Who's afraid of Jejemon?

From experience, I know that "Jejetyping" or the conduct of applying unusual typographical forms to the accepted ways of short-cut bilingual texting began with GROs or bar girls. At least they were the first senders to my CP of by-now seminal terms of endearment such as "Jejeje" and "Muzta nA p0hwsZ?" Why my CP number is known to these pioneers of thumb action, let alone became the early recipient of such charming argot, is nobody's business, albeit of course I can claim cultural research for an alibi. Flash forward and in the summer of 2010, "Jejemon" became not only the word of the day, month or year, but also allowed fresh levels of curiosity, as well as the typical knee-jerk response of instant opprobrium. Suddenly, everyone caught on to Jejemonism, a phenom by any standards, or at least in the level of interest, fascination, revulsion and controversy it provoked. By word of mouth, text, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook, the growing lore quickly expanded the collective Pinoy ken. Word maven Pete Lacaba would comment on Jejemon in his Lenguador column in Yes magazine: "While the word itself was new to me, the phenomenon that gave rise to the word was not unfamiliar. I had already been receiving text messages such as this: 'Muzt4H fh0e? (g0dbL3sS).' (Hmm, maybe Pete has also been into diligent cultural research.) "Now, it turns out, there's a word for someone who writes like that: Jejemon.

 It's apparently a new coinage, maybe only a few months old, but already it's said to be one of the top searches on Google. Jejemons themselves are the talk of the Web, their pros and cons hotly debated in blogs and online forums, on Facebook and Twitter.

 The cons are represented by the pseudonymous lexicographer who, in the online Urban Dictionary, describes jejemons as 'individuals with low IQs who spread around their idiocy on the web by tYpFing LyK diZS jejejeje, making all people viewing their profile raise their eyebrows out of annoyance'." Obviously, GROspeak (or textese) had been appropriated by young peeps who raised the ante on the simple, early features — such as replacing "H" with the more attractive "J" (in obvious curtsy to our Castilian heritage), inserting that displaced H" elsewhere (often to follow a vowel), using alternate or random caps and lowercase, and adding apparent letter redundancies (Z after an S, other than replacing it). The next level of imaginative application involved replacing letters with anything remotely resembling them that can be found among the symbols offered in a CP. Thus, the letter "E" becomes either the Euro sign or the number 3, the latter representing the letter in reverse. By the same token, the letter "G" may give way to the number "6"; the letter "I" becomes the number "1"; and the letter "O" is replaced by the zero. Jejemons also began to take their examples of radical encoding beyond CP use, to computer keyboards, and by natural extension to the Internet. "Imaginative application" can well be translated to "Wala lang magawa," of course. Still, idle time is transformed into both avenue and arena of creative exercise. Again, Lacaba proves instructive: "The word jejemon has already given birth to other fanciful coinages. Their language — a form of written argot, an in-group language, just like swardspeak or academic jargon — is Jejenese. Their alphabet is jejebet. When they use their cellphones or computers to write, they jejetype. What they're doing is jejemonism. And the 'Internet grammar vigilantes' who hate jejemons and are sworn to humiliate them are known as jejebusters.

" In a country of instantaneous polarities and polemics that manifest more than just a myriad of mindsets, crowning the jejebusters' effort was an official reaction by the Education Secretary, who joined the media play by foisting a ban on Jejemonism. Ah, Sec. Mona Valisno added upon having her action questioned by the Human Rights Commissioner, the sanction would only apply to school activity. But of course. The lesson here pertains to that important matter of tolerance for what is evidently a passing fancy, the way the Jologs fad predictably turned Jeprox or stale. That is, amusement may still be a viable option when confronted with the seeming foibles of youth — even when these begin to involve further extensions such as favored apparel (for Jejemons, a certain kind of cap and ukay-ukay mufti) and a quirky dance with spastic movements. Better yet, join 'em — as most of my own open-minded contemporaries (read: senior citizens) quickly demonstrated. On e-mail discourses, some of us now incorporate the less fastidious features of Jejespeak. I should add that when I asked the Dumaguete poet-wizard Dr. Cesar Ruiz Aquino for his opinion on Jejemons, after also disclosing that GROs and maids had given him his first lessons on the Jejebet, he consequently texted: #0y2 @qV1n0 0uR n3w Pr3s1d3n+! 60d bLe$zz +1+A ¢0rY! Ma8uH1 aN6 P!L!p!nA$!!! Another well-traveled (in the Net) reaction, from the lofty groves of academe, came from UP's Dean of Mass Communications Rolando Tolentino, who opined that "the jejemon phenomenon is situated in a bigger context of social marginalization." To quote, in the original Filipino: "Ang paglikha ng kaantasan ay hindi lamang simpleng paghihiwalay sa may K (karapatan) at sa wala. Ito ay paglikha rin ng epistemiko at maging literal na karahasan (sa kaso nga ng jejemon sa Urban Dictionary na may tasitong panghihimok ng annihilation). Inetsapwera na nga sila ng estado, ineetsapwera pa sila ng mismong mamamayan nito. "Samakatuwid, ito ang tagumpay ng mismong estado. Hindi nito kailangan gumawa ng batas para ietsapwera ang peligrosong mamamayan. Epekto na lamang ang pagkaetsapwera ng lantarang polisiyang ekonomiko at politika nakapabor sa naghaharing uri ng bansa. At ang isang direktang epekto nga ng paglikha ng hegemoniya ng naghaharing uri — na pati ang pinaghaharian ay umaastang kabahagi ng ideolohiya ng naghahari — na muling nag-eetsapwera sa mamamayan." To which a 60-something photographer in Malate, a member of the global Banggaan e-group of Pinoy artists, archly issued a rejoinder: "Ano raw? Aba'y mas naintindihan ko pang mga Jejemon." - HS, GMANews.TV