnut Munias and Pygmy Woodpeckers, though, will be a total no-show.

Mike reassures us, however, that this is definitely not a typical day for them. In most days, he says, the birds are readily seen as this Metro-based birding club goes about its Sunday afternoon business.

Armed with the official field guide, Kennedy’s Birds of the Philippines, Mike and the other tour guides volunteer tidbits of natural history infos at unexpected times, so it’s good to stay close to them.

“For some reason, the kalachuchi trees don’t attract birds,” Mike says, for example, as he points this way and that. “Kalachuchi is an introduced species; maybe that explains it,” he shares his own hypothesis, to which I can only nod in agreement. “But the fire trees…,” he continues, “they are the ones that attract a lot of birds.”

Along the way as we crane our neck, we see a little, round, compact structure built on the junction of a bifurcating tree branch. Mike says it’s a Pied Fantail nest. True enough, there are fantails graciously flying in the undergrowth, picking red berries, or is it insects, along the way. Called Maria Capra by the locals, fantails are known to fan their tails indeed, like some perspiring ladies fanning themselves, as they move about on their perch from one direction to another.

***

We move again and position ourselves on a vantage point that gives us, um, a worm’s eye view of the big arch formed by the dead branches of two trees. Lo and behold! Perched on top of this arch are a pair of White-collared Kingfishers with bright, iridiscent aquamarine/blue wings, their ivory beaks pointing to opposite directions. They seem to refuse to stay a minute longer, though, as they espy us and the noisy commotion that we make upon our luck. Birding, we find out further, is also about the thrill of whether you stumble on a rare find or not. It’s probably one thing birders share in common with game hunters.

Our fellow birders are disappointed that they came in too late to see the elusive pair. Nevertheless, the kingfishers did not vanish without leaving their telltale cry of delight, maybe from a repast of a fish or two? (“No,” Ned counters, “these are inland kingfishers; they need not fish, they can live on insects.”)

As we stand under the 4:30 PM sun, another species from out of the blue announces its presence with a staccato of a song. “It’s a colasisi!” Mike himself almost gasps in surprise, and the rest of us crane our necks to trace this endemic parrot’s flight. The pretty colasisi is a green brightness punctuated by a short red-orange beak. That most probably explains why a “secret mistress” in Tagalog is named after this intriguing parrot variety.

You never know what comes up, really. The element of surprise rivals that of a movie thriller. We walk further on in this well-manicured, spankingly clean desolation (also called a cemetery) and, what do you know, we stumble into a pair of Zebra Doves (bato-bato), singing in a faint bubbly tune and walking like regular doves on the grass. Zebra Doves are so called because of the distinguishing stripes on their body and wings. I learn from Mike that there are four species of doves present in this place, a fast fact that can only make my round eyes grow even larger. I see the word “competition” suddenly emblazoned on the horizon, but Mike explains just as quickly that the grassy plain is wide enough for four different kinds to share or find and establish their own respective niches.

***

Our visit is capped by a longish waiting game. We sit on the stucco benches alongside the memorial edifice for the appearance of the Barred Rail, which is called that way because of the whitish ‘bars’ on its breast. “The bird is also known as tikling, from which name the native dance tinikling came from,” Ana Gonzales informs us. “This is the kind of moment that really needs a prayer,” I think to myself anxiously. But no sooner that I finish my wish than out comes the shy creature, emerging from the bushes like a chicken stealing some grain out of its home base.

I remember Mike saying a while back that other bird guides have the ability to imitate calls that make the birds come out, like a ventriloquist’s voice. The idea of throwing pieces of bread in the sea to attract the fishes likewise comes to mind, but these serious hobbyists (advocacy people is the better term), I figure, will disapprove of any activity that disturbs the natural way of life of the birds just so they come out for some nice photo ops. Alas, the one and only Barred Rail we see early in our watch will be our last, too, for this trip. No other such fowl follows suit.

Nevertheless we persist in hoping to see some other species still. The different melodies we’ve heard early on were just too numerous to match our current tally sheet of, how many, 10 species?

***

As we repair to our respective cars, a pair of introduced species, the Ring-necked Parakeet – lovers, we suppose - make us pause in the gathering dusk. The pair reportedly has been released here and apparently made this park their own home. They have nowhere else to go anyway; they are practically marooned in this urban ‘island’ by the towering Essensa Towers, among other behemoths in Fort Bonifacio and Ayala Ave. The birds’ shade of green obscures them because it mimics the shade of the leaves of the trees around. But when they fly away, it’s impossible to miss them as they make a whole racket of it. Such scene stealers! Mike reports that the security guards of this park claim that they used to see crested mynahs (martinez) here, too. Mike considers the possibility that the mynahs have been displaced by this exotic pair.

