I remember when

My mother would scream at the TV, “Came to the Philippines! You go there, you come here!” She was again emphatically correcting Jeanne Young on “Spin a Win”, who was just telling the story on how she “went” to the Philippines so many years ago. The affectations of Jeanne Young’s American twang didn’t impress my mom, an English teacher of the old school kind.

“Children are listening. You are teaching them the wrong things!”

My mom would surely skewer me, the way I’ve mangled the English language with my colloquial and highly informal style. Imagine what she’d do if I ever texted “d2 na me.”

The rules have changed. That’s for sure. But still I cannot bring myself to text “Hir na me, wer na u?” I’d rather “D2 nako, sankana?”, or the English equivalent “M here, wru?” That, somehow, doesn’t sound so awful.

Maybe I am just an old dog that refuses to learn new tricks. I still adamantly refuse to drop the “O” in “Ok”. What’s another three keystrokes? “K” is just too lazy, if you ask me. And I am often guilty of still texting full words, correct spelling and syntax, that is, for as long as I can confine it to the 160 character limit. One peso is one peso, after all.

We take care when it costs.

The scrolls of documents in the Vatican archive, all hand-written in elaborate fonts, are almost all without errors. They didn’t have MicroSoft Word back then. No one button to undo what has been recklessly done. The scribes took care, because paper was worth its weight in gold.

I live in a housing complex where I am advised to “Please observed cleanliness.” Somebody actually put paint to metal and wrote that. It was a fine job, if you can overlook the grammar. I cringe, the sound of my mom’s voice ringing in my ears. Perhaps I should lobby for the hardware to charge more for paint.

Driving through Bataan and I am actually tempted to gouge out my own eyes tortured by all the misplaced apostrophes. “Crab’s for sale” says one sign. “Crabs’ for sale” corrects the competition. Doctor Evil, scratching his ill-timed imaginary quotation marks in the air, has got nothing on these locals.

I make no claims to perfection. But I try. I take care, because I know words cost. And more than that, I believe in the value of what I have to say.