Floodgates

This discovery opened up the floodgates to research and led to the establishment of the discipline as a legitimate field of inquiry.

In the six hundredth year of the life of Noah, in the second month, in the seventeenth day of the month, all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the floodgates of heaven were opened.

The fountains also of the deep, and the floodgates of heaven, were shut up, and the rain from heaven was restrained.

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.

Born in the time of The Beatles, my generation in the Philippines was the product of more nationalism and less Americanization than what my parents experienced, born during the Swing and Big Band music era. It was in 1937 that the Philippine government adopted Tagalog, an Austronesian language, as the basis of the national language. Filipinos born during the time of "King of Pop" Michael Jackson had much more Tagalog indoctrination, and television shows, anime, and cinema became more Tagalog. Later Filipinos born during the reign of Lady Gaga became more exposed to the Internet, where English was ubiquitous. With floodgates open, the archipelagic nation once again became inundated with the colonial language. It still seemed though that the reading habit was not for the majority because most books there were in English, which the elite gobbled up. The Philippines was a country of about 200 native Austronesian languages, whose ancient origin was Taiwan. What school children learned was Tagalog (alias Filipino) and English, but Taglish, the patois of code-switching between the two languages, was the de facto oral-aural lingua franca in the islands. English was the main written language.