The end of June has come. We reflect on what transpired, a summing up for the editorial desk\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cNitaboh\u201d (2004) was the mainstay of the event.<\/p>\n
Sinosphere pictograph before it became ideographic is well known, later adopted its own phonetics. We note the 15th century Korean Sejong\u2019s hangul reforms on the hanja, with Japan\u2019s Meiji wrestling the kanji to sound starting 1868, comrade Mao\u2019s putonghua simplified in 1949, and the Vietic integration of influences of Zhonghua, la langue fran\u00e7aise, and gringo \u2018Mericano, aka, GenAm from the Viet War, all getting phonetic.<\/p>\n
Comes Let\u2019s Play Language advocates a method of learning language to \u201cplay with\u201d rather than \u201cstudy\u201d (aka, memorize), focusing on word use in spoken familiar words such as the parts of one\u2019s body and the garments one wear, before learning the strictures of writing and reading, grammar and syntax.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlay\u201d is normally reserved for break time in public school systems, a recess before seriously hitting the texts again. \u201cQuiet in the classroom\u201d is the rule so that one can hear one\u2019s self think!<\/p>\n
What if \u201cplay\u201d is the tenor and tone of classrooms, and \u201cserious\u201d is the reflective mode at recess and break times? What if we are accused of lacing our vocab with malice?<\/p>\n
Our editorial piece, characterized by a reader in the use of \u201cslurred\u201d Juneteenth of Lolo Jose as \u201cracist 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,\u201d we double checked if we had failed our alma mater\u2019s granting us a B.A. in English.<\/p>\n
The offending line was from the opening paragraph: The slaves slurred their words and June 19 became \u201cJuneteenth\u201d!<\/p>\n
The last we checked in our dictionary, the verb \u201cslur\u2019s\u201d primary meaning is to \u201cspeak indistinctly so that the sounds run into one another,\u201d thus, \u201cJune Nineteenth\u201d becoming Juneteenth. Our SF reader went on to tell us that we meant it the way he read it, racist and offensive.<\/p>\n
Picasso on the bull and horse in Guernica, when asked about their meaning, he said, \u201c…. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like the tea-origami-movie at the Consulate of Japan, it was simply tea-origami-movie. The shikantaza, its essence, is in the participants\u2019 mind. Our editorial looks like it unearthed and itched what was on someone\u2019s mind. We\u2019ll go beyond just an opinion: Juneteenth was slurred! That\u2019s a bull.<\/p>\n
The days of June were delivered. We close both its zen and bursting days! \u00a9 2015 Saipan Tribune<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The end of June has come. We reflect on what transpired, a summing up for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[170,5752,38,5753],"class_list":["post-205444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-japan","tag-korean-sejong","tag-saipan-tribune","tag-viet-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}