La-yer

You read 'La' with a having the short sound. And 'yer' as is.

Well, haha. It's been years or almost a decade, I think since I last had my taste of TikTok. I don't use the app anymore but I do hear about things happening there now and then.

And I will just be relating this using my rough story-telling and not precise descriptions. Hahaha.

We were sitting, like usual, at our favorite front yard in the neighborhood.

Tita Teresa is a 50-decade lady who happens to be an avid TikTok watcher. She was relating what she watched on TikTok and here goes... (I'll just relate based on how she also related it. Not sure about the exact thing and I don't plan to watch it firsthand in TikTok.)

"Pabili po ng la-yer!"

Anong la-yer?

.

.

.

"La-yer! Yung pansindi."

Ah... Lighter!

In the above, someone was buying a la-yer. In the end, it was a lighter for lighting cigarettes.

***

For some reason, it got me laughing very loudly as if it were my first time hearing a joke.

But you know, some people are just so, I don't know, intent may be (I don't want to use the word "trying hard"), on trying to speak in a slang manner, so their words are less understandable like the above than when one speaks clearly like Lea does.

Instead of speaking clearly like Lea Salonga, they speak like Americans. Ahehehe. So lighter became la-yer.

That's about it for my morning article. Hehe hehe.

I am not saying we should not speak English at all because we also need very much to speak it in our daily lives, just that, we don't really need to try so hard to imitate the natives of the language. The things English teachers teach us would do. Or maybe, I'm wrong in this.