A recurrent misuse of ‘between’

A recurrent misuse of ‘between’ « on: September 19, 2009, 12:44:04 AM »

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One grammar error I frequently encounter in my work as a copy editor is the misuse of the preposition “between” in the sense of setting the limits or endpoints of a range. This usage of “between” being so basic in English (as in “between you and me” and “between heaven and earth”), I used to think that getting it wrong was simply due to oversight by the writer or to what we might charitably call a typing error. But over the past three years or so, my coming across this grammar transgression much too often has convinced me that there’s actually more to the problem than meets the eye.

Consider the following sentences (I have changed some particulars to protect the identity of the writers): “Putting up a water refilling station requires an initial capital outlay of anywhere between P600,000 to P1.1 million.” “Plain chocolate contains between 30 percent to 70 percent cocoa solids.” “Each shop can carrybetween 1,000 to 1,800 items, with groceries comprising the bulk of its sales.” “The tunnel provided the perfect setting for the locals, who could only go partying between 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. because of the curfew.” “The estimated investment recovery period for the restaurant is between one to three years.” “His distributorship moves between 1,000 to 2,500 units a month.”

In all of the six “between”-using sentences above, of course, the grammatically acceptable usage is not “between _______ to_______” but “between _______ and _______” instead: “Putting up a water refilling station requires an initial capital outlay of anywhere between P600,000 and P1.1 million.” “Plain chocolate contains between 30 percent and 70 percent cocoa solids.” “Each shop can carry between 1,000 and 1,800 items, with groceries comprising the bulk of its sales.” “The tunnel provided the perfect setting for the locals, who could only go partying between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. because of the curfew.” “The estimated investment recovery period for the restaurant is between one and three years.” “His distributorship moves between 1,000 and 2,500 units a month.” This is because in all of the six sentences, the “between”-phrase is describing not the range itself but a point somewhere within that range.

Now, for those who’d rather use “to” because they feel queasy using “and” as go-between for the endpoints of the range, there’s a perfectly acceptable alternative: get rid of “between” and replace it with the preposition “from,” and, if possible, get rid of “from” itself afterwards. The original five sentences will then read as follows: “Putting up a water refilling station requires an initial capital outlay of anywhere from P600,000 to P1.1 million.” “Plain chocolate contains from 30 percent to 70 percent cocoa solids.” “Each shop can carry1,000 to 1,800 items, with groceries comprising the bulk of its sales.” “The tunnel provided the perfect setting for the locals, who could only go partying from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. because of the curfew.” “The estimated investment recovery period for the restaurant is one to three years.” “His distributorship moves 1,000 to 2,500 units a month.”

Note that the third, fifth and sixth sentences above did away with “from” and are none the worse for it. In all six sentences, though, it’s clear that the phrase at hand is describing not a particular point within that range but the range itself.

There’s one other thing to make sure of when converting an erroneous “between _______ to _______” phrase to a “from _______ to _______” phrase in which the endpoints are dates: don’t change the “to” to a hyphen. When correcting, say, “The business flourished between 1995 to 2007, then floundered during the 2008 economic meltdown,” avoid reconstructing the sentence as “The business flourished from 1995-2007, then floundered during the 2008 economic meltdown.” For clarity and elegance in construction, always spell out the “to”: “The business flourished from 1995 to 2007, then floundered during the 2008 economic meltdown.”

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, November 15, 2008 issue © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
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Is "presently" present or future?

Is "presently" present or future? « on: September 25, 2009, 07:12:48 PM »

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Let’s settle this vexing word-choice problem once and for all: Do we use the adverb “presently” to mean “at present” or “very soon”? I realize that I had already taken a position on this matter years before in this column—that the word should mean “very soon” and not “at present”—and I must admit that when I’m copyediting manuscripts, I always itch to change “presently” to “now” when the author had obviously used the word in that sense, as in “The couple presently lives in a charming little apartment.” But then, when I watch a British movie with snotty butler telling snotty master “I’ll be with you presently, sir,” I’m absolutely sure that the word means “very soon” instead.

