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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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.

You might remember those sort of “controversial” posts I had on language and prescriptivism (the one commenting on the Bebigerls and another commenting on one of Mr. Jose Carillo’s posts regarding the prescriptivist versus descriptivist debate). As language studies scholar, I do swear by descriptivism, since as a an applied linguist, I have to write about language as it’s being used rather than how it “should” be used.

But I do acknowledge the role of prescriptivism today especially in language teaching. I know that some colleagues in fields such as literature and creative writing do swear by the masterful and artful use of the language. Most have minimal to zero tolerance for grammar errors and lapses. And I do acknowledge their points. In my opinion, if even only for the basis of achieving mutual intelligibility, there is premium to teaching and learning a “standard” English.

And I do concern myself with this thought as of late. I need to bone up on my academic writing. I’ve been trying to write my thesis for the past couple of months only to find myself lacking the patience and discipline to write longer stretches of academic discourse. Years doing web content writing have transformed my writing style from being clear and concise to curt, disorganized, and fluffy.

And I concede that I have to go with a prescriptivist if only to remedy my writing style for the purposes of my thesis. I have to revisit Strunk and White and the MLA Handbook. I even grabbed a few books on style and usage including a couple of Mr. Carillo’s books which I know are excellent local materials on the subject while at the bookstore earlier.

While my position as a language scholar will always be descriptivist, I do maintain that it’s not about choosing one over the other but selecting which one is apt given the context.

Oh. Interesting that I found several David Crystal titles available at National Bookstore. And it was funny to see them located next to Lynne Truss books.

Had quite an interesting discussion regarding Gricean pragmatics this morning and had me thinking about . It’s funny how all of these theories and books can be filtered down and summarized to just a few of their core sections. With H.P. Grice, many linguistics majors just remember him with his Co-operative Principle.

In a nutshell, the idea goes that to achieve mutual understanding in a conversation, communicators often follow abide by four maxims and these are:

• Quantity – be informative
• Quality – be truthful
• Relation – be relevant
• Manner – be clear and concise

The thing is, reality has it that even by flouting (breaking) these maxims, we are able to achieve creating all sorts of meaning and to some extent a mutual understanding because of our ability to interpret conversational implicatures. Sarcasm for example (though we have to admit that not all people are “sensitive” enough to interpret this).

As far as online discourse go, many constantly flout most if not all of these maxims (some all at once). Take social media and blogging for example. How much information do we convey to our audience? How truthful are we? How relevant is our message? How clear and concise are these messages? Survey the statuses of friends on Facebook or people’s tweets and you’d struggle to make sense of most of them. And still, the Web thrives with our discourses.

Sure there are quite a lot of cases of misunderstanding because of varying interpretations but we just have to deal with understanding’s evil twin.