The Construct

Facebook has been abuzz lately with the jejemon phenomenon. It appears that someone has finally decided to label those who use a local variety of leetspeak as “jejemons,” which, I believe is a blend of “jeje” (the variety’s phonologically-conditioned orthographic representation of the laugh “hehe”) and Pokemon (itself a blend of “pocket” and “monster”).

Since traditional media has now found social network trends newsworthy, the jejemon phenomenon (jejemonon?) warranted a writeup from Inquirer.net calling the so-called jejemons the new jologs.

So who are these jejemons anyway? I’d hate to cite UrbanDictionary.com but based on what appears to be Facebook consensus, the jejemons are the breed of computer-mediated communicators who use a hybrid code which draws from jologspeak, leetspeak, textese, and gamer language. The code is manifested through their use of media such as SMS and the Internet.

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And we complain about the “poor” command of English our graduates have. There’s no reason to play chicken and egg on a problem that is caused by many wrongs on so many different levels. But one thing that the academe shouldn’t do is make matters worse by implementing obviously detrimental policies.

I just recently heard from my good friend Randwin (a fellow MA student, former classmate, and instructor at UP Los Baños) that their administration has allegedly mandated their division to turn all English GE courses to large classes of 160 students or more.

Any ESL teacher would see the flaw in such an arrangement. The lower the student ratio is, the better. For starters, it allows for more interactions between student and teacher. The teacher will also be more capable of monitoring each student’s progress.

Grading 25 papers on the merits of the good old Content, Oragnization, Style, Grammar and Mechanics is already a huge task. Imagine doing that for 160.

Obviously, some people at Los Baños are not too happy about the matter. Here’s Randwin’s take on the matter.

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I feel so old in saying “How I wish we had the learning resources kids have these days.” The Internet and the availability of information has, I think, has pretty much the same effect as, say the photocopying machine or the word processor. I just can’t imagine writing a 100-page thesis

Just last night, my younger university colleague, Raymond and I were sharing a few of the ideas that are quite interesting research areas for us language scholars. Then we came to the issue of access to the latest ideas and resources. How can one do relevant research when we’re still quoting 20 year-old materials.

Wikipedia is up-to-date but still questionable for most as a “citable” resource. But who needs Wikipedia if you can get the actual ebooks and book scans online for free? Sites like Gigapedia (which has been online for more than a year now, wonder why only very few UP people know about it) have a better catalog for recent books than local libraries.

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It really is a hard thing to come up with something original these days. That proverbial bucket in the sea of knowledge is a constant bitching reminder that no matter how much you read and learn, you won’t be able to match the billions of Google’s indexed pages.

Makes you wonder how difficult it really is to write a dissertation these days. I consider myself pretty well-read given my age for my field locally. And yet there’s still a lot of material that I am aware of and have not read, and material that that I haven’t even thought existed despite the thousands of bibliographic entries I’ve browsed. I hate to admit it but I’ve just recently come across Steven Pinker who is, by specialization a psychologist, but anchors many of his arguments on language.

And boy, how I hate myself for only reading about him just now. Quite a lot of my interests in language studies are actually dealt by his works – game theory, pragmatics, and even physics in language. Yes, physics! (Check this video of his talk at Google where he discusses ideas from his book The Stuff of Thought.)

That had me thinking about that joke I had in our graduate class in Semantics about establishing a field on “quantum linguistics.” I argued that deixis and tense can be related to the concepts of space and time. When I was joking about it, I wondered if that was an original idea. Turns out, it isn’t. According to Pinker there’s “space in our prepositions, matter in nouns, time tenses, and causality in verbs.” Humble pie for me.

Still, this has me thinking. How much original and world-changing thought can be conjured up by an ordinary mind? Perhaps that’s the reason why God only sends a genius like Einstein once a century. Maybe the world won’t just be able to deal with such revolutionary ideas if they come plenty and quick in between. The rest of us are just plain bound for mental mediocrity.

Lake Superior State University recently posted a list of their banished words for 2010.

The list includes words in popular use right now such as “unfriend,” “tweet,” and “sexting.” The list continues to argue in favor of prescriptivism. Promoting a standard language to address miscommunication is one thing. “Banishing” words is something else.

What I don’t understand is that LSSU has an English program which I expect would at least acknowledge language change as part of linguistic development.

It’s interesting for such an institution to offer a totally different stance compared to institutions that acknowledge linguistic creativity like Oxford with its Word of the Year.

And guess what was 2009′s Word of the Year?