When disaster strikes, the grammar for avoiding blame comes in handy

Monday, February 16, 2015

When disaster strikes, the grammar for avoiding blame comes in handy

It takes great courage and a strong sense of honor to admit culpability for a wrenchingly disastrous outcome, like the brutal annihilation of 44 Special Action Force commandos by Muslim terrorists in Maguindanao on January 25, 2015. Finger-pointing becomes the order of the day for those responsible in the line of command, and very often, the language used to wriggle out of blame and accountability becomes disingenuously familiar and—if truth be told—nothing short of scandalous.

In English, in particular, a special verb form lends itself very nicely to that pass-the-blame routine: the causative verb. I wrote at length about this verb in an essay for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in early 2006, then posted that essay here in the Forum in December of 2011 in the aftermath of the horrendous disaster wrought by Typhoon Sendong in southern Philippines (fatalities: 1,268). This week I am again posting the essay to help us see through the smokescreen of words coming from the usual finger-pointers, the better to figure out who among them is ultimately to blame and need to be punished in full measure for the horrific death of the 44 SAF troopers. (February 15, 2015)

Using causative and factitive verbs

When an awful act or serious mistake is made, particularly one that leads to a disastrous or tragic outcome, rare indeed is the soul that comes out in the open to take the blame for it. The usual response of the culpable is to ascribe the deed to somebody else or something else:

“They had me scoop the money from the vault at gunpoint.” (The perpetrator of an inside job is trying to extricate himself from the crime.)

“An earthquake made the mountain unleash the deadly mudslide.” (Actually, loggers had ruthlessly stripped the mountain of every inch of its forest cover.)

“The steel gate’s collapse caused the people to stampede.” (The crowd-control measures simply were too puny for so large a mass of humanity aiming to get rich quick.)

The English language has, in fact, evolved a special verb form to make people avoid acknowledging responsibility—if only for the moment—when caught in such situations. That verb form is the causative verb, which carries out an action that causes another action to happen. In the three sentences given as examples above, in particular, “have” is the causative verb in the first, causing the action “scoop” to happen; “make” is the causative verb in the second, causing the action “unleash” to happen; and “cause” is the causative verb in the third, causing the action “stampede” to happen. In each case, the crime or calamitous outcome is acknowledged but no one is accepting responsibility for it.

Causative verbs are, of course, not only meant to make people avoid taking responsibility for things that have gone sour or disastrous. In general, they are used to indicate the sort of actions that people don’t do themselves but allow, ask, or force other people to do: “Emily’s supervisor permitted her to leave early today.” “Our landlady reminded us to pay our overdue rent.” “The thieves forced the tourists to hand over their jewelry.” Note that in a causative construction, the subject doesn’t actually do the action of the operative verb but only causes the object to do that action. In the last example above, for instance, the subject is “the thieves” and the object is “the tourists,” and the causative verb “force” makes this object do the action of handing over the jewelry.

The other most commonly used causative verbs are “allow,” “assist,” “convince,” “employ,” “help,” “hire,” “let,” “motivate,” “remind,” “require,” and “urge.” When used in a sentence, practically all of these causative verbs are followed by an object (a noun or pronoun) followed by an infinitive: “We allowed foreigners to invest in the local mining industry.” “The recruiter convinced me to leave for Jeddah at once.” “The desperate applicant employed deceit to get the plum job.”

The only notable exceptions to this pattern are the causative verbs “have,” “make,” and “let.” They are followed by a noun or pronoun serving as an object, but this time what follows the object is not an infinitive but the base form of the verb (meaning its infinitive form without the “to”):

“I had my fellow investors sign the incorporation papers yesterday.”

“They made him finish writing the book in only five weeks.”

“We let the students pick the class schedules they want.”

Like the causative verb, another type of verb that exhibits peculiar behavior is the so-called factitive verb. While the usual transitive verb can take only one direct object, a factitive verb actually needs two of them. There are only a few of its kind, however, among them “choose,” “elect,” “judge,” “adjudge,” “make,” “name,” and “select.”

Here’s how a factitive verb works: “The prestigious finance magazine last night chose our company “Best at Consumer Goods” in its annual poll.” Here, “choose” is the factitive verb, “our company” is the direct object, and “‘Best at Consumer Goods’” is the objective complement—all three in tight, uninterrupted interlock. (February 20, 2006)
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 20, 2006 issue © 2006 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

U.S. President favors eloquence over grammar-perfect English

Should the chief executive of a powerful English-speaking nation knowingly commit a subject-verb disagreement error just to make a single line in a major speech more eloquent and compelling? Indeed, as an English-savvy speaker and with all the powers at his command, why had President Barack Obama not chosen to be a role model for good English by being grammar-perfect in his recent State of the Union address? In the essay below that I wrote for my weekly English-usage column in the January 31, 2015 issue of The Manila Times, I offer some answers in response to what I initially thought was a Filipino lawyer’s red herring* of a question about faulty English in the U.S. president’s speech. (February 1, 2015)

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*Just for those encountering this old idiom for the first time, a “red herring” is something used to divert attention from the real matter, issue or object. It is often deliberately used in fiction and nonfiction to plant a false clue that can lead readers or characters towards a false conclusion.

