IT ended with a bang. Hell broke loose long after the ashen taste of defeat and the gnashing of teeth. Not anymore could he hold back his tongue. “America sucks,” he was allegedly overheard, offended as he raged at people who mocked his accent.

Unspeakable. That’s how horror loomed beyond Binghamton, New York after Jiverly Wong, a 41 year-old Vietnamese immigrant, burst into the office of the American Civic Association where he used to take classes to improve his English. Described as “the nation’s worst killings since the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech,” Wong’s rampage left 13 students and employees dead before he committed suicide. Wong reportedly went unhinged after he must have understood what was wrong with him: No gift of gab, no job.

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No problem if it’s not as hard as one’s accent. Or, even if it’s rough enough for ax to grind against, you could still face the world and have it like an oyster in one’s palm.

Oh, but only if you got Manny Pacquiao’s fists. Such winning charm proved handy again in his recent guest appearance at the US talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” And who cared if his grammar teachers were getting a black eye?

Some may have felt their skin slither cold as he conversed in “carabao English” with his American host, without apology to many of his countrymen who consciously crawl to lick the soles and suck the kneecaps off the King’s language. That, after all, is the way to toe the line of progress and get a foothold in the world, according to our colonial education.

Yes, echo the queue to the call centers all over the Philippines and India where many try utterly hard not to be caught dead with an MTI, or Mother Tongue Influence, as if it were a communicable disease. Like a second skin to a legion of non-native English speakers, MTI comes with a stigma for those who have to labor about aspirating or stretching certain consonant and vowel sounds. And so, far out with a fake accent they go. Otherwise, wa ka class. Chaka.

Great, if one can talk like a deejay without the twang clotting the sincerity of one’s sensibility till they bleed out of one’s nose. It’s a hoot, however, when all that slick lip service at phonetic turns phony, specifically when it spits not only on one’s native language but also the appropriation of English into our own way of speaking.

“We all have certain uniqueness to our accents,” says Nasha Fitter, a communication skills expert and trainor. Or, as Gershwin tune put it down pat: “Potato, potahto, Tomato, tomahto. Let's call the whole thing off!”

That Shakespeare’s lingua franca has survived and thrived is partly because it’s sinuous and sinewy enough to cartwheel into the echo chambers of other cultures, if not into the jungle of a borderless world where the colorful jangle of English has become chameleon’s comfort.

African-American and Caribbean frequencies of communication are fine with ebonics (ebony and phonics).Even Americans have weaned themselves out of the British standard of speech, and made it their own. Ditto with Australians. Even the various regions around Buckingham don’t hew into a single way of pronouncing things. Go hear the swell of Irish or Welsh voices in any English pub.

Hear this discussion, too, from an online music forum: Why do most British singers or bands have American accents when they sing? “Maybe,” a respondent said, “it has something to do with America being a bigger market and they feel they will do better if they sound American.” Ah, the economics of accents.

And so, Pacman in that American talk show is music to the ears for us who don’t feel shortchanged the more he dared to sound like the rest of us. There are many ways to connect. Some do it by speaking as much as they mean it. Or with a punch and a no-holds-barred version of “Sometimes When We Touch.”

(geemyko@gmail.com)