EVERY SUNDAY afternoon, the “Buzz,” a show business magazine on ABS-CBN
hosted by Kris Aquino and Boy Abunda, carries a regular feature called
“Tigilan Ako/ Stop Me” where up-and-coming sexy actresses are caught
unawares spewing grammatical abominations during interviews. After
the footage of each unfortunate faux pa is shown, the honest mistake
is replayed ad nauseam, with a hysterically scornful laughter playing
in the background and a gay reporter, in a “screaming queen” voice,
throwing witty jeers at the actress’s ignorance of the English language.
The grammatical lapses in the footages are mostly true horrors. After
salivating for the sexy stars, any literate male must necessarily
experience a momentary ebbing of the libido upon seeing the actresses
murder the language. Ranging from subject-verb agreement to incorrect
tenses, the mistakes are indeed elementary that any self-respecting
high school student should be able to identify them readily. What
makes the segment farcical is the fact that the sexy actresses deliver
those blatant grammatical lapses with great bravura and in a feigned
coño accent that, had one not known better, one would think
they were weaned on Emily Post and the BBC.
The Sunday magazine confirms, what we have known all along, that
our show business people, the sexy stars being a subspecies, are a
bunch of word-butchers. These embarrassing episodes are also, mind
you, not limited to sexy stars of dubious celebrity. The Philippine
Daily Inquirer’s entertainment section regularly prints a congeries
of bloopers from almost every star in the firmament of Philippine
show business. One star, for example, claims that she is “sweatening.”
Another asks, “Did he came yesterday?” When asked of her racial pedigree,
another star, desperately trying to emphasize her mestiza value, replied,
that she is “half-Filipino, half-American, half-Spanish.” Surely,
a marvel of miscegenation.
Even the social circle of Kris Aquino, the venerable doyen of English-speaking
mestizas on TV, is not blameless. Pops Fernandez, during an interview
with "Saksi" on prime time TV, was discussing her marital
life when she casually dropped in her accented English of the Loyola
Heights variety her parenthetical phrase, “for Martin and I.” Now
the cloddishness of our sexy stars are easily understandable and forgivable.
After all, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. Some of them, I understand,
come from bedraggled clubs straight from GRO work and a nightly diet
of hors d’oeuvre and alcoholic drinks is not exactly conducive to
furthering one’s linguistic skills. But this particular gross violation
of the English language comes from the woman formerly known as Mrs.
Martin Nievera, the same Martin Nievera who, nowadays, is everyman’s
beau ideal of someone approaching English nirvana.
Exactly what kind of literacy does our show business celebrities
foist on their unsuspecting public? Why do our actresses and actors
risk foisting illiteracy on an unsuspecting public and insist on speaking
English rather than switch to Filipino? And more importantly, why
do we poke fun at their mistakes?
English is the lingua franca of most of the half-breed elite in the
Philippines. Ramos’s championing of the free market, even while crushing
portions of the country’s poor, have launched the ambitions of a considerable
number of people of someday joining the ranks of the upper middle
class and the rich. For these people who are suddenly awashed in cash,
there is a pressure to adopt the lifestyles of the rich of this country.
They now have the house, the car, the bank accounts; by all means,
they must have the language.
For most people in show business the same thing applies. If one can
not be glamorous and posh, one can always fake being glamorous and
posh. For sexy actresses this pressure is doubly intense because the
semi-respectability of their status demands that they continually
differentiate themselves from lowly untutored hawkers of cheap flesh;
the boundary between the glossy FHM and the risqué Toro
is thin and must be continually observed lest the distinction blur
all together. Thus, the clumsy resort to English.
An incident at the Buzz is particularly instructive. Belinda Bright,
who claims to be a coed at the upscale De La Salle University, was
promoting a movie in her posh English of the coño variety when
toward the end she classified her new movie as belonging to the genre
of film noire which she pronounced, erroneously, as film nwa without
the r sound at the end, as one would correctly say moi. Aquino, bumptious
and a little condescending, grilled the sexy actress, telling the
audience several times she knew of no such word before acknowledging
the correct pronunciation with the r sound. The embarrassment for
Bright is palpable. Anyone with a heart can commiserate with her for
having given herself away on national television. (The above shows
why Henry Higgins, in Pygmalion, is a genius. He is able to remedy
this particular handicap because he doesn’t just dress up Eliza Dolittle
in a ball gown and get her to use a knife and fork properly: he teaches
her to speak posh English—to use a kind of voice—with an accent and
pronunciation indistinguishable from the real thing.)
Another case I saw, the mother of one actress, when prompted to deliver
a message to her daughter via telephone patch, read a long Hallmark-type
English note in dull monotone. The telephone patch was supposed to
be impromptu but the mother’s reading of her message left no doubt
to the TV viewers that she was, in fact, reading a prepared message
rather than improvising one. The mother did not only manage to sound
stupid, she was by all indications insincere in her protestations
of love for her daughter.
But through all these embarrassments and pretensions, there is a
greater illiteracy at work here—an illiteracy of the soul. Jettisoning
the Filipino language on our way to upper-class bliss, especially
with English of such ignominious incompetence, is misplaced snobbism
and truckling ingratiation with the elite in this country.
With Philippine show business people on the lead, just how long can
impressionable young people resist the temptation of sounding cool
at the price of mangling the English language? When the quality of
English instruction in public schools on a free fall and the pressure
to speak it on the rise, this is what we get in our sad state of affairs:
abominable English delivered with coñotic bravura. The inordinate
influence of young stars on the youth is marginalizing the Filipino
language, now increasingly viewed as a preserve of the political leftists,
the intellectuals at the University of the Philippines and the irredeemably
jologs. Woe to one who belongs to all three.
When the sexy stars in the “Buzz” commit flagrant grammatical errors,
they should be berated for their pretensions; the lapses themselves
are forgivable and should not be mocked as what the “Buzz” has been
doing for some time now. The ignorant person, after all, can be enlightened
except if he is totally stupid or demented. The Catholic Church has
a beautiful phrase for this: “invincible ignorance,” referring to
a state of paganism that is forgivable because the word of Christ
was not available to it. Such a phrase should also apply to our ungrammatical
actors—and to the rest of us who. The ignorance is forgivable because
these actresses probably did not have the economic resources to master
Fowler. If the Church can forgive invincible ignorants like Plato
and Socrates, how can Boy Abunda and Kris Aquino harden their hearts
so?
The more decent stance should be one of forgiveness and correction,
not mockery. The memorable advise in the opening lines of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” comes to mind: "Whenever you feel
like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this
world haven't had the advantages that you've had." But in our confused
world of bilingual education and class pretensions, the “Buzz” becomes
arbiter of the English language every Sunday, dispensing disdain upon
the unlettered members of our benighted realm.