The truth of the matter is that “presently” has two acceptable senses in current usage: “currently” or “at the present time,” and “very soon” or “in a short time.” The neologisms “antagonym” and “contranym” have been coined for words like this, which could sometimes mean the opposite of itself. At any rate, The American Heritage Book of English Usage says that “at the present time” or “currently” was actually the original sense of “presently,” one that dates back to the late 14th century. For some reason, though, the usage seems to have disappeared from the written record in the 17th century. This disappearance, my digital Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary implies, was probably what prompted the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary to declare in 1909 that that sense of the word had become obsolete—even as the OED observed that the sense remained in regular use in most English dialects.

Since then, some language critics have become biased against the “now” sense of “presently,” declaring it erroneous usage. They insist that “presently” should be used only in its primary sense of “soon” or “in a short time.” In fact, according to The American Heritage Book of English Usage, only 50 percent of its Usage Panel found the “now” sense of “presently” acceptable. (In one recent official count, the Usage Panel had 180 members, including such notables as Jacques Barzun, educator; Alfred Kazin, English professor; Henry Louis Gates Jr., humanities professor; Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, and Pat Conroy, novelists; Paul Theroux, travel writer; and William Zinsser, writer-editor.) This, of course, puts sentences like “The 29th Olympics ispresently being held in Beijing” in serious jeopardy. Indeed, it’s obvious that if the Usage Panel had their way, they’d rather restate that sentence as “The 29th Olympics is [now, at present, currently] being held in Beijing.”

I must admit that it was the collective judgment of all these English-language notables that had persuaded me to take a firm position in this impasse. I’m not saying that the “now” sense of that word is incorrect, but being not a native English speaker and not bound by a particular English dialect, I’d rather rely on how professional users of American English perceive the meaning of a word than on simple dictionary meaning or anecdotal evidence.

Thus, to avoid confusing myself and my readers, I would never use “presently” in this sense: “They arepresently in Boracay Beach on their honeymoon.” Hands down, I would use “now” as first option, and perhaps use “at present” only if I have already used a lot of “nows” in preceding sentences. As to “currently,” I’d shy away from it because the word sounds to me too officious for comfort. These, too, would be my advice to writers who until now are unsure of how to deal with “presently.”

One more question needs to be answered, of course: When do we use “presently” to mean “very soon,” if at all? Well, perhaps when we’re in London to visit the Queen, and the cab driver is badgering us to hurry up while we’re buying some souvenirs, we can tell him with absolute nonchalance: “Just you wait. I’ll be with you presently.”

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, Saturday, August 16, 2008 issue © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
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The battle for our minds

The battle for our minds « on: August 22, 2009, 12:41:15 AM »

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Once upon a time in our fledgling democracy, people who sought elective office assiduously cultivated a public life of honor, dignity, and excellence. The measures of social and political acceptance were intelligence, integrity, and achievement. The political firmament of the pre-Independence era thus filled up with such illustrious names as Quezon, Osmeña, Recto, Tañada, Roxas, and Laurel. They became larger-than-life presences because of their personal magnetism, eloquence, and deep understanding of the imperatives of politics and governance. But then that was the time when radio in our country was still an adolescent as a mass communication medium. That was the time when broadcast television was still an infant even in America, which had transplanted democracy on the largely unprepared Philippine soil at the turn of the 20th century. That was the time when the print media still held sway as the public information medium. The mechanisms of the democratic electoral process could still grow without getting badly distorted by media-induced manipulation.

When the Filipinos discovered TV and radio broadcasting, however, a monkey wrench was thrown on the country’s electoral process. They discovered that broadcast media appearance and noise could very well substitute for the assiduously cultivated public life. They discovered the politics of convenience, the politics of media-induced gloss and popularity. From then on, no one who wanted to enter politics needed to learn the art of politics and governance. All one had to do was to expose oneself on broadcast media, preferably television. The kind of exposure really didn’t matter—decent, indecent, whatever—so long as it was sustained exposure. Clowning or outright buffoonery or somersaults on TV was perfect. Reading the news or prattling on TV and radio with half-baked opinions was just fine. Anchoring talk shows or quiz shows was just great. And yes, doing 30-second TV or radio endorsements for any product that needs heavy advertising was even much better! Pitch multivitamins, rum, brandy, anything—and voila! one can be sure to be rated highly by the statistical pollsters and run for election. The greater the broadcast exposure, the higher the level of public office one could aspire for. So why bother learning the art of management, leadership, and governance? After all, the simple media-exposure formula had wonderfully sent entertainers of all stripes to Congress as well as to provincial capitols and city halls—film actors, clowns, sit-com talents, martial-arts performers, talk-show hosts, and newsreaders. At one time, the same formula even sent one of their kind to the highest post in the gift of the land!

