The Construct

Author’s Note: Did this quite hastily the day after the SONA. Forgot to click the Publish button.

I’ve been looking forward to Noynoy’s SONA not in a strictly political standpoint, but as a discourse analyst. Having wrestled with GMA’s nine SONAs, I’m intensely curious about the linguistic profile of Noynoy’s. Now that it has been delivered, I can give it a go.

Tagalugin mo kasi.The SONA contains 1,256 unique words with more than 60% of which are Filipino words. As such, analyzing the SONA’s text through existing semantic tagging software will be problematic since the software will fail to accurately tag 60% of the data. Interestingly, the “at” string, which can occur as both Filipino (as conjunction) and English (as preposition) only occurs as the Filipino conjunction.

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Tomorrow, Gloria Arroyo will once again deliver her State of the Nation Address. What’s in store for her audience remains to be heard but as always, we can always expect it to be one heck of a day.

Classes have been suspended at all levels but only a few students will be listening with a critical ear. Most of the working population will go about their routines. Some will hear it, some will not. Personally, my TV’s busted to I’ll have to rely on the Internet for updates.

Commonwealth Avenue will again be a circus with usual clash of riot police and militant activists. It has always been a great spectacle but tomorrow, Iglesia ni Kristo will also be celebrating their anniversary so we can all expect the expansive stretch of concrete to be awash with more color.

Unless Arroyo has some big announcement (snap elections, Martial Law, or Con Ass), I can only expect it to be more of the same – a speech from president trying to quantify her successes through numbers and qualify them with anecdotes. Some would say, the real SONA is on the streets – the cold hard facts of life compared to the more than optimistic view of an unpopular president.

Well, I say the true state of the nation is in every Filipino. Your nation is only as good as how your life in it is.

UPDATES:
1. Word Cloud
2. Full Text via Tonyo Cruz

Sheesh. And I put the Matrix DVD on pause for a few minutes for again, a string of balderdash. It’s quite fitting I paused it just as Morpheus said “[The Matrix] is the world that has been pulled over your eyes, to blind you from the truth.”

Come to think of it, it’s the seventh time she strutted her stuff in front of Congress (and live TV) to feel oh-so-smug and revel in her “accomplishments.” Why not? There’s all the goodwill, progress, and grace that her reign has bestowed upon citizens of our great nation to be happy about. Hehehehuuurk…

Oh sure, talk about being first world in twenty years. Hey, why not? If that happens, I might create an offshore business elsewhere and force third-world kids to work in my sweatshops tailoring my branded designer jockstraps. Or possibly gene-splice the whale’s ambergris-producing DNA to them third-world kids, breed them, and sell their produce to France.

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If killing people isn’t a crime, I would have a good scalp count by now. While it’s pretty easy for me to give myself reason to kill, handing out unsolicited spoilers would be a crime against me that warrants death. And I guess for a lot of people too. Just read on the feel the sheer murderous rage flowing through this person‘s veins.

Oh yes, this could apply to the dozens of people who had their whole Harry Potter experience smothered by uncouth people handing out unsolicited spoilers. Talk about having loud mouths and total disrespect to fiction. I can really care less about this Harry Potter thing since I am not too big a fan to actually care, but the thought of that moment of suspended disbelief shattered by loudmouths makes by blood boil. But, say, if someone gave out the ending to Prison Break without me getting to watch it first, now I’m definitely going medieval on that person’s ass.

These people should have bullets popped in the back of their skulls. No judge. No jury (Heck, we don’t have juries anyway). Straight to execution.

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