There seems to be some kind of a bird god because another member confirms next the presence of yet another native species, the Lowland White-eye. These are fast-moving birds that twitter noisily, making a lot of commotion as they hop from branch to branch, from tree to tree. I actually see one myself after tinkering with the adjustments of my binoculars, following at least one bird head until I get dizzy. A little patience is really key in bird-watching. Being finally rewarded for it, however, is certain to strengthen your resolve. It also makes you hope and anticipate to catch up on the next trip what you have missed on your last.

Meanwhile, it’s important to note that the ubiquitous little brown mayas are roundly ignored all along in this trip. “But when the migratory shrikes come in (from Japan),” Ned volunteers, “not a single maya can be seen.” Ned volunteers the factoid like some kind of consolation.

For this amateur birder, I can see why nothing beats observing birds in situ. You may not see them up close and personal as in an aviary - though a good scope will do the job in bird-watching tours, but you also won’t see them for who they really are – beautiful creatures with distinct ‘personalities.’ They make bird calls, pose in silhouettes that trigger a guessing game, forage for food, build nests, peck on red berries, preen like narcissistic and vain supermodels, play with each other like little kids, play hide-and-seek and snub their nosey visitors like they’re a bunch of peeping toms, poop and be like agents of seed dispersal, control insect
population and prevent them from becoming pests, dance in a courtship ritual, mate, and generally keep the world happy and gay.

Bird list:

Barred Rail - 2
Zebra Dove - 15+ scattered in pairs throughout the park but not more than four seen at any one time.
Colasisi - 1
Ring-Necked Parakeet - 5. One of the pair, possibly the male was feeding the other, possibly courtship behavior.
Pied Triller - 4+, singles encountered in the southern section
Yellow-Vented Bulbuls - 20+
Black-Naped Oriole - 1 calling in tree in south-eastern section of the park
Pied Bushchat - 2 males (one of which was a juvenile in the process of attaining its adult plumage)
Golden-Bellied Gerygone - heard singing throughout the park this afternoon. I didn't see any because of the lush foliage.
Tawny Grassbird - 1 singing in the hedge on the southern section of the park. This ID based on call. There must also have been a Striated Grassbird elsewhere just past the hedge.
Pied Fantail - 10+, pairs seen in trees
White-Breasted Woodswallow - 2
Lowland White-Eye - 12+

The crime of ‘pidginization’

It’s easy to understand why adherents of linguistic purity always wince at the mangling of language: The resulting pidgin version (or bastardization, take your pick) is like pirated DVD (“dibidi”) – workable, yes, but inferior in quality and illegally assembled. Of course, there’s no such thing as a pure language, strictly speaking, but we refer here to something close to it, and, in this little rambling of mine, I shall be sympathetic to the purists.

It wouldn't be hard to see why ‘pidginization’ is a crime, but how did an entire generation of the upper-middle classes become guilty of it en masse? There are two variants of this damaging phenomenon, according to Jessie Grace U. Rubrico, author of the paper The Metamorphosis of Filipino as National Language. These are the moderate Taglish and the “coñotic” Taglish. The latter is the subject of our, uh, analysis.

Konyo or conyo is a neologism that has evolved to mean ‘rich kids.’ It is a word loaded with rich subtexts: “Rich kids are not used to the sufferings of the hoi polloi.” “Rich kids talk to their parents in English.” “Rich kids are forbidden to talk in Tagalog or in any other vernacular because being an English-speaking person is a mark of success and social position.” “Rich kids are reared by devoted yayas who, unfortunately, can only speak to their wards in fractured Tagalog and English.” Conyo kids, mostly domiciled in Metro Manila, are often identified by their variant of English that introduces Tagalog words in a variety of eyebrow-raising ways.

The word konyo/conyo itself came from the vulgar Spanish coño ("cunt")—the radical shift in meaning having been lost on history. Conyo people, along with their speech, are often ridiculed in mainstream society, the constant subject of many a TV spoof. Conyo English is often formed by a phrase combining the English verb ‘make’ with the base form of a Tagalog verb. This phrase replaces perfectly acceptable English equivalents, and this is the point where the crime is committed. A classical example of conyo English is the following sentence: Let's make tusok the fishballs. (Let's pierce [onto the stick] the fishballs.)

Let us take a look at Kris Aquino as the archetypal conyo girl. Imagine her as a tempered version of "let's make tusok-tusok" Assumptionspeak and we easily come up with an ugly vision of tongues, all uniformly handicapped in both straight Tagalog and straight English. Imagine how this attack of Kris Aquino clones – our would-be businessmen, educators, media persons - realizing their handicap to be the height of cool by sheer association: coñotic Taglish = being reared by a yaya, etc. = upper socioeconomic status. Imagine all of them with their misplaced superiority - whether they’re aware of it or not, an entire army conducting its daily transactions in such a mangled yet amazingly confident manner. Imagine how the clones are proudly incapable of elegant words and proper usage in the vernacular, how they wear it as a badge of honor. And imagine how they are sure to foist their (double?) standard as the new norm on the general populace. This can only mean NOT speaking and acting conyo make you a marked man/woman for life. This can only mean the rest of young people trying hard to sound like Kris.