There may be some exceptions to the rule, but look at what Philippine democracy has produced for us: politicians without political platform or ideology, elective officials who do little on top of preparing themselves for the next elections, individuals who have no true constituency or principle to stand for and fight for. Repudiating the marketing axiom so clearly enunciated by Al Ries and Jack Trout in their book, Positioning—that anyone or anything that must battle for our mind must clearly “position” or define itself in the marketplace—these people have not even taken the trouble to position themselves. They stand for nothing. They belong to a political party largely for convenience. Only a paltry few have shown a gift for leadership and governance, fewer still those with a clear vision of their role as public servants. Many have just capitalized on their media-induced popularity to attract moneyed backers or well-financed politicians who were unsure of their grip of the public mind. Some, in fact, have evidently become touts or politicians for hire.

The sad thing is that the Philippine mass media have actually abetted this state of affairs. They have allowed not only politicians but their very own broadcast or editorial personnel to ruthlessly exploit the power of media to advance their political interests. (Of course, it is entirely possible, too, that the media owners were the ones exploiting their former wards all along for their own vested interests.) We thus see the embarrassing spectacle of  (1) TV newscasts whose newsreaders are also the commercial endorsers of products advertised on these newscasts, (2) broadcast personalities already in high public office still shamelessly extracting media exposure for themselves by keeping their old broadcast programs (as if nothing has changed in their professional lives), and (3) officials in high elective office callously acting as commercial product endorsers on all forms of media to perpetually keep themselves in the public eye.

When will this cult of media-abetted popularity end? I am afraid it will not—unless the Filipinos realize that the quality of their governance will only be as good as the quality of the people they put into public office, and unless they recognize the harm that this reign of entertainers in politics is doing to them and act in concert to end it. Until then, to expect any real progress in this country will remain an altogether ridiculous notion.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 15, 2003 issue © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

“Like” and “such as” are such slippery grammar trippers

“Like” and “such as” are such slippery grammar trippers « on: October 03, 2009, 02:15:19 AM »

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Surely one of the most slippery grammar trippers we will encounter in English is choosing between “like” and “such as” in forming comparative statements or giving examples. Which of them, for instance, is correctly used in the following two sentences? “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures like a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.” “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures such as a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.”

If you still haven’t figured out the correct usage, you may take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone in the predicament. The use of “like” and “such as” is actually considered correct in both sentences, but the choice between them has remained debatable all these years. We therefore need to carefully study both sides of the debate so we can put ourselves on more solid semantic footing regarding the usage.

Some grammarians insist that “such as,” which means “for example,” is the only correct usage in such constructions: “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures such as a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.” They maintain that “like” should never be used as a substitute for “such as,” arguing that “like” doesn’t convey the idea of giving an example at all. Instead, they say, “like” in this usage can only imply similarity, resemblance, or comparison, as in “Her pillow lips look like Angelina Jolie’s.”

Other grammarians are not as restrictive in their prescription for using “like” and “such as,” but they do recommend the following more precise usage for them: (1) Use “such as” to introduce one or more examples that represent a larger subject, as in “Eduardo has a collection of vintage cars such as the 1955 BMW 507 and the 1915 Vauxhall”; and (2) Use “like” to convey the idea that two subjects are comparable, as in “Alberto wants to be a vintage car collector like Ramon.”

Take note, though, that these same grammarians consider “like” to be a close semantic equivalent of “such as.” They are therefore not averse to substituting “like” for “such as” in the sentence given in Item 1: “Eduardo has a collection of vintage cars like the 1955 BMW 507 and the 1915 Vauxhall.” On the other hand, they would find it unthinkable for anyone to substitute “such as” for “like” in the sentence given in Item 2 above. To them, the resulting sentence is unacceptable because it isn’t natural-sounding or idiomatic: “Eduardo wants to be a vintage car collector such as Ramon.”

At any rate, “like” in modern spoken English has practically taken over the role of “such as” in comparative statements. The forms “such as” and “such...as” are now largely confined to formal writing. “Like,” in contrast, is now the preferred form for informal usage in which the example being given is offered not simply as an example but as the topic of the sentence itself, as in this case: "We are delighted to have a generous benefactor like Bill Gates." Using “such as” instead of “like” in such sentences must be firmly avoided, for it gives the sentence a false ring: “We are delighted to have a generous benefactor such as Bill Gates.”