Grammatical pitfalls when ‘everyone’ is the antecedent

I thought I was being presented with a red herring when I received e-mail a few days ago from a Quezon City-based lawyer who made this observation: “In his recent State of the Union address, U.S. President Barack Obama said: ‘Everyone must do their share...’ That is now very common. We hear a lot about ‘everyone’ being asked to do ‘their’ part in nation-building, etc. And what’s the deal with ‘between you and I’?”

Atty. Stephen Monsanto evidently meant to say that President Obama could have said “Everyone must do his or her share” instead but didn’t because even if that usage is grammatically airtight, the preferred option now is the plural adjective “their” for such constructions even if it’s grammatically faulty.

Nevertheless, I thoroughly checked the quote with the text of President Obama’s speech and found that it wasn’t a red herring after all. It wasn’t exactly what the president said but close to it, with the debatable usage even repeated in this scrupulously parallel construction (italicizations mine): “That’s what middle-class economics is—the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. We don’t just want everyone to share in America’s success—we want everyone to contribute to our success.”

Now the big question is: Did President Obama unknowingly commit a subject-verb agreement blunder in that speech?

My opinion is a qualified “No, he didn’t,” and I’ll now proceed to explain why.

Recall that “everyone” is a singular pronoun that refers to every unspecified person in a group; there’s a presumed zone of ignorance on whether the group is all-male, all-female, or mixed-gender. In President Obama’s speech, however, “everyone” clearly refers to the American people as a whole, which is unquestionably a mix of males and females. I therefore think that it would have sounded odd—and distractingly repetitious—for him to use “him or her” with that certain knowledge about his constituency: “That’s what middle-class economics is—the idea that this country does best when everyone gets his or her fair shot, everyone does his or her fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules…”

But hardline grammar prescriptivists would insist that to be an exemplar for correct English, President Obama should have avoided the obvious subject-verb disagreement altogether by replacing “everyone” with the  pronoun “all”: “That’s what middle-class economics is—the idea that this country does best when all get their fair shot, all do their fair share, and all play by the same set of rules…” That’s grammatically faultless all the way, but we can see and feel that the eloquence, fluidity, and sense of urgency of the original statement are gone.

The problem with using “everyone” is, of course, that English doesn’t have a singular third-person possessive adjective of indeterminate gender. All it has are the masculine adjective “his” and the feminine adjective “her,” and in contemporary usage, the classic recourse to “his” as default possessive adjective when the antecedent pronoun’s gender isn’t specified is now widely frowned upon as sexist. Also, as I’ve shown above, we can replace “everyone” with “all” to sidestep the gender problem but this tends to depersonalize the statement and make it less compelling.

This is actually why even at the risk of being looked upon as less than perfect in their grammar, many English-savvy people like President Obama now use “their” as possessive adjective for “everyone” as antecedent even in their formal English—and I do think that it’s not an unwise and illogical decision.

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P.S. “Between you and I” is indefensibly wrong usage, though; it should be “between you and me.” A pronoun that follows “between” should always be in the objective case, like “me” instead of the subjective-case “I.”

This essay first appeared in the  weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, January 31, 2015,  © 2015 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Why the nominative and subjective are lumped as just a single case

Here’s a basic grammar question that baffled an adequately English-savvy friend of mine: Why are the nominative case and subjective case lumped as just a single case in English? Plus the objective case and possessive case, shouldn’t there be four cases in all?

To answer my friend’s question, I came up with this simplified layperson’s definition of case: it is the form a noun or pronoun takes to indicate its functional relationship to other words in a sentence or clause. In modern English, there are indeed only three cases—the nominative or subjective, classified as just a single case, when the noun or pronoun acts as the subject of a sentence or clause; the objective case, when the noun or pronoun receives the action of the verb or is the object of a preposition; and the possessive case, when the noun or pronoun shows possession of something.

Now let’s find out why the nominative and subjective are considered as just one case and practically synonymous.

A telltale sign that a noun or pronoun is in the nominative case is when it’s functioning as the subject of a verb in a sentence or clause. It’s not necessarily the doer of the action of that verb, for that’s true only when the sentence or clause is in the active voice.

In the active-voice sentence “The committee planned the Pope’s itinerary,” for instance, the subject “committee” is the doer of the action of the verb “planned”; as such, that subject is in the nominative case. But see what happens when that sentence is rendered in the passive voice: “The Pope’s itinerary was planned by the committee.” Here, the doer of the action of the verb—“the committee”—is no longer the subject of the sentence; instead, the receiver of that action—“the Pope’s itinerary”—has become the subject of the sentence.

Thus, whether a sentence or clause is in the active or passive voice, the noun or pronoun that serves as its subject will always be in the nominative case. So when is a noun or pronoun in the subjective case instead?

By definition, a noun or pronoun is in the subjective case when it is in the subject position of a sentence or clause. As such, it’s either (a) a subject that “did” or is “doing” something, as in “The police cordoned Rizal Park,” or (b) a subject not doing something but only being described in a certain way, as in “The police is ready for the Pope’s visit.”