I bet everyone has heard President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's "make patol" sound bite. Certainly it was a phrase that came straight, neither out of the stern convent nuns’ lecture books nor from her parents, but one ultimately traceable to the schoolgirl yaya-speak she was aping? I thought that was a dangerous setting of bad example, though unintentional. It’s because the implicit message was a resounding: “If it’s good enough for the President, it’s good enough for me.” What if PGMA pursued that kind of lingo in her memos as official Malacañang policy?

The sporadic rants about how Philippine education lags behind most nations, when it was leading several decades ago, might want to point out to conyospeak as among the culprits.

The loss of the more elegant versions of the languages inevitably means the death of certain ways of in our communication (with our own and with outsiders), if not the death of an entire culture. Clarity of expression, the efficiency of communication, and the sheer beauty of being distinct and distinguished will be replaced by something gooey and amorphous, like a plate of unappetizing gruel. This bodes ill not just for the national literacy rate but for Filipino literature itself that Conrado de Quiros' quill is sure to froth at its tip. A new lingua franca may have been formed in conyospeak’s aftermath, but what about all those concepts and idioms lost? What about precision and context? Unique vocabularies? Talk about breeding mass confusion, to say nothing of an entire cultural identity lost for good.

The pidgin lingo has devolved into a situation where every rule is always accompanied by jaw-dropping exceptions. Think about the wild atrocities inflicted on syntax and diction as a result. This devolution of our diverse tongues into a bland sop is shameful, even violent, and yet it is looked upon as the height of cool. Take a look at these classic samples from Rubrico's book:

I'm so init na; make paypay me naman o. (I'm so hot; please fan me now.)
You make hintay here while I make sundo my kaibigan. (You wait here while I fetch my friend.)

In the age of globalization, pidginization may be seen as a sponge-like openness to the onslaught of useful new foreign concepts, but ironically the speakers of the new lingua franca turn out to be misfits unable to make intelligible subject-verb constructions in both English and Filipino without violating pronoun-antecedent agreement rules. And we’re talking here of leaders in every conceivable sector of society. A language straddling two kinds of tongues, both of which are evolving themselves, can only result in some kind of snafus, whether in monolingual or bilingual contexts. And who says a distinct version of the language cannot adapt itself to the pace of technological change? The French even go to the extent of ridding their French of Americanisms, but they remain the most cosmopolitan people as ever. Let us have all those nice things that come with the invasion, but, like endangered species, our native languages should be protected from such an awful bane as pidginization, or Tagalog and the rest of them Philippine languages will go the way of Latin and the dodo.

Look, we are not disparaging any sector of society here. It's not so much the problem of maids dictating the linguistic rules as much as the ruling classes' own doing, or undoing, thanks in large part to their status-consciousness. Languages die and are born in a matter of centuries. In the case of the coñotic infection, language is killed by the bullet train of contempt of one’s own heritage. The rate of language mortality today, according to a news report, has reached alarming levels. Are Filipino/Tagalog and the other Philippine languages (as we know them) next? It wouldn’t have been so agonizing a question if we saw an improved version being born and not an embarrassing corruption that coñotic has come to be.

Alas, language is essentially a function of power, and whatever the economic elite holds to be the norm becomes the norm for the rest of us.

We’ve mentioned globalization. In the eyes of language purists, this is just another form of colonization. This time, it’s neither the wrongful use of the cross nor Coca Cola that’s the culprit, but the emergence of the call center. No conquistadores were on the scene, no Yankees mouthing off dubious agendas; there’s only the inexorable march of the globalization of (un)fair trade, the “outsourcing” of (mostly) unwanted jobs to the lowest bidder abroad (dirt-cheap Third World labor – that’s us).

This time, batches and batches of newly grads are indoctrinated via accent neutralization and American pop culture trivia. (“What’s the capital of Nevada?”) The banner of a call center succinctly puts it this way: “Prom dis… to this” and the retraining of diction is supposed to be a good thing.

The colonization seems to have been thorough and complete. And yet even industry recruiters claim that they’re having a hard time hiring applicants conversant enough in English – yes, right in a country that prides itself to have placed #3 in the number of English speakers.

Thankfully, though, not everyone is happy with the invasion of the pseudo-"Valley Girl" or "Noo Yawk" accent. Certain Gen-X’ers, neo-nationalists attuned to their crystal balls, have been conscientious enough to upend the naked ‘power grab,’ by insisting to write in their respective vernaculars without shame. They bone up on the written stuff of their dead folks and set up their own respective websites. Thankfully, too, globalization has an unwitting way of favoring uniqueness in the spiral of such a soul-less culture blender. Today, to be an odd-man-out can be the new cool. With a kind of counter-culture thus espoused, pidginization is hopefully pushed back to its rightful status as a heinous crime.

(An edited version appeared in Fudge magazine, July 2005 issue)