In formal writing, of course, we are well advised to distinguish carefully between “like” comparisons and “such as” comparisons. In a “like” comparison, only one person or object from the class is usually named, and that person or object is understood to be excluded from the group being discussed. Take this example: “If you are a student taught by a brilliant mathematics teacher like Prof. Alberto Reyes, you would learn differential calculus in no time at all.” This comparison is about the possibility of students being taught by mathematics teachers whose brilliance is comparable to Prof. Alberto Reyes’s, with Prof. Reyes himself specifically excluded from the comparison.

On the other hand, in a “such as” or “such...as” comparison, one or several persons or objects can be named in the comparison, and all of those persons or objects are understood to be included in the group being discussed. Take these two sentences:

“With highly capable mathematics professors such as Prof. Alberto Reyes and Prof. Eduardo Cariño handling the differential calculus classes, we can expect a much higher percentage of passing among the students.”

“With such highly capable mathematics professors as Prof. Alberto Reyes and Prof. Eduardo Cariño handling the differential calculus classes, we can expect a much high percentage of passing among the students.”

In both sentences, the comparison this time is about brilliant mathematics teachers as a class whose members include both Prof. Reyes and Prof. Cariño.

Now that we can clearly distinguish the semantic difference between “like” and “such as,” we should now be able to use them without fear of tripping in our grammar.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, September 26, 2005 issue © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The Quixotic Quest for Good Teachers

The Quixotic Quest for Good Teachers « on: June 13, 2009, 03:17:05 PM »

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Public-school teachers are comparatively the most productive professionals a nation can have on a continuing basis. In a whole lifetime of teaching, where a teacher handles, say, five sections of 60 pupils each every school year during a 40-year career span, she helps educate something like 12,000 pupils and nudges them a grade or year closer to becoming productive professionals themselves. Of course, nine other teachers have to work with her to achieve that, so the country’s current public teaching force of 327,000, if just trained and motivated to do a superb job, can assure this country of something like 98,100,000 capable high school graduates every 10-year cycle and a total of 392,400,000 graduates within the teacher’s 40-year career span—more than enough to replace all of the undesirable products of the previous half century’s half-baked and largely misdirected teaching.

This visionary mathematics for the public school system performing at peak efficiency is probably too fancy, too idealistic, and too incendiary, and those with only a piddling understanding of mathematics really should not fret if they don’t get it. But the numbers are probably reasonably accurate and for real. They are as real as the fact that in a longer career span of probably 50 or 55 years, a good number of lawyers—the most glamorized and usually the most lucrative-earning professionals of all—probably will litigate only a few hundred cases that only serve to keep moneyed criminals and organized deceivers out of jail, work out schemes for maybe a dozen corporations to do gray-area or outright unethical things legally, or legislate laws that often only get our law enforcers in a perfect bind (like those that prevent them from evicting professional squatters without giving them a relocation site). As to the medical doctor and the dentist and the engineer and the accountant and the journalist, it’s probably prudent to keep them out of this productivity equation. We may not avail of their services very often or deal with them directly, but when we do, they sure can alleviate suffering and give us comfort and reliable information—thus giving us peace of mind and helping make our lives demonstrably better.

But before we hear again that righteous platitude about all professions being equally honorable (as if professional con artists and professional pyramiders and Ponzi schemers could be honorable), let’s go back to the baseline data about this country’s public school system. The Philippines, as already mentioned, currently has something like 327,000 elementary school teachers, with more than 80 percent of the country’s Department of Education budget of 106.5 billion Philippine pesos (US$2 billion) going to their salaries. And, in what seems to be a jolting surprise, a recent World Bank report says that Philippine public school teachers are among the best compensated in the world.

Based on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, according to the World Bank report, the starting salaries of Filipino teachers were much higher compared to those of most Asian, Latin American, and even some European Community countries. They were higher than Korea’s and matched only by Jordan’s. But then we should be very careful about these worldwide macro level comparisons. Too many inter-nation adjustments are brought to bear on their computations as to render them meaningless in real domestic terms.