With “police” as subject of the sentence either way, it clearly also meets the criterion for nouns in the nominative case. Indeed, whether in the nominative case or subjective case, a noun or pronoun always functions as the subject of a sentence or clause. It is precisely for this reason that the two cases are virtually synonymous and folded into just a single case.

However, we must keep firmly in mind that only when the subject of a sentence is specifically a noun will there be no grammatical difference between its nominative and subjective forms. This is because nouns in modern English don’t inflect or change form at all in both the nominative and subjective cases and in the objective case as well.

In contrast, the pronouns—particularly the personal pronouns—typically inflect for different grammatical cases. Consider this sentence with a nominative subject: “The committee members approved the security plan.” That subject can be routinely replaced with the nominative pronoun “they”: “They approved the security plan.”

But see what happens when that sentence is rendered in the passive voice: “The security plan was approved by them.” The nominative pronoun “they” has inflected or changed into the objective pronoun “them.”

We will explore the inflections of the various personal pronouns for the various cases in the next essay below. (January 10, 2015)

This article first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, January 10, 2015, © 2015 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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How the English personal pronouns inflect for case

Last week, I explained why the nominative and subjective cases are lumped as just a single case in modern English, then pointed out that nouns don’t inflect or change form at all in these two cases and in the objective case as well. Indeed, only in the possessive do nouns inflect by taking the suffix apostrophe-“s”, as in “The Pope’s visit required unprecedented security measures.” That’s all.

Not so with the pronouns, however. Many of them inflect for case depending on person (first, second, or third), number (singular or plural), and gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter). And nowhere are the inflections more pronounced—and more bewildering to English learners—than in the personal pronouns, which typically change form to show whether they are serving as subject of a clause, as object of a verb, or as object of a preposition.

Let’s start with the singular first-person pronoun. Its form is “I” in the nominative or subjective case, as in “I watched the crowd” and “I am impressed.” In the objective case, it inflects to “me” as direct object, as in “She chose me”; as indirect object, as in “She gave me hope”; and as object of the preposition, as in “She dedicated the book to me.” Then in the possessive case, it inflects to “mine,” as in “That car is mine.”

Now see what happens to the first-person pronoun in plural form. It inflects to “we” in the nominative or subjective case, as in “We watched the parade” and “We were stunned by the massive crowd.” In the objective case, it inflects to “us” as direct object, as in “The Pope blessed us”; as indirect object, as in “He gave us his benediction”; and as object of the preposition, as in “He commiserated with us.” Then in the possessive case, it inflects to “ours,” as in “The court ruled that the farm is now ours.”

The second-person pronoun is unique in that it doesn’t inflect at all in the nominative or subjective case and in the objective case as well. It takes the form “you” for both singular and plural, as in the nominative “You came just when we needed you” and in the subjective “You are generous.” It’s also “you” in the objective case, whether as direct object, as in “We wish you well”; indirect object, as in “They owe you a big favor”; or object of the preposition, as in “Tonight she’ll send the invitation to you.” Only in the possessive case does it inflect—to “yours,” as in “That car is fully paid so it’s now yours.”

For English learners, the third-person pronoun proves most difficult because it inflects in all three grammatical cases not only for number but also for gender. The nominative or subjective singular forms are the masculine “he,” the feminine “she,” and the neuter “it,” as in “He/She joined the entourage,” “He/She is a believer,” and “As to your contribution, it is enough.” The objective case singular forms are the masculine “him,” the feminine “her,” and the neuter “it,” as in “They brought him/her/it to Rizal Park.” The possessive singular forms are the masculine “his” and the feminine “hers,” as in “The controversial mansion turned out to be his/hers.” The neuter “its” only works as a possessive adjective, as in “As to that appliance, convenience is its major advantage.”

The plural forms of the third-person pronoun are easier to learn because they don’t inflect as much for case. In the nominative or subjective case, the third-person pronoun inflects to “they,” as in “They reconciled just now” and “They are part of the entourage.” In the objective case, it inflects to “them,” as in “We welcomed them despite our differences.” Then in the possessive case, it inflects to “theirs,” as in “That decision was theirs, not ours.” (January 17, 2015)

This article first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, January 17, 2015, © 2015 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

No earthly reason why the Philippine clergy should be bad in English grammar

On the eve of the visit of Pope Francis to the Philippines from January 15-19, 2015, I thought of reposting here an essay that I wrote way back in 2003 regarding the need to improve the English proficiency of the country’s Roman Catholic priests. I actually had that essay posted in Jose Carillo's English Forum in 2010 or over four years ago together with the preface below, but not being aware of any determined efforts taken by the church hierarchy regarding the matter, I believe that the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis to our predominantly Roman Catholic nation makes that essay even more relevant reading today. (December 28, 2014)

In their efforts at evangelization, should the major organized religions just rely on the momentum and stickiness of their respective belief systems? Or should they make a purposive and continuing effort to be better communicators and defenders of the faith, whether using English or any other language for that matter?

