On refreshing my perspective

Have you heard this song? It sounds like that other song, but it's not, it's this song:



Phil Wang (the guy in the doughnut shop) is like, one of my favorite people on the Internet because I find him hella cute. And also because he makes really good videos. How awesome is this new video? It's got flashing lights, dancing ladies, and a sweet as beat! So maybe the lyrics don't make a whole lot of sense but who cares I just want to dance to this song. Let's dance to this song!

There's also this other guy, Charley, who I don't really count among my favorite people, but who gets a lot of love from me because he gets to make up useless words.

Like one time when he was younger, he was sitting in a cafe and being moody because he was so poor. Scanning the cafe, maybe looking for pretty girls, his eyes happened upon the oval glass plate on the door, on which Coffee-room was printed, but the words facing the street, he misread the sign as Moor-eeffoc. Even in his later years, reading the word backward on cafe doors would remind him of that moment when he first noticed it, and this would send a shock through his blood

He wrote all this down in an autobiography and some people who read it (like G.K. Chesterton and Tolkien) were so taken by how Mooreeffoc perfectly describes the intensity with which we notice again something that has become trite - notice how any word sounds queer when you say it too many times - that they adopted it and that is why it still exists today.

And that is why Charley is awesome.

Charley writing A Christmas Carol and wondering how he can incorporate a sense of Mooreeffoc into the narrative.

When I had just come to Manila, I struggled with conversational Filipino. It must have been very entertaining for my classmates to hear me speak; my accent was all wrong and my diction left much to be desired. For example, once I was walking with a friend down the college drive. A flashy car drove by and I remarked to him, "ang ganda ng sasakyan o!" He laughed and when I asked him what was so funny, he explained that "we do not usually say sasakyan. You can say kotse." So I took to calling all four-wheeled vehicles kotse.

Fast forward a few years: at lunch yesterday, I was telling my colleagues that I had to deliver some samples to Makati in the afternoon, and that I wished our boss would allow me a car, so that I would not have to commute.

I said, "Sana may kotse mamaya," and they laughed.

"Sosyal! Ang BM ni sir, baka yun yung ipapagamit."

"Haha, di naman. Kahit yung delivery van lang natin, basta may masakyan lang ako."

"Edi sabihin mo, ang L300."

"O bakit, hindi ba kotse din ang L300?"

"Hindi, van yun eh."

"Onga, hindi ba kotse pa rin?"

"Hindi. Sosyal kasi ang kotse."

And I laughed at the absurdity of our argument and how mooreeffoc this was.

Afterwards, I wondered if its Spanish roots made kotse classier than sasakyan. And on some level, it might be, but in a country where more than half of the population lives below the poverty line, does not even matter if your ride was pimped out or beat up. Sosyal ang kotse.