Viewed more realistically at the micro level, the compensation for Philippine public school teachers boils down to a starting salary of about 11,000 Philippine pesos (US$208) a month.* This is lower than what a salaried janitor gets in the better-paying government corporations or private companies. The even more shocking downside is that this entry-level salary for teachers stays practically at that level even after 15 years of service. In high-teacher-salary countries like Korea and Jordan, those entry-level salaries almost get doubled after 15 years by performance incentives and regular salary increases. In contrast, for the backbreaking job the Philippine public teacher puts in, the system provides her absolutely no incentives or rewards at all. It plays a blind eye to the need to motivate her to teach well and to keep her in the profession. Worse, the World Bank study found, the Philippine public school system–in an unbelievable act of illogic–keeps the salary scales the same for both primary and secondary teachers even if the work and the required qualifications vastly differ. Indeed, after more than a century, the Philippine public education system is thus still ridiculously muddling through in managing its most important development resource.

So, if we need better proof of why the teaching profession cannot attract the best and the brightest of the land, look no further. If we need better proof of why students would rather become lawyers in a nation already perilously awash with lawyers, or would rather lead lonely lives abroad working as machine-room engineers and nurses and physical therapists and housemaids, or would rather work as card dealers in the world’s casinos or as boilermen in the darkest recesses of ocean-going ships, it is this. If we need the smoking gun for why this country will forever be engaged in a quixotic quest for good teachers, and why it will forever be gripped by a vicious cycle of national incompetence and illogic and superstition, it is this. (July 14, 2003)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 14, 2003 issue © 2003 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

Learning to use the relative pronouns confidently

Learning to use the relative pronouns confidently « on: October 16, 2009, 11:06:09 PM »

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Part I

One of the most common mistakes I encounter in my work as copyeditor and grammar consultant is the misuse of the relative pronouns. Not a few of the manuscripts I edit often embarrassingly fumble or stumble when using “who,” “which,” or “that” to relate a qualifying clause to an antecedent noun in the sentence. And I must admit that early in my writing career, I used to get pretty mixed up with the relative pronouns myself. Simply on gut feel, I would indiscriminately use “which” and “that” to announce my relative clauses, so I can imagine that my grammar then was probably correct no more than 50 percent of the time.

I can see now that I got into this predicament largely because in my youth, I had read a lot of novels by British authors. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them or profit from them in terms of getting a better grasp of the English language, but as I was to find out to my consternation many years later, British English uses “which” and “that” in almost the opposite way American English does.

So I think it’s high time we did a full-dress review of the relative pronouns. We’ll do it specifically in the American English standard, which is the standard we are using in the Philippines.

The relative pronouns are, of course, “who,” “which,” “that,” “whom,” “whoever,” “whomever,” “whatever,” and “whichever.” Each of them serves to relate a dependent or subordinate clause to an antecedent noun in a sentence, which can either be the subject or object of that dependent clause. And taken together, the relative pronoun and the dependent clause it introduces constitute what is called a relative clause.

Let’s examine this sentence that has a relative clause attached to it: “People who complain loudest about a problem often don’t do anything to solve it.” Here, the relative clause is “who complain loudest about a problem” and “who” is the relative pronoun that relates it to the antecedent noun “people,” which is the subject of the sentence. What the relative clause does here is to specify the particular people being written about; functionally, it provides additional information about the antecedent noun so the reader can understand the context of the statement better.

Now, in English, the choice of relative pronoun depends on two things: (1) whether the additional information being given is essential or not essential to the understanding of the idea or context of the main clause; and (2) whether the antecedent noun is a person or an animal or inanimate object. Either way, however, the relative pronoun can function as a subject or an object or can take its possessive form.

At any rate, a relative clause that provides essential information to the main clause is what is known as adefining or restrictive relative clause, as in the example we looked at earlier: “People who complain loudest about a problem often don’t do anything to solve it.” Here, the relative clause “who complain loudest about a problem” can’t be taken out from the sentence, for to do so will seriously change the meaning of what’s being said. Indeed, if we drop that relative clause, we would end up with “People don’t do anything to solve [a problem]”—a sentence that unreasonably and illogically generalizes on human behavior.