I have often pondered these questions over the years and even wrote an essay about the subject, “The Grammar of Clerics and Preachers,” sometime in 2003 after listening to a priest give his homily during a mass in Metro Manila. That priest had bungled his English grammar and had stumbled on his English phrases and idioms far too often for comfort, and I felt that this was an untenable state of affairs that needed the immediate action of the church leadership.

Within a few hours after my essay came out in the Internet edition of The Manila Times, however, I received the following e-mail from one of the faithful overseas:  

“Regarding your column on the grammar of preachers, let me say that none of us is perfect. I must admit that I’m not that great either when it comes to English grammar. We even have a Filipino priest who has been here in America for over 10 years, but who still finds it next to impossible to correctly pronounce just a simple English word; he also doesn’t know the difference between ‘she’ and ‘he,’ but of course I know what he means. However, if you listen closely to the message of God that he is trying to tell you through the homily, you will be surprised that all those grammar errors fade away. Let God’s message reach your heart and mind instead. And for their big and little imperfections, our priests need our prayers, too.”

I really wonder if the church hierarchy should follow the line of least resistance being advocated above and leave everything to God, or start being really proactive and make sure that its seminarians and even its full-fledged priests will get much more intensive, rigorous grounding in English grammar and usage from now on. (March 20, 2010)

The grammar of clerics and preachers

A few Sundays ago, my two sons and I attended Holy Mass in one of those improvised worship halls put up inside Metro Manila malls. The priest, in his late thirties or early forties, read the opening lines of the Eucharist in pleasantly modulated English, his voice rippling the familiar words and phrases like the chords of a well-tuned piano. His cadence and pronunciation reminded me of the late Fr. James Donelan, S.J., then chaplain of the Asian Institute of Management, who used to say morning mass at the institute in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He would regale the middle-aged management students with English-language homilies of simple beauty and depth, and then, in his formal humanities class, he would lecture them with delicious erudition about the cultural wealth of Western civilization. Now, listening to the young priest at the mall, I thought that here at last was one more man of the cloth of possibly the same weave. I thus settled down on my chair confident of hearing a well-delivered homily to strengthen my resolve as a believer for the week ahead.

That expectation was soon dashed to pieces, however, for as soon as the priest no longer read from the book and started speaking extemporaneously, it became clear that his command of English left a lot to be desired. He could not even make the form of his verbs agree with the number of his nouns and pronouns, and his grammar was so gender-blind as to be irritating (“The woman walked in the storm and go under the tree to deliver his baby.”). His command of the prepositions was likewise disturbingly inadequate, and he stumbled on his English phrases and idioms far too often for comfort.

I therefore listened to the rest of his homily with increasing distress. Of course, I couldn’t presume that the rest of the congregation shared my discomfort; perhaps I was just too exacting in my English grammar that I tended to magnify what could really be minor mistakes. But two weeks later, I asked one of my sons—then a high school senior—to validate my impressions of that homily. Having attended grade school in a Jesuit-run university, he would normally be squeamish about criticizing priests about anything, but he told me without batting an eyelash that he thought the priest’s English grammar was bad because he kept on messing up his noun-verb agreement and gender usage. I really needed no better confirmation of my impressions than that.

Looking back to that incident, I think that the country’s priests and preachers—more than anybody else in our highly Anglicized society—need better than just average English-language skills to effectively practice their vocation. We expect TV and radio broadcasters to have good English so they can properly report or interpret the news for us; we expect classroom teachers to have good English so they can effectively instruct our children on well-established, often doctrinaire areas of learning; and we expect lawyers to have good English to ably defend us in our mundane civil entanglements or prosecute those who have criminally acted against us and against society. But priests and preachers have a much more difficult job than all of them, for their goal is to teach us modes of belief and behavior that are matters not of fact but of faith. They ask us to believe with hardly any proof. And whatever doctrine they espouse, their mission is to help us experience the sublime, to make us shape our lives according to the hallowed precepts of prophets or sages of a bygone age. This is a definitely a tall order even for one with the gift of tongue, for it demands not only the fire of belief but also good or excellent command of whatever language he or she uses to preach.

Since I was a child, my impression has always been that priests and preachers stay in school the longest—ten to eleven years if my memory serves me well—because they have to master the craft of language, suasion, and persuasion better than most everybody else. My understanding is that this is why seminarians study for the priesthood far longer than students pursuing a degree in medicine or law. I would think that those years of long study could give them a truly strong foundation in English grammar and usage, in listening skills, and in reading skills, then imbue them with a facility with the language that couldn’t be matched by lesser mortals. However, as shown by the fractured English of that priest delivering that homily at the mall and of so many other priests I have listened to over the years, that foundation has been resting on shaky ground indeed.

I therefore think it’s high time that the church hierarchy took steps to remedy this problem. This might be a tall order, but if nothing is done about this, I’m afraid that the established religious faiths would lose more and more of their flock to less virtuous but more English-savvy preachers—preachers who may have rickety or dubious religious platforms but who have honed their gift of tongue and powers of elocution to a much higher degree. I therefore suggest, for their own sake and for the long-term survival of the faith, that all seminarians and even full-fledged priests be given a much more rigorous grounding in English grammar and usage. They need to effectively smoothen out the grammatical and semantic kinks in their English to become more able promoters and defenders of the faith.

