Review of Women’s Studies 21 (1): 25-37 A PRELIMINARY DICTION STUDY OF THE PHILIPPINE MAGNA CARTA OF WOMEN Words as Shapers of Filipinas’ Rights Liway Czarina S. Ruizo Abstract Proceeding from the theory that Language is the incarnation of a speaking community’s valued experience and reality-shaping power, this paper looks into the very language used in the 2009 Philippine Magna Carta for Women, and explores how the wording of this legislative milestone for Filipinas strengthen women’s rights, or actually weaken or defeat the purpose thereof. Taking into account overlapping considerations of the law-making process as well as statutory construction, this paper humbly offers the preliminary conclusion that although the law in the main affords security for women’s rights, in the fine, it contains provisions and clauses that are not as accurately phrased, so that they open up crevices for repression, oppression, abuse and misuse to seep into the otherwise watertight gender-equality law. “The word is the skin of the living thought.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes For most first meeting discussions of my introductory English class, the above quotation from one of the most celebrated US Supreme Court Justices is the first sentence I whet their intellectual appetites with. I caution my students that before exploring the intricate maze of the rules of effective paragraph development, and going down the narrow and shifting alleyways of punctuation conventions, it is imperative to begin the course with a more extensive, if not a full appreciation of how the language is, foremost, a tool for the creation and recreation of the world as we perceive it. I walk the class through a pragmatic observation of how we shape our realities, and they in turn shape us, through words; of how these initially random strings of letters take on life and meaning when they are used to ©2013 UP Center for Women’s Studies, University of the Philippines ISSN 0117-9489