On the other hand, when the information in the relative clause is not essential to the idea or context of the main clause, we have what is called a nondefining or nonrestrictive relative clause. In such cases, a comma is normally needed to separate the relative clause from the main clause, as in this sentence: “The company decided to fire its legal counsel, who bungled the court filings in a crucial corporate dispute.” Here, the main clause can stand even without the relative clause. (September 20, 2008)

Part II

In the previous essay, we discussed the difference between the two kinds of relative clauses: a defining or restrictive relative clause provides essential information to the main clause of a sentence, while anondefining or nonrestrictive relative clause provides information not essential to the idea or context of the main clause. We then saw that when the antecedent noun is a person, a defining relative clause is inseparably linked to the main clause by the relative pronoun “who,” as in “Young people who spend too much time playing computer games tend to have very short attention spans.” A nondefining relative clause is similarly introduced by the relative pronoun “who,” but it must always be set apart from the main clause by a pair of commas, as in “The great Jose Rizal, who has been called ‘The Pride of the Malay Race,’ was actually of Chinese ancestry.” Those commas indicate that the main clause can stand even without the relative clause.

(Again, to get a surer feel of the difference between a defining clause and a nondefining clause, see what happens when we drop the relative clauses from each of the examples above: “Young people tend to have very short attention spans.” “The great Jose Rizal was actually of Chinese ancestry.” With the relative clause gone in the first sentence, the statement has become too overgeneralized to be true; in contrast, even without the relative clause, the second statement remains perfectly valid.)

So far, though, we have only discussed the use of relative pronouns when persons are the antecedent subjects. When the subject is an animal, a place, an inanimate object, or a concept, we can no longer use the relative pronoun “who” to link the relative clause to its antecedent subject. Instead, we use either the relative pronouns “that” or “which” depending on the kind of relative clause we are using in the sentence.

In American English specifically, we use “that” to link a defining or restrictive clause to a nonhuman antecedent subject, as in the following examples: “The Siamese cat that our father found on a street gutter a year ago became the family’s favorite pet.” “The treehouse that the Sanchez brothers built during their teens was gone.” “The great idea that was propounded by the neophyte legislator got mangled due to too much politicking.” In these sentences, the relative clause is crucial to understanding the idea or context of the main clause; dropping the relative clause can seriously alter the import or significantly detract from the intended meaning: “The Siamese cat became the family’s favorite pet.” “The treehouse was gone.” “The great idea got mangled due to too much politicking.”

On the other hand, we use the relative pronoun “which” to link a nondefining or nonrestrictive clause to a nonhuman antecedent subject, as in the following examples: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was written by the British historian Edward Gibbon in the 18th century, has been hailed as one the greatest historical works produced by Western man.” “A subspecies of the chevrotain, which is also known as the mouse deer, is indigenous to Palawan and nearby islands.” The pair of enclosing commas is mandatory in such constructions; it sets the relative clause apart from the main clause and indicates that the relative clause is not essential to the idea of the main clause.

Indeed, when the relative clauses are dropped from such sentences, we will find that the main clauses can very well stand by themselves: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has been hailed as one the greatest historical works produced by Western man.” “A subspecies of the chevrotain is indigenous to Palawan and nearby islands.”

In the next essay, we will discuss how the American English usage of the relative clauses differs from that of British English, and how we can streamline sentence constructions that use relative clauses. (September 27, 2008)

Part III

A rather sticky point about the relative pronouns “that” and “which” is that their American English usage differs in one important respect from British English usage. Indeed, one who gets heavily exposed to books and periodicals in both English standards—as I had been in my younger days—would experience some difficulty in choosing between “that” and “which” to link relative clauses.

This is because as we saw in the previous column, American English specifically prescribes using “that” to link a defining or restrictive clause to a nonhuman antecedent subject, and restricts the use of “which” to linking a non¬defining or nonrestrictive clause to a nonhuman antecedent subject. In contrast, British English uses “which” to link both defining and nondefining clauses in such situations: a defining “which” when no comma or pair of commas separates it from the relative clause, and a nondefining “which” when a comma or pair of commas (as the case may be) separates it from the relative clause.

In British publications, therefore, we will normally come across “which” introducing defining relative clauses, as in this sentence: “Nevertheless, [Charles Darwin’s] is the version of natural selection which has since been supported by a century and a half of observation and which is now accepted by virtually every scientist on earth.” (“How Darwin won the evolution race” by Robin McKie, The Observer, June 22, 2008). In contrast, American publications normally would use “that” for the two relative clauses in that sentence: “Nevertheless, [Charles Darwin’s] is the version of natural selection that has since been supported by a century and a half of observation and that is now accepted by virtually every scientist on earth.”