As the old saying goes, God helps only those who help themselves. (May 23, 2003)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 23, 2003, © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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The Dangers of Overstatement

As a largely self-taught student of rhetoric, I watched and listened attentively to the homily that Sunday afternoon. The priest officiating the Mass exuded the verve and confidence of an experienced schoolmaster, speaking in fluent Tagalog interspersed with impeccable English. He obviously knew how to speak rhetorically, and I must say that at the start, his eloquence held me and the rest of the audience spellbound.

His elocution was classically Aristotelian. First, although a lector had already given him a suitable introduction, he restated his bonafides to more firmly establish his ethos, or the appeal of a speaker’s character (“Yes, I am a teacher, make no mistake about that.”). Then, for pathos, or the appeal to emotion, he used some academic-style humor that often drew laughter and half-smiles from the audience. I thus imagined that he was conversant with the Grecian flowers of rhetoric, so I naturally expected his homily to have a persuasive logos or appeal to reason as well.

To my bewilderment, however, he used a strange rhetorical device for the homily. What he did was to pick a native-language phrase—let’s just say “pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“my closest friend”)—then playfully ask everybody what each letter of the first word represented. Of course, there really was no way even the most intelligent person could have fathomed what those were. It was like telling a quiz show contestant this: “Give me the names of all the persons who perished in the Titanic.” A mind with total recall and steeped in trivia probably could have hazarded a guess if the priest had used a concrete noun instead, like “Doe, a deer, a female deer/Ray, a drop of golden sun…” in that delightful song of the Von Trapps in The Sound of Music. But the priest did it in the manner that people with nothing else to do will ask: “Ano ang kahulugan ng bawat letra sa katagang ‘San Miguel’? Sirit na? Ang hina mo naman! E, di ‘(S)a (a)ming (n)ayon (m)ay (is)ang (g)inoo (u)minom (e)h (l)asing.” (“In our village a gentleman got drunk.”)

The rhetorical device he used certainly was not a hyperbole, or an extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis or effect, as in “I ate so much that I must now be heavier than an elephant.” It could not have been a simile or metaphor, either, because no word was really compared or substituted with another. I had a fleeting feeling—soon gone—that it was some form of synecdoche, a variant of the metaphor that mentions the part to signify a whole, as in “I need six hands” to mean “I need six people.” In hindsight, I can see now that it was a weak fusion of metonymy and prosopopoeia, the first being a figure of speech that substitutes some suggestive word for what is actually meant, and the latter—also called “personification”—one that invests human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects. In any case, his question was so nebulous that the priest, as might be expected, ended up providing all the answers himself.

The words he assigned to the letters of the word “pinakamatalik” are no longer relevant, so I will not dwell on them here. They formed the core of his logos, however, and from sheer repetition, they ultimately brought home the message of the beneficence, love, and invitation to the communion that God extends to us all. There was no question about that. The problem was that the priest didn’t know when to stop. Ever the taskmaster giving pupils a grammar drill to the very end, he dunned his listeners many times to repeat each word; when they balked, he would browbeat them until they relented and blurted out the words. Then he asked everyone to do what I thought bordered on the absurd: to say “Ikaw ang pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“You are my closest friend.”) to his seatmate. He sternly badgered the listeners until he was satisfied that their collective voice was loud enough.

That was where, I think, the logic of his logos snapped; the liberties he took with the language simply became too embarrassing. Perhaps “Ikaw ay aking kaibigan” would have been acceptable rhetorically, but to ask someone to tell a total stranger that he is “your closest friend”? This gave you the feeling that the priest was more interested in testing his power to elicit the blind obedience of his flock than in planting a divine message in their minds.

In his classic book Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that persuasion by argument is best achieved when the speaker’s chain of argumentation is not too hard to follow and not too long: “The links in the chain must be few.” I have this feeling that the priest, in coercing his listeners to be party to his convoluted rhetoric, had seriously violated that role on both counts. This is the danger in overstatement that all public speakers must always guard against to keep their persuasiveness intact.

From the book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, Copyright © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo, Copyright © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Open secrets to writing prose that leaps out from the page

If you are simply writing a memo to your manager, a job application letter to a prospective employer, or an accomplishment report to a socio-civic or professional organization, your best bet will always be plain and simple English—simple words, concise and uncomplicated phrasing, short and straightforward sentences, expositions with not a trace of embellishment. But if you are a professional writer doing nonfiction feature stories or opinion pieces; a literary writer doing short fiction, novels, or stage plays; or a public speaker who ply the lecture circuit for a living or do a lot of social advocacy or political speeches, it definitely won’t do to depend on plain and simple English alone. You need to discover, learn, and practice the open secrets of writing English that leaps out from the page, English that engages and keeps your readers or listeners enthralled until you’re done with what you have to tell them. In short, you need to acquire ample skills in rhetorical writing and speaking in English.

