At the end of June

The end of June has come. We reflect on what transpired, a summing up for the editorial desk’s benefit. Sometimes the product is shared like the one in April; at other times, it is but a yellow pencil on our earlobe like May.

But June burst out all over! Saipan Tribune editorial attended an event of tea, origami, and a movie in a two-hour Thursday afternoon at the end of May at the Saipan Consulate of Japan. A 99-minute anime “Nitaboh” (2004) was the mainstay of the event.

Sinosphere pictograph before it became ideographic is well known, later adopted its own phonetics. We note the 15th century Korean Sejong’s hangul reforms on the hanja, with Japan’s Meiji wrestling the kanji to sound starting 1868, comrade Mao’s putonghua simplified in 1949, and the Vietic integration of influences of Zhonghua, la langue française, and gringo ‘Mericano, aka, GenAm from the Viet War, all getting phonetic.

Comes Let’s Play Language advocates a method of learning language to “play with” rather than “study” (aka, memorize), focusing on word use in spoken familiar words such as the parts of one’s body and the garments one wear, before learning the strictures of writing and reading, grammar and syntax.

“Play” is normally reserved for break time in public school systems, a recess before seriously hitting the texts again. “Quiet in the classroom” is the rule so that one can hear one’s self think!

What if “play” is the tenor and tone of classrooms, and “serious” is the reflective mode at recess and break times? What if we are accused of lacing our vocab with malice?

Our editorial piece, characterized by a reader in the use of “slurred” Juneteenth of Lolo Jose as “racist and offensive, because it plays upon the old stereotype that African-Americans just shuffle along slowly without picking up their feet and are even too lazy to open their mouths all the way, so that their words come out all slurred and garbled,” we double checked if we had failed our alma mater’s granting us a B.A. in English.

The offending line was from the opening paragraph: The slaves slurred their words and June 19 became “Juneteenth”!

The last we checked in our dictionary, the verb “slur’s” primary meaning is to “speak indistinctly so that the sounds run into one another,” thus, “June Nineteenth” becoming Juneteenth. Our SF reader went on to tell us that we meant it the way he read it, racist and offensive.

Picasso on the bull and horse in Guernica, when asked about their meaning, he said, “…. This bull is a bull and this horse is a horse…. If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning…. I paint the objects for what they are.”

Like the tea-origami-movie at the Consulate of Japan, it was simply tea-origami-movie. The shikantaza, its essence, is in the participants’ mind. Our editorial looks like it unearthed and itched what was on someone’s mind. We’ll go beyond just an opinion: Juneteenth was slurred! That’s a bull.

The days of June were delivered. We close both its zen and bursting days! © 2015 Saipan Tribune