From my recent readings, though, I get the feeling that some British writers—probably due to the influence of American media—are no longer entirely averse to using “that” to introduce defining relative clauses. Consider this passage: “Heather McGregor, a City headhunter, echoes this analysis with the arch observation that ‘the UK bank that has come out of the current crisis strongest is the one that has most aggressively promoted women into positions of senior management: Lloyds TSB.’” (“What caused the crunch? Men and testosterone” by Matthew Syed, The Times-UK, Sept. 30, 2008). A thoroughly British writer would have used “which” to introduce the two defining clauses within the quoted material in that sentence.

Now, as I mentioned in my previous essay, there’s a way to avoid having to make a choice between “which” and “that” when linking restrictive relative clauses to their antecedent subject: to drop the relative pronoun altogether. See how this works in the following sentence: “The charming little beach that we used to visit in summer is now a crowded, high-end resort.” With “that” dropped: “The charming little beach we used to visit in summer is now a crowded, high-end resort.” Another example: “The emergency financial maneuver thatwas proposed by the chairman was rejected by the company’s stockholders.” With “that” dropped: “The emergency financial maneuver proposed by the chairman was rejected by the company’s stockholders.”

The two “that”-less sentences above are, of course, a form of elliptical construction, which we will recall is a streamlining procedure that makes a sentence more concise and easier to enunciate by omitting words that are obviously understood. This particular construction, though, is advisable only for informal writing and spoken English, and doesn’t work in all cases. In particular, we can’t omit “that” when the relative clause begins with an adverbial phrase, as in this sentence: “The speaker insisted that ultimately the people would suffer from the rejection of the emergency economic measure.”

See what happens when we drop “that”: “The speaker insisted ultimately the people would suffer from the rejection of the emergency economic measure.” The result is a squinting modifier, where the adverb “ultimately” could be understood as modifying either the verb before it or the entire phrase that follows it.(October 4, 2008)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, September 20 and 27, 2008, October 4, 2008 © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Writing to hook the reader

Writing to hook the reader « on: October 24, 2009, 01:18:56 AM »

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In an essay that I wrote about the language of the Philippine national election campaign in 2004, I briefly discussed the classic advertising acronym AIDA, which I said was an opera of sorts in four acts: A for “Attention,” I for “Interest,” D for “Desire,” and a different A for “Action.” It struck me at the time that like advertising people and propagandists, all communicators in general—and that, of course, includes fiction and nonfiction writers and writers for the mass media as well—must  do their own unique performance of AIDA to get their message across and get people to think things their way. And that, of course, wouldn’t happen at all if they didn’t perform the very first of the four acts of the writing opera: the “Attention” cue, or getting the reader interested to read them in the first place.

I am thus tempted to begin discussing AIDA’s first A by saying that writers should come up with a creative opening that will hold readers by their lapels and never let go, but that would really be begging the point. Creativity is an elusive thing. It worked for the American novelist Herman Melville when he began his classicMoby Dick with this disarming three-word opening, “Call me Ishmael.” It worked for the Austrian writer Franz Kafka with this intriguing opening of The Metamorphosis, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” And it worked for American legal-thriller writer Scott Turow in this compelling first paragraph of his novel Personal Injuries, “He knew it was wrong, and that he was going to get caught. He said he knew this day was coming.”

But what’s creative and interesting to us may either be too simple and too inconsequential to some, or too complex and too high-flown to others. There really is no single, fixed formula for it. The only mandatory thing is that whatever the chosen approach and style, the writer must be keenly aware of his or her primal obligation to keep the reader reading from beginning to finish.

I remember very well a consummate master of the “Attention” cue, but he was actually not a nonfiction or fiction writer; he was a noted Filipino industrial designer who used to ply the lecture circuit many years ago. His subject during a seminar-workshop I attended one hot summer afternoon was—if my memory serves me well—advertising communication, with focus on AIDA. We were just through with lunch after a hectic morning schedule, so most of us in the audience were naturally fagged and inattentive.

At that point, there came this bemoustached, bespectacled gentleman in his mid-forties carrying a tall stack of books, lecture notes, marking pens, boxes of marbles and paper clips—all