In “Playing Boldly with Sentences,” an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column of The Manila Times in the early 2000s, I related my thrill of discovery in coming across Lucille Vaughan Payne’s The Lively Art of Writing, a reference book that methodically but delightfully describes the nuts-and-bolts of writing sentences and expositions with the power to hold readers and listeners by their lapels. I am sure that Forum members and guests can greatly benefit from that book’s writing prescriptions, so I have posted that essay about them here. (December 16, 2014)

Playing Boldly with Sentences

One of the most lucid and delightful books I’ve read about writing is Lucille Vaughan Payne’s The Lively Art of Writing. The slim volume, which I discovered many years ago when I was still very self-consciously grappling with writing technique, taught me one unforgettable truth about doing a sentence: it’s all a matter of developing a basic idea. No matter how complex our thoughts are, we can actually boil down each of them to a few words that capture its essential meaning. The emotional turmoil that seizes a love struck person, for instance, can normally be whittled down to this deadpan statement: “I’m in love and I don’t know what to do.” The righteous anger that a manager feels when a subordinate violates a time-honored corporate rule usually culminates in two words: “You’re fired!” And the feeling of certainty of a religious convert usually gets affirmed in these words: “I believe.” They are all that simple.

It is only when we ask ourselves—or when other people ask us—to support and justify those simple ideas that we have to elaborate on them with more words. Who are involved? Why? Where? When? How? And so what? To answer these questions, we begin to build our sentences. We make them long and complex to the extent that will make our thoughts clear, not only to ourselves but also to anyone who would care to read or listen to us.
 
Building those sentences can actually become much easier once we understand clearly that any sentence falls under either of three patterns: loose sentence, periodic sentence, or combination sentence. As delightfully discussed by Ms. Vaughan Payne in her book, every sentence begins with a basic idea or statement: “The doves flew.” “Ana lost her temper.” “The manager burst into laughter.” It is how we build structures upon these basic ideas that determines how good a writer or speaker we are.

We come up with a loose sentence every time we add a string of details to the tail end of a basic statement: “The doves flew, flapping their wings in the still air, breaking the morning stillness with their shrill cries, warning their kindred of the approach of the deadly hawks.” On the other hand, we produce a periodic sentence when we place additional details before or inside the basic statement: “The imperturbable Ana, ever the patient one, the girl who never got angry even with the worst provocation, lost her temper.” In a combination sentence, of course, we add details before, inside, and after the basic statement, freely combining the elements of both the loose and periodic sentence: “The morose and demanding manager, with an ax to grind against anything and everything, was so pleased with the quarterly sales that he burst into laughter, the first time in so many years in his beleaguered company.”

You must have already noticed that periodic sentence structures usually expand the subject or verb, while loose structures expand the verb or object. The usual methods of expanding the subject in a periodic sentence are, of course, description and the use of appositives, adjectives, prepositional phrase, and participles. In her book, Ms. Vaughan Payne suggests that the easiest way to make details flow in a periodic sentence is to think of the subject as being followed by a pause.

It is, she says, the same kind of pause that occurs in conversations every day, as in these sentences: “My friend [pause] a Political Science graduate [pause] wants to run for town mayor.” “That volcano [pause] sheer and high as it is [pause] is not really that hard to climb.” “The school [pause] in keeping with tradition [pause] required graduates to wear togas and gowns.” “Annabelle [pause] grown tired of her boyfriend [pause] broke off with him last night.”

In the case of verbs, whether in periodic or loose sentences, we can expand them by showing how their action progresses. We can use adverbs and adverbial phrases to do the expanding: “The interviewer listened, attentively at first, but distractedly and impatiently towards the end.” “The soldiers paused at the road junction, wearily scanning the horizon for jet bombers, fearfully spying the buildings for snipers.”

As in the case of subjects, we can likewise expand objects to form loose sentence structures by using appositives, adjectives, prepositional phrase, and participles: “Today I am seeing Miss Jennifer Cruz, the human resources manager.” “The newlyweds took the bus, a rickety affair that perilously transported the mountainfolk and their produce to the nearest lowland town.”

There’s actually no limit to how much we can expand subjects, verbs, and objects in our sentences—except, of course, good sense and a keen awareness of how much our readers and audiences can take. In the end, the good writer is one who exercises restraint: not saying too little as to be irritatingly cryptic, nor saying too much as to be a big, tiresome bore.

This essay is Chapter 80 of Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose A. Carillo © 2009 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Monday, December 1, 2014

Supply of English-capable Filipinos falls short of call-center demand

Way back in 2003, in an essay that I wrote for my English-usage in The Manila Times, I wrote about the special circumstance of the Philippines as a major exporter of English-capable manpower. I observed that the English acquired by Filipinos after being colonized by the United States for half a century was making a great life-saving difference for some 8 million Filipinos who had to work overseas for lack of gainful employment in their homeland. I argued then that barring any major reverses in the global labor market, the Philippines would be running out of its English-proficient labor exports in a few years. I then suggested that to stave off depletion of this supply, the country must undertake an intensive, no-nonsense training program to build the English proficiency of its labor pool and to assiduously improve it over the long term.

