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I hate the 500 word limit.

So what if it promotes brevity and conciseness of thought?  Not everything can be encapsulated into this stifling limitation.  How much can you really fit into 500 words if you have a lot of things between your ears that you want unleashed upon your captive reading public?  Does this mean that those with a penchant for verbal diarrhea will have to conform to this puritanical law of anal-retentive, number-crunching, grammar elitists?

I dread the 500 word limit.

I know I’m guilty in this blog of spewing words with reckless abandon, the same way a sewer drain unloads its deadly cargo everyday.  When I was a little Pinoy boy with limited grasp of language, I dreaded writing classes.  I always wished that one paragraph, or even one sentence, was enough. It was neither laziness nor ignorance, but rather, the inability to articulate what I wanted to say onto a written medium.  But as I progressed through grade school, and proceeded to the secondary academic circus, I learned how to write more than just a title and a cacophony of jumbled randomness.  Upon reaching that savage  jungle we know as “college,” I was a virtual writing machine.  I loved writing almost as much as I loved reading.  Whenever someone imposed limits on how much I can write, I flipped the literary middle finger by writing twice as much.  Sometimes my figurative protest was heeded, but mostly I received a reprimand, or a demand for a re-write.  All because I surpassed the word limit.

I am confused by the 500 word limit.

So why the 500 word limit, really?  Why not a 755 word limit that doesn’t count the swear words?  What strictly counts as a word, anyway?  Are antecedents, conjunctions and simple prepositions counted as words? Is an acronym, or an abbreviation, or even a “forced” contraction (i.e. ’twas, ’twasn’t, etc)  counted as a word?  Is the number “500″ even considered a word?  If not, can I get away with writing a lot of numbers to offset the 500 word limit?  If I write out the value of Pi, is that considered a work of literature to rival Tolstoy’s War and Peace? Come to think of it, if I spelled S-O-M-E-T-H-I-N-G out, is each letter counted as a word?  Worse yet, is punctuation counted as a “word,” too???!!!!…

And what…

about…

paragraph breaks

?

I laugh at the 500 word limit.

It may be a necessary evil in order to prevent meaningless ramblings, or to make sure your article fits canvas space, but I snicker at it.  I am amused beyond comprehension.  The sheer audacity of the powers that be to LIMIT what I can write, just so it’ll fit a predesignated column space, or maybe because the attention span of the proposed reader is as focused as a flying plastic cup in the middle of a busy freeway, staggers me.  But I guess, in the end, so be it…

This blog entry meets the 500 word limit…  asshole.

This blog entry meets the 500 word limit

Technorati: 500, limit, word

That’s what I get asked by some of my friends, after they had a rude awakening at seeing that my blog spam is back…  Yeah, instead of saying “Nice! Good to see you writing again!” or “Welcome back! Long time, no spam!” or even “Oh, it’s you again… oh joy…”, what some of them asked me was “Is your tagalog words coming back?”

Of course, I was initially confused by the question because I my brain didn’t register the context of it, and I wanted to reply, “Aking minamahal na kaibigan, hindi maibsan ang aking lubos na kaligayahan na dulot ng iyong katanungan, at ikinagagalak kong ipahiwatig sa iyo na ang aking gunita ay patuloy na pinupunan ng ating minamahal na wika, at ang sinumang bumulwag ng aking mariing katapatan ay aking isasalya sa pangpang at ipupukol sa madilim at maruming karagatan bago ako humimlay sa aking silid tulugan…”

(My dear friend, my extreme happiness cannot be sated due to your question, and I’m happy to tell you that my thoughts are always filled by our beloved language, and anyone who tries to tear down my intense resolve will be slammed at the seashore and then thrown into the murky, dark ocean before I sleep in my bedroom…)

It took a few moments and a generous amount of thinking (which is always painful for me) before I realized that they were asking whether I would be bringing back my regular feature called “Tagalog Word of the Day”.   I didn’t want to give out an answer yet, coz it was kinda hard getting back into the regular blogging mood, and my friends have enjoyed several months of tranquility due to the apparent absence of the blog email notification spam.

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Back then, I tried my best to post a new Tagalog word everyday, much to the chagrin of the people in my friends list who were probably rolling their eyes and saying “oh great, another blog post from Tolitz…”  But being the person that I am, I thought, “This is the consequence of being a friend of Tolitz, so suck it up soldier!  Muahahaha!”  Yeah, that laugh in the end was part of my thoughts, too…

Thankfully, only a couple people removed themselves from my friends list… and I couldn’t even remember who they were anymore

Anyway, I was thinking, that the best solution to solve my problem – with either running out of words or running out of interest for it – is to not post a “Tagalog Word of the Day” everyday.  Sure, it’s called “Tagalog Word of the Day” but it isn’t called “The Daily Tagalog Word”.

So I finally had a convenient alibi by turning semantics into a scapegoat… Go me!

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That doesn’t mean I’ll be posting a “Tagalog Word of the Day” in this blog, regardless of my alibi.  But now that I think I’m back into the groove, I am very, VERY confident that I can now give an answer.

Am I bringing it back?  Is it making a return? Is the “Tagalog Word of the Day?” gonna rise from the ashes and once again wreak havoc on virgin sensibilities and educate the ignorant foreigners about the intricacies of the mutt language?

With firm resolve, I have made up my mind… and my decision is….

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Technorati: comeback, day, of, return, tagalog, the, word