It's only words

LOOK DIDA, my grandson Miguel Iñigo tugged at my shirt and pointed to the blown-up photo on one wall of the eatery where, I learned later, a friend in the local government ingested crispy pork that ran roughshod in his bowels.

No this is not about bowels, which often times are confused with vowels, and indeed find confluence in some affliction endemic to politicians called verbal diarrhea.

My apo referred to a picture of sculptors emblazoned with the big bold texts “Wood curving, Betis Pampanga.”

Is it the shape of the wood? Or the craft of the men? Migo asked me what was headlined there.

A curved piece of wood being carved into a work of art. Passable alibi for the semantic lapse. Still, it’s wood carving, both livelihood and art.   

Part of editorial work is traversing through verbal landmines of homonyms indiscriminately, usually carelessly, planted in news stories which gave them a different meaning. Okay, which reduced them to meaninglessness.

There is for instance the breaching of the Arayat setback levee one time, noted down as levy in one story and levi in another. The embankment assumed in the first the imposition of a tax, and if capitalized that of Pampanga’s foremost business and media mogul, and in the second a Hebrew patriarch which when uppercased that of the inventor of denim jeans.

A police story one time referred to a rouge’s gallery making me search for the names Max Factor, Revlon Maybelline, L’Oreal and Alexandra de Markoff in that list of scoundrels, also known as rogues.

Then there was the murder suspect reported to have been hailed in court. So what was a man indicted for a heinous crime praised for? Instead of being compelled – haled – before a judge to face the bar of justice.

Still on legal grounds, pork chopped legislators flout the law when they flaunt their ill-gotten wealth. Maybe – in contrition, and to make amends – they may also flout their loot and flaunt the law. So much for wishful thinking.

A case too in semantic misdemeanor is that of the “aid” of Nanay Baby Pineda herself aiding the flood victims. Aid for the assistance misplaced for the assisting aide of the governor. At least, it was not a case of the dreaded disease which, to distinguish, we always put in all caps, AIDS.  

As dis makes the whale of a difference between honor and dishonor, so in spells the chasm between fame and notoriety – famous, the heights of glory; infamous, the abyss of obloquy, okay, disgrace.

It is thus the ultimate insult to call – even unwittingly, ignorantly too – a child celebrity as “infamous.”

A matter of semantics, so careless journalists pooh-pooh wrong choice of words in their stories.

Yeah, it’s only words. And – to paraphrase that song – words are all we have to take our readers’ minds away.  

Write with care. We owe it to them.