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LINK: ‘Note Verbale‘, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Section) - 18 November 2007 Issue

As a branch of knowledge particularly in the field of linguistics, semantics has reference to the study of meaning.

Human expression is unique because communication is effectively done in the form of spoken and written words called language. Other living creatures merely rely on non-verbal expressions, gestures or even instincts which of course are also subsumed as other modes of human expression.

Like the human beings that they serve, languages live, die, move from place to place and change with time. Of these languages, English is perhaps the most dominant, extensive and widely-used globally.

This article attempts to look at the context of the English words home, love, politics, and happiness as they reflect or affect rightly or wrongly the Filipino thought.

A line in a popular song says that a “house is not a home”.  True enough because a home goes beyond the physical structure where people are sheltered. A home indicates ties, kinship or some degree of relationship. Thus, it is unacceptable, if not awkward, to say ‘go (to) house early’ in lieu of ‘go home early’. But when what is involved is severance of ties, the expression ‘get out of the home’ is never used. A house is not a home because they represent different polarities especially in the context of the Filipino culture where a family is deemed as an inviolable social institution.

Filipinos love to love. But many times they simply ‘fall in love’, inadvertently forgetting that there is a better option, to ‘grow in love’. Love is supposedly an affair of both the heart and the mind, for one without the other could be annihilating. The pursuit of love could understandably entail some personal sacrifice, burden or pain. For many Filipinos though, these tragedies define the unwarranted measure whether love is pure and true. But love should evoke a beautiful thought and a wonderful feeling. And perhaps the only way to do it is to make love evolve and develop as bits and pieces of cherished moments until it bears the fruit it rightly deserves. Growing in love requires a serious, conscious and mutual effort to make the relationship work. Falling in love accepts unilateral desperation as a matter of fact. No wonder, there seems to be so much bickering and strained relationships nowadays in Philippine society because Filipinos love to fall in love.

Criticisms in public governance are always viewed as “playing politics”.  Many Filipinos and observes view politics as the root cause of the country’s political, social and economic maladies.  But politics is not an evil.  As a concept, the word could either refer to the social relationship of the governed and those in power, or the study of political structures of the state, or the profession devoted to governance and political affairs, or the opinion the public holds with respect to political questions. Thus, politics intends to bridge and harmonize the gap between the government and the people towards the attainment of state goals and principles. Perhaps, the country needs more politics that it has now for public servants or functionaries to serve their constituency well without being insensitive to public opinion.

Some say that Filipinos are among the happiest people in the world despite the crisis and the difficulties that befall them.  In a sense this could be true because “to be happy” is not really dependent on material possessions or physical conditions. Happiness is a state or condition of mind. An individual could be among the poorest of the poor, or the most uneducated, or even terminally ill and still be happy. Happiness only demands acceptance and contentment at the barest level. Happiness should not be mistaken with pleasure normally represented by the usual trappings of life. The latter is temporary while the former is more or less permanent.

The whole point is for individuals to mean exactly what they think and say in what they do for verbal human expression to serve its purpose.

LINK: ‘Note Verbale‘, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Section) - 22 April 2007 Issue

“At the age of 38, I decided to step out of the rat race of New York, join the Peace Corps and board a plane for Manila. This blog is dedicated to my adventures in the Philippines for the next two years. Wish me luck.” This is how Julia Campbell, an American Peace Corps volunteer whose dead body was found several days ago by rescuers in a remote village in Mountain Province, described herself when she started her blog in December 2004.

During the past couple of years, the growth of blogs in cyberspace has been remarkable and phenomenal. 

Leading blog tracker, Technorati, reported that as of March 2007 there are more than 70 million blogs in the blogosphere, a term originally coined jokingly, they say, by American blogger Brad L. Graham in 1999, which has reference to the community of bloggers. Technorati reported that there are at least 1.5 million blog posts each day and approximately 1.4 new blogs are created every second.

For those not in the know, a blog, an abbreviated version of the term “web log”, is an Internet-generated journal where the user may write, edit, and post entries, usually displayed in reverse chronological order, about practically anything from facts to fiction, from news to mere announcements, from commentaries or opinions to personal experiences and share them to the on-line community to view, read, link, or comment on. The term “web log” was coined by American blogger, Jorn Barger in 1997 while the short form “blog” was the idea of a certain Peter Merholz.

Blogs are actually the digital evolution of traditional journals and diaries, where people keep a running account of their personal lives. With the facility and convenience of the Internet to capture different media formats, several types of blogs were also born, like ‘photoblogs’ for photographs, ‘vlog’ for videos, ‘podcasting’ for audios, ‘moblog’ for those generated by mobile devices, ‘splogs’ for that pernicious spam blogs, ‘slogs’ for a slice or section of a regular business website, or a ‘blawgs’ for legal blogs.