I wrote that essay at a time when the Philippines was just starting to nurture its fledgling call-center industry—a special employment variation in which modern communications technology makes it it possible for the country to export its English skills while physically keeping the manpower in the homeland. Last year or a decade later, fueled by the abundance of low-cost but highly-skilled English-speaking Filipinos, the Philippines became the top call-center country in the world—even overtaking India in the process.

But now a serious systemic problem has cropped up—the supply of qualified English-speaking Filipinos can no longer keep up with the growing call-center demand. Today, it looks like only one out of every 100 English-capable applicants interviewed by the leading call-center companies are actually hired, and that only 3 to 5 out of every 20 trainees survive the typical intensive one-month training. Clearly, as I suggested in that 2003 essay of mine, the Philippine government more than ever needs to put up an efficient, stable mechanism for replenishing its much-in-demand but depleted marketable English-speaking stock.

So here again is that 2003 essay of mine to put things in clearer perspective. (November 30, 2014)

Priming up our English exports

The special circumstance of the Philippines as a major exporter of English-capable manpower is a strategic advantage and strength for which we should be truly grateful. In truth, only God knows where our country’s economy would be right now if not for the English we have acquired after almost a half-century of colonization by the United States. We can rant and rave forever against this colonization from an ideological or geopolitical standpoint, but one fortunate fact will be indisputable: our passable English has made the great life-saving difference for some 8 million Filipinos who work overseas for lack of gainful employment in their homeland, as well as for their 40 million or more dependents back home who subsist on their $8 billion to $10 billion (400 to 500 billion Philippine pesos) in annual foreign exchange remittances. This happy accident of history as well as saving grace is something we share with only one other major English-capable country in the Asian region, India, and whether we like it or not, how we will deal with it in the next several years will largely shape our national destiny.

As with any other national resource, however, our English-proficient pool of professionals, health care and social workers, teachers, entertainers, househelps, and laborers is fast being depleted by the relentless waves of our labor diaspora. Barring any major reverses in the global labor market, we will run out of our English-proficient labor exports in a few years if we make no serious effort now to replenish them. The day will come when we will begin scrounging around for our English-speaking runts, or those who have achieved only a pitiful smattering of spoken English and cannot even write a decent English sentence. This will happen because although the Philippine economy has become so terribly dependent on overseas labor exports for economic survival, the government has not bothered to set up an efficient, stable mechanism for replenishing its depleted English-speaking stock. On the contrary, it has actually de-emphasized the teaching of English in favor of Pilipino in the primary and secondary schools. It has blithely ignored the fact that it is the English of its labor exports that has been saving its skin all this time, propping up the battered and faltering economy. This is like cutting the only rope that prevents us from falling headlong into the precipice of economic ruin.

It is high time the government finally recognized both the danger and opportunity in our current overseas labor situation. To put it even more bluntly, we must make sure that our English-capable labor exports are not only deployable but also the preferred choice of the overseas labor markets. The demand side is growing but our supply side is now on “low bat” after so many years running, so to speak. The only way to stave off depletion of this supply is to conduct an intensive, no-nonsense training program to build our English proficiency as a people and to assiduously improve it over the long term. We have already lost out by default to many of our Asian neighbors in the areas of technology, manufacturing, and agriculture, but the fact is that we are still miles and decades ahead of them in English proficiency, no matter how low its levels may have sunk in recent years. English is our only highly viable and competitive export product remaining today. Let us not lose out on this one; let us nurture and not neglect it.

One immediate course of action the government can take is to train a highly professional, high-performing corps of teachers with a strong English-language orientation. It can create a highly selective scholarship program for this purpose, similar to the National Science Development Board (NSDB) program in the 1960s. The program can aim for an annual quota of, say, 10,000 to 20,000 high school seniors with excellent English, science, and mathematics skills as well as outstanding aptitude for teaching; prequalify them through a rigorous state-conducted exam; and put them in a special, highly intensive teaching degree course as state-sponsored scholars. The best and brightest of our young people can be attracted to this program by guaranteeing them highly competitive salaries and privileges upon graduation. After all, their work will be truly radical and missionary: to teach English and the basic academic disciplines not simply for domestic needs but for international competitiveness in the foreign labor markets. The long-term goal, of course, is to spearhead the liberation of our educational system from mediocrity and to spark a Renaissance in the teaching and learning of English, science, and mathematics in both the public and private schools.

In perhaps five to six years’ time, this elite group of teachers can be deployed to strategic points of the country to do two very crucial tasks: to take leadership positions in the regional or provincial educational hierarchies, and to set up and run local retraining programs in English, science, and mathematics for primary and secondary teachers. They will also set the mechanism for replacing or retiring teachers who do not meet the much higher teaching standards that will be pursued in all levels. Only through a well-focused, purposive, and long-term initiative like this can we ensure the continuity of our overseas labor exports as a source of badly needed foreign exchange, and ensure that the products of our school system are superior to those supplied by other labor exporting countries.

The formation of this elite group of English-oriented educators and teachers will not only be a pragmatic move but a symbolic one as well. It will announce in no uncertain terms the government’s strong and earnest desire to build a much stronger educational system that is fully in tune with the needs of the modern-day world economy. It can in fact become the launching pad for the long-dreamed overhaul of the educational system that government officials and educators had only been paying lip service to all these years. On top of this, it will serve notice to the world that the Philippines is finally taking its primacy in the English language very seriously, and that it intends to dearly keep and improve its 100-year lead in English as a matter of national pride and survival. (2003)

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From the book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language by Jose A. Carillo © 2004 by the author, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Mastering the fine art of negation in English

We know that to affirm something to be true is much easier and more pleasant to do than to declare it to be untrue. This is because doing the latter often involves negating what somebody else holds to be true—a situation that could cause bad feelings, wounded pride, acrimonious exchange, or even vicious and protracted debate. It is therefore important for us to develop negation to a fine art, the better to diffuse the pain and unpleasantness to the one being refused, rebutted, contradicted, denied, lied upon, or denigrated.

The staple negation adverbs in English are, of course, “no,” “not,” “never,” and “without.” In addition to them, however, the language uses a remarkably wide range of devices for lexical negation (words with negative connotations) and affixal negation (positive words negated by affixes). I surveyed these types of negation in an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in the mid-2000s, and I am now reposting it here for those who may need a refresher on how to say no without causing offense. (November 16, 2014)

Forming negative sentences correctly

Without any doubt, the adverb “no”—abetted by its semantic cousins “not,” “never,” “without,” and several others with a negative bent—is the most subversive word in the English language. Look how “no” undermines and negates every single thought and idea to which it latches on: “No, I don’t like you.” “No, I have never loved you.” “No, go away; my life will be much better without you.” And if you look back at the adverbial phrase “without any doubt” that begins the first sentence above, you would see how the word “without” totally reverses the sense of “doubt” to “certainty.” Overwhelmingly powerful, “no” and its cohorts can quickly and very efficiently demolish every declarative or affirmative statement that we can think up in the English language.

We can see that to negate entire statements, “no” takes a commanding position at the very beginning of sentences. It does so with brutal efficiency: “No swerving.” “No entry.” “No, sir, minors aren’t allowed here.” On the other hand, when “no” has to do the negating within a sentence, it often assigns “not” to take its place, commanders an auxiliary verb, and positions “not” right after it: “The woman drove.” “The woman did not drive.” “The woman will not drive.” Of course, we already know that when “not” does this, the main verb relinquishes the tense to the auxiliary verb. In the example given above, in particular, the auxiliary verb “do” takes either the past or future tense, and the main verb takes the verb stem “drive.”

The pattern of negation is slightly different in the perfect tenses. The adverb “not” simply inserts itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, with the main verb remaining in the past participle form even as the negation is consummated: “The woman has driven.” “The woman has not driven.” The important thing to remember is that “not” always positions itself between the helping verb and the main verb; for it to do otherwise would be grammatically and awfully fatal: “The woman not has driven.” “The visitors not have eaten.”

In contrast, “never” is a movable negator, certainly much more versatile than “not.” Watch: “The woman never drives.” “Never does the woman drive.” “The woman has never driven.” “Never has the woman driven.” “The woman never has driven.” “Never” is negation in its emphatic form—demolishing an idea to the extreme.

The adverb “no,” of course, can routinely negate any element by denoting absence, contradiction, denial, or refusal: “Under no circumstances will Claudia’s offer be accepted.” “I see no sign of reconciliation.” The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are no more.” “Have you no conscience?” The adverbs “not” and “never” work in much the same way: “Not a single drop of rain fell last summer.” “She will always be a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

But there’s one major caveat on “not”: it’s wrong to use it in sentences that have an “all…not” form (to mean “to the degree expected”). Take this sentence: “All of the women in the district did not vote for the lone female candidate.” This sentence is semantically problematic; it could mean that “some of the women did not vote for the lone female candidate”, or that “none of the women voted for the lone female candidate.” Better to remove the ambiguity by fine-tuning the negation to yield the desired meaning. The first option: “Not all of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.” The second option: “None of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.”

The same caveat should also be observed when using “not” with the adjective “every,” as in this ambiguous sentence: “Every candidate did not meet the voters’ expectations.” Better: “None of the candidates met the voters’ expectations” or “All of the candidates failed to meet the voters’ expectations.”

Apart from using “no,” “not,” and “never,” we can also use the lexical semantics of negation as well as affixal negation to reverse the sense of things. Lexical negation is simply the negative structuring of sentences by using words with negative denotations, such as “neither,” “nor,” “rarely,” “hardly,” and “seldom.” Affixal negation, on the other hand, negates positive words through the use of the affixes “un-”, “im-”/“in-”/“il-”, “dis-”, “de-”, and “-less,” as in “unnecessary,” “imperfect,” “ineffective,” “illegal,” “disregard,” “decamp,” and “useless.”

When using these negative affixes,however, we must always remember to drop the “no,” “not,” or “never” in the sentence if our true intention is to negate the statement. Failure to do so will result in a grammatically incorrect double negative. “It is not illegal to steal,” for instance, will mean exactly its opposite, “It is legal to steal”—with all its dire consequences to civilized society.

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From the book Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose A. Carillo © 2009 by the author, © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.