When handwriting becomes eligible and a bachelor becomes illegible

“Stop it, people, stop it. You’re confusing the hell out of me.”

I have been attending training sessions for the past week. Audit training sessions, mind you. Of entity level controls, combined risk assessments, PM/TE/SAD Nominal, and analytical review procedures. Oh, I’m sorry…am I boring you? Good. Because I was bored to death myself.

Apart from endowing upon me the gift of boredom, an added perk of the training sessions, or any audit training session for that matter, is first-hand exposure on auditor/accountant-specific vocabulary and pronunciation.

Accountants share not only technical jargon, but also a unique way of pronouncing even the most pedestrian words. I have been trying to be politically correct with this, but there is no better way of putting it than simply saying that it is kabarokan. I think we drown in the monotony of our work that we often lose our morals of grammar and pronunciation. Worse, more often than not, we are unaware of these loose morals. Not that I enjoy putting my own profession down, but this fact has never gone under the radar anyway.

I may be wrong, though. It just might be the people I work with. That’s what scares me—that this culture of accountant kabarokan is prevalent only in our office. I admit that I don’t have impeccable choices in grammar and pronunciation, but it surely is terrifying sort of knowing that I’m in an environment which fosters such fallibility. And, of course, it’s simply annoying hearing all those misplaced modifiers and short E’s in place of long E’s put together in a week-long training event.

During the past week, when I hear someone say something like “team planning event” as if it’s “TIM PLANNEENG EH-VENT” or “my role as audit senior” as if it’s “MY ROHL AS AUDIT SINIOR” or “STAFFS” instead of “staff members” or “associate” as if the word talks of a dog, there’s stress on the first syllable and there are just three syllables instead of four (AH-SO-SHEYT), I hold back my tears (of laughter) and try oh so hard to exude nonchalance. But again, there is the fear that because of the frequency and regularity of these types of occurrences at work, I just might develop immunity to it.

At one particular point, I felt that fear starting to materialize. I was listening in to the discussion and found myself trapped in an unexpected confusion:

AUDIT TRAINOR (sic): What do you think should a good senior be like?

PARTICIPANT: Like in making review notes, good seniors should not have EH-LEE-GEE-BOL (stress on second syllable) handwriting, so that the staff will understand it.

XTIN: (zones out and goes to a deep and sudden introspection)

Hmmmm…wait. Did he say illegible or eligible? It’s just so hard to differentiate between the two as both seem to have the same accountant-specific pronunciation. Well, either way, it’s wrong.

Not one of the two is pronounced as EH-LEE-GEE-BOL, with stress on the second syllable.

Illegible, or not decipherable, is pronounced as EE-LEH-JIH-BOL, stress on the second syllable.

Eligible, on the other hand, or qualified or unattached, is pronounced as EH-LIH-JIH-BOL, stress on the first syllable, not the second.

Wait, or is it the other way around? Shocks! Stop it, people, stop it! You’re confusing the hell out of me!

Shit. I had to relearn the semantics of these two words just so I could finally differentiate between illegibly and eligibility. There was momentary dyslexia there.

XTIN: (comes back to reality with a renewed sense of self, only to find out that she is still in the training room in the presence of her TRAINOR [sic] and her co-participants, still engaged in their accountant-specific conversations)

Damn.