From being a mere social network of personal and individual online journals and diaries more than a decade ago, the blogosphere is increasingly re-defining mass media, human interaction and global culture today.

Blogs have the capability of shaping and even influencing public opinions and events. Blogs are easy repository of desired information or even entertainment, in the same vein that they could be the root cause of conflict and antagonism. Some fortunate bloggers earn good money from their blogs through on-line advertisements or by publishing a ‘blook’, the term used for published books based on blogs.
 
It is not difficult to understand why blogs are consistently and aggressively becoming a very popular mode of human expression. There is no other form of public and mass media nowadays that could compete with blogs in terms of facilitating, propagating and pushing the exercise of freedom of speech and expression beyond the limits of costs, regulations and censorship.

Blogs are largely anarchic and generally beyond the ambit of prior restraint and the usual restrictions obtaining in mainstream mass media, although bloggers are certainly not immune from criminal liability or certain legal responsibilities by reason of their posts. Each blogger therefore becomes responsible for his or her acts in cyberspace.

On February 22, 2007, a court in Alexandria convicted an Egyptian blogger for insulting Islam and the Egyptian president on his writings in the Internet.

Former flight attendant Ellen Simonetti of North Carolina was fired by Delta Airlines for inappropriate entries in her blog that documented her personal life and experiences. In 2006, however, she successfully published a book about her blog entitled: “Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight Attendant: The Queen of Sky Blog”.

Early this month, Malaysian Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin was quoted to have said that bloggers should not be exempt from the same controls as the mainstream media, and accused them of using lies to overthrow government.

Blogging is about human freedom.  And it would be here to stay and further revolutionize human expression.

LINK: ‘Note Verbale‘, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Section) – 11 February 2007 Issue

Romantic love is the usual focus of public attention on Valentine’s Day. The occasion is one big commercial event that provides lovers the social amenities, if not the ambiance, to exchange tokens of affection one way or the other in the observance of the occasion.

Theoretically, romantic love is distinguished from other forms of love in the sense that it is driven by both emotional and sexual desires. They say that romantic love is typically the result of a random encounter, oftentimes irrepressible, not purely predicated but always end up on sexual desires, and, if requited, could be the basis of long-term or life-long commitment, like marriage, in the same manner that it could result in illicit intimacies.

Both emotional and sexual reciprocation are key ingredients in every romance. Take away the emotional aspect and love is transformed to mere eroticism. Take away the sexual motivation and love would take another form, perhaps platonic or familial.

Since reciprocation is almost always expected in romantic love, what happens if the love is unrequited?

Many people who had unrequited love can attest that the experience could be tortuous, if not traumatic on both sides especially if the love-struck person develops obsessive behaviors, resort to stalking and even aggression. Others would just ignore the emotional distress by simply enjoying that loving feeling, which eventually will end up also in frustrations and a deep feeling of resentment, if the love is ultimately rejected or remained unrequited for a long time.

BBC News in a February 6, 2005 interactive report declared: “Unrequited love can be a ‘killer’. The news item cited the findings of expert psychologists that many people are “destabilized by falling in love or suffer on account of their love being unrequited”, which could lead to certain manic conditions, depression, elevated mood, inflated self-esteem, and in extreme cases, suicide attempts. People could die from a broken heart or get into a state of despair and hopelessness.  Some would suffer from an extreme state of physical exhaustion, tearfulness and insomnia.

Of course, there are also situations of unrequited love that conclude in happy endings but it is almost a fairy tale. 

In fact, the usual tragedy and pain attributed to unrequited love has made it a popular idea or themes of music and literary works for centuries. Roxanne of Cyrano de Bergerac in the play of noted French poet and dramatist, Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand, or the Dulcinea of Don Quixote in the novel written by Spanish novelist, poet and playwright, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, are classical works that depict unrequited love.

But is it possible for a person whose love is unrequited to just show altruism or simply love another person selflessly without any anticipation or expectation of a reciprocal emotional fervor?

If love is familial (or based on blood ties or common ancestry) or platonic (or based on a deep friendship minus the sexual element), it is a non-issue whether or not love is requited because the more profound a person expresses his affection without expecting any thing in return is nobler.

The same situation may not obtain though in a desired romantic love because of the difficulty to attain sexual submission if there is no emotional response from the person simply met in a random encounter.

There is certainly nothing like having that loving feeling. But if romantic love is initially unrequited or maybe remains unrequited, it is obviously prudent to make logic or reason prevail over the heart to avoid possible state of desperation, or worse self-destruction.

This day of the hearts, remember that it is always better to ‘grow’ in love than to ‘fall’ in love.