Be the ultimate maco!!

*Maco (pronounced mah-co)- eavesdropper, busybody, a gossip (also a verb)
*Macocious - adjective or adverb describing such a person or behaviour
*"Maco" is also available in whatever other parts of speech you may need

Ok, so they finally got me to join Facebook, which, after really going through the website now, I consider to be the ultimate macoing tool. It is interesting how you can't get too much in depth info on the FAQ or whatever they have unless you REGISTER. Trap trap trap. I must note, however, that they have fairly detailed privacy settings applied to who can see your profile/pictures/ etc. But again, you have to click around and set up everything. Hell, just to register I thought was a bit much.

A bit of background if you are not on it, or have only heard of it: IT IS MACO CENTRAL! So you go and set up your profile listing whatever personal info you want to be posted including a picture, you have the option to join networks which revolve around your school or job or where you live. You can join multiple networks

Maco opportunity #1: even if is not yuh friend, yuh could see all these people around by you who on de same network.

Then you start adding "friends", you can do it by automatically (facebook does it for u) inviting people who are in your email address book. Then you get to see who belongs (macoing) and choose which ones you want to invite. And voila! you build a friend list as these people reply.

Maco opportunity #2: yuh could click on yuh friend profile and see all who dey is friend with. AND click yuh friend friend too, and yuh friend friend friend once dey in a network you in.

Alright so those things may have taken a bit of exploring, let's move on to some built-in stuff, things they put right in front of your face (why its called facebook right?) The first thing you see when you sign in is what they call a "news feed". Its a chronology of happenings on your account AND YOUR FRIENDS' accounts, including their new friends, if they deleted friends, messages everybody wrote on each others' "walls", and what they are doing (if they chose to update that bit)

Maco opportunity #3: dat one was self-explanatory, ah mean..."news feed"? MACO FEED!. An all yuh had to do was sign in.

Moving on... you click on "my profile" and you see the details that pertain only to you i.e. your picture and other personal info, who you "became friends with", and all the stuff people wrote to you, and if you were "tagged" in any pictures that you or others may have in their accounts.

Maco opportunity #4: yuh could see all dat fuh other people too includin all dey messages doh matter if you eh know all de writers. (a nex network trap)

I'll add one more although there's lots of little things that add up, I have 2 in mind but I'll go with the pictures since they can be so damning. I mentioned being "tagged" above. Similar to "labels" I suppose for blogging, you can tag people by attaching their names to a photo you have uploaded. Funny thing is: you can see (via the news feed) when OTHER people (possibly complete strangers)tagged your friends, and see the picture too!

Maco opportunity #5: dat one kinda self-explanatory too. An if somebody tag you in a bad picture, well crapaud smoke yuh pipe.

There are several other ways to maco on this thing, one of which is the "social timeline". Doesn't that just have the ring of a "macoing journal"? I didn't write about it because I must have deactivated it somehow as mine was empty. It lists details you have entered over time about your friends, AND AS PER USUAL, you can also access your friends' or other people on your network.

They say its a good way to "share", to "keep in touch", to see whats going on in your friends' lives, and thats where it starts going downhill: too many prying eyes.

So there you have it! High speed! Efficient! Far-reaching! If you are a maco, facebook is the thing for you! What are you waiting for?! Join now!!!!!

till nex time...

p.s. if you are NOT a maco, and a more private type, make sure you go through and select all the "my friends only" that you can find ;-)

but I digress...

I realise I have strayed a bit from the original focus of this blog which was to compare/describe/comment on my "life in foreign"...
Did I mention that I have class ALL this weekend? i.e. 8-4 saturday AND sunday? Back next week with a more relevant subject...

Nex time...

Creole

FOllowing a comment from Triniobserver, I decided to do a small thing about creole languages. In the Caribbean, we mostly think of creole as the language spoken in Haiti. Personally I think people give it recognition as A LANGUAGE. Well surprise! It's the same with English speakers, we have our own language. Readers can go here for a fairly comprehensive explanation of what is creole, and see that in fact there are many such languages around the world. In summary, creole is a language developed to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages e.g. slaves. Sometimes there is a parent language, in our case English. Things are kept simple so they can understand one another. As subsequent generations come along, the language structures become standardised and voila!

Clicking one of the links regarding Ebonics in the U.S. I found that that situation had some similarity to ours in that some people would like to have Ebonics recgnised as its own language and not just a dialect, where it can be used, similar to the suggestion from Merle Hodge, as a tool in teaching standard english where users can be taught to recognise the equivalents in both languages. But proponents of Ebonics experience the same "fight down" attitudes that we in the Caribbean sustain as we keep telling ourselves we speak broken english, or as Triniobserver put it "a perversion" of english.

I'll say it again: I love my language! so very expressive, full of subtleties, words and expressions drawn together from various other languages. It's part of what makes a Trini a Trini. What do you think?

small milestone :)

Aye I jes realise I actually make it to 50 posts. Never thought it would get tihs far. But now I beginning to have some fun with it. Nice lil distraction blogging...
Thanks to the people that come by and comment. And thanks to all the lurkers for coming by, a comment once in a while would be nice, let me know if I should shake things up a bit hehe. I hope all those that I read keep it up, it's most entertaining, and reminds me that I do have my own blog that maybe I should write in every now and then ;-)

Wha it is yuh say dey?

OK I'm back, I am supposed to be doing homework but here I am. Lime would really appreciate this one:

This post has been long in coming and now that I’ve spent a few weeks at home and truly "gotten back into it" although I have relatives here to talk to, I realise I just LOVE the Trini language. This has also been helped in large part by reading other trini blogs and finding amusement in how people write and express themselves in a way that no other would understand.

I’ve frequently gotten into discussions/arguments with people (sometimes Jamaicans) about the fact that Trinis speak their own language and not just a dialect or broken English as some would like us to believe. Yes most of the WORDS are English, but many are not, and certainly our expressions are not. And yes there is a set structure, which makes it indeed a language of its own; everybody says things in the same format, its not broken English helter skelter like we don’t know the right thing to say.

How many times have we switched from speaking “properly” to speaking “dialect”? Its unfortunate that we have developed this concept of what is proper and what is not as opposed to which language should be used in which situations. I would like to reference a most interesting text written by Merle Hodge, “The Knots in English”, which expounds on the fact that "the majority of us are not English-speaking; we are a Creole-speaking. We have a language of our own and English is another language we have to learn." The text touches on the circumstances around which we grow up and learn to speak and our trouble with learning English. It outlines very specific examples of structure of Trinidad Creole and contrasts it with Jamaican Creole (we all know that we DO NOT talk the same) in a way that you can clearly see how we use certain words, and frame thoughts and sentences. Most enlightening reading about something you take for granted e.g.

"Double Negatives : Creole is one of those languages which uses more than one negative marker at a time...this cannot be done in English.

English - I DON'T want any. NOBODY here smokes any weed.

Trini - I DON'T want NONE. NOBODY here DOESN'T smoke NO weed.

Jamaican - Me NO want NONE. NOBODY here NO smoke NO weed.

In English a negative sentence can only have one negative marker"


Quite an interesting text containing examples, comparisons, and explanations about different parts of sentence structure and how "we" would say things. It is quite comprehensive in its own right but doesn't/cannot get into the intricacies of "nah", "eh heh" and "eh eh" LOL. I wholeheartedly subscribe to one statement from the preface that "it is hoped that Caribbean users [of the text] will gain a greater respect for their mother tongue as a language in its own right."

Till nex time...

Another sign...

just cuz i haven't posted in a long time (and I still haven't unpacked yet) here is another sign courtesy a friend of mine, used as her MSN display name:

"why trinis does put 'beware of the dog' on dey gate when when dey have one scruntin, tired lookin pothound in dey yard?"

hehehe

Till nex time...

Back for the new year

Well it took a long time but here is the picture of the kitchen, this was taken christmas eve (wow the flash make the doors look extreeeemely white boy...) Sorry for those who were looking forward but no ham was on the counter yet hehe We were still obviously in the process of cleaning. Even now there are some small things still to be done but I would say we beat the deadline :-)

For the first time this christmas though there was no traditional breakfast, after working so hard and then wrapping presents in the middle of the night I woke up at...drumrollll.... 1pm. Yes one in the afternoon, it wasnt all that bad, somehow my doing that threw off EVERYone, so there was no christmas breakfast, oh well...

Things have been great otherwise, went to the beach a few times, saw some friends, eating of course, and YES! working out! OH! I just saw shurwayne winchester with live band on a truck in the Croisee, is a good thing I get out of town early cuz it looks to be a big CT105 friday afternoon lime (the truck was heading down the main road to town) The only thing i havent done this holidays is go a fete...yuh believe it?!?! And yuh know why? it too DAMN EXPENSIVE. As a student i certainly can't fete after I pay my own flight here.

Well I now have only six more days in paradise, I have to go make a list of things i need to take back: red mango, chinee prunes.....

Till nex time..