CE Virus Has Mutated

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Now, why has the problem grown worse? The virus has mutated. Just browse on your FB wall and you'd see folks saying their own versions of English that look and sound more like alien tongues. I mean extraterrestrial. Despite the fact that English is a second language to us. From kinder to college, there's always the English subject to keep us literate. But are we?

The trend in Tagalog TV programs today made it all much worse. They say it's to endear the national language more among youths. Well, so far youths are far from becoming expert speakers of Tagalog or Filipino. What develops instead is a strange Pinoy millennial lingo derived from street Taglish and gay slang which authentic Filipino speakers barely understand. And the CE virus has spread. CE as in Carabao Englsh.

I miss the days when most TV programs were in English and we still spoke good, traditional Tagalog as kids. We enjoyed Filipino classic movies in the early afternoons where we heard actors and actresses of old engaging in rich, poetic Tagalog dialogues. That's besides the nice, archaic local background scenes unmistakably Pinoy. Some of us still had terrible English grammar then but not the kind you see today.

So what happened?

As school administrator back in the 1990s, I interviewed several English teachers and had them write essays. I was shocked and shaken by their carabao English, even revolting in my stomach. Who taught them that? And to think they were English majors. What more if they had it as a minor subject? And how many more teachers in the country are like that? These teachers were LET passers! What's happening? Is it the end of the world? Climate change? Global warming? Fake food from China?

But I was also like that once upon a time. My friends and classmates in grade school made fun of my grammar and lines of thought. I thought "sugar" then was a magic healing potion you used to "make the medicine go down." I watched too much Mary Poppins, I guess. And I got the lyrics of my favorite songs comically wrong and coming out with weird, funny ideas instead. I was the laughing stock of my peers.

But I managed to fix that. I determined to catch up with my English and Math during high school (especially Algebra and Physics) so that come college I'd be fit to be a top agent of the British intelligence service MI-6 and pass for another double O7 agent. Seriously. I imitated Roger Moore's diction (and also tried to look like him, but this part didn't work). That's how I beat my carabao English. I found the Carabao English cure that Pinoy bloggers and teachers especially, would find very helpful.

Later on I tried imitating how American actors talked, like Mel Gibson and Paul Walker. I noted well how they constructed their sentences and their pronunciation. The result? I was the top in my speech class when I underwent training as a call center agent. Our brand then was Riders where we assisted American drivers in the US find their way when they were lost on their highways. They thought we were Canadians. It's an effective way of improving your grammar and pronunciation--imitating the way actors talk in movies.

No matter if the CE virus has spread, there's still hope if we just have more English TV programs. Let's put them back and minimize the stupid local soaps flooding our TV programs. I learned a lot from Jake and the Fat Man, Airwolf, Hawaii 5-0, Magnum PI, Murder She Wrote, and the rest. Plus movies. Please try this, especially if you're an English teacher. Take pity on your pupils.

And I'm planning on starting an e-book on Carabo English Cure, the first 50 of which I plan to give away to my first subscribers here. You want to pre-order a free copy while I'm still doing it? Or, you need my CEC free lessons? Then email me at caraboenglishcure@gmail.com.