Mangge' iyo-mu draf?
I am back on Guam and I am loving it.
The daily slaughtering of the English language is so exciting and refreshing. I really detest this language, and how cumbersome and evil it is. But what I detest more than its usage is the way in which people attempt to defend and map out what is proper about it (the same thing happens with Chamorro, and that is something I detest even more (if this level of detesting is even humanly possible). While it can be fun to tease others about "accents" and simple mistakes in their English, the result is always a silent and sometimes hysterical privileging of English which drives me nuts.
So sometimes I say "borrow me your pen" instead of "can I borrow your pen." Hayi matai put este? The first time I recall saying it as an adult I remember people laughing and chastising me for poor English. I became so annoyed at the rebuking that I decided from then on to intentionally say "borrow" in that "incorrect" way.
I am back on the island I love and my English is getting poorer by the moment as I return to my happy bilingual self. Today, when I was typing my cousin Alfred and my friend Madel about a conference panel that we are trying to throw together for next year on Pacific Islander communities in transition, I made another cute mistake. I'm not sure yet whether it was on purpose or on accident. But it doesn't really matter anymore anyways.
I wrote the two about our abstracts, whether we all had our draft abstracts ready to turn into the conference. Instead of writing draft in the correct way, I wrote it the way I pronounced it in my head, as draf.
The daily slaughtering of the English language is so exciting and refreshing. I really detest this language, and how cumbersome and evil it is. But what I detest more than its usage is the way in which people attempt to defend and map out what is proper about it (the same thing happens with Chamorro, and that is something I detest even more (if this level of detesting is even humanly possible). While it can be fun to tease others about "accents" and simple mistakes in their English, the result is always a silent and sometimes hysterical privileging of English which drives me nuts.
So sometimes I say "borrow me your pen" instead of "can I borrow your pen." Hayi matai put este? The first time I recall saying it as an adult I remember people laughing and chastising me for poor English. I became so annoyed at the rebuking that I decided from then on to intentionally say "borrow" in that "incorrect" way.
I am back on the island I love and my English is getting poorer by the moment as I return to my happy bilingual self. Today, when I was typing my cousin Alfred and my friend Madel about a conference panel that we are trying to throw together for next year on Pacific Islander communities in transition, I made another cute mistake. I'm not sure yet whether it was on purpose or on accident. But it doesn't really matter anymore anyways.
I wrote the two about our abstracts, whether we all had our draft abstracts ready to turn into the conference. Instead of writing draft in the correct way, I wrote it the way I pronounced it in my head, as draf.
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