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Wika Notes 01a

Tagalog lessons with an attitude
Note 1: I’m starting a new series—or rather, resuming an old series—on Tagalog. I dedicate this series to my increasing number of foreign friends who want to learn, are starting to learn, or have acquired some fluency in, Tagalog. It’s also for my fellow Filipinos who want to refresh and deepen their knowledge of the language. I decided to resume this series (I started it in 2001, through an e-group named Wika) because I wanted to explore novel and more interesting ways of learning it than the usual boring lectures and drills.
Note 2: Take notice that I call the language Tagalog, not Filipino or Pilipino. For hundreds of years, the people speaking it as native tongue were called Tagalog. At present, the Philippines has more than a hundred languages, from Ivatan to Tausug. Thus I prefer to talk about Philippine languages (in the plural) rather than the Philippine language (in the singular). We do have an officially-proclaimed and widely-accepted language called Pilipino or Filipino, but it’s nothing more than modernized Tagalog. Call it Pilipino (or Filipino) if you will, but I’m calling it Tagalog. That doesn’t make me less patriotic than you. Gets? Continue reading “Wika Notes 01a”
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Fake Spanish freaks, stay away!

dictionary image
I threw a little farkin' title up there, so I'll have your attention when I lash away at ignorant mongers of fake loan words from Spain. Sometimes it's a simple matter of looking up the word in the dictionary, for the correct range of meanings, or if it exists at all as a word.

No, this isn’t an ultra-nationalist or racist rant, and sorry if the title sounds that way. In fact, right now I’m having a long and lovely affair with (or rather, rediscovery of) Spanish culture and language. I threw a little farkin’ title up there, so I’ll have your attention when I lash away at ignorant mongers of fake loan words from Spain.

Continue reading “Fake Spanish freaks, stay away!”

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I refuse to vet and to curate

I don’t know how the new techie terms began to overpower our common vocabulary. But here they are, overwhelming us like an unannounced summer deluge. You can no longer get out of your house without wading into their treacherous deeps.

A high priest of data abracadabra
Unlike this ancient high priest of the Temple, the modern high priests of the online world are expert in vetting and curating and leveraging.

You still wondering what I’m talking about? I’ll give you three examples.

Vet. Time was when an animal doctor vetted a brood of poultry or a stock of cattle. Which meant, basically, that the poultry or cattle population were kept healthy by selecting those stocks that passed a certain criteria, by preventing disease outbreaks, and by culling out those that are unhealthy.

Now you see the term being bandied about everywhere, from public governance (“A committee was assigned to vet the Cabinet appointees…”) and corporate HR (“He vetted his staff closely…”) and to data (“Make sure to always vet your sources.”) In short, appointees are no longer screened. Staff support is no longer evaluated. And data sources are no longer graded. Nowadays, they are all vetted.

Continue reading “I refuse to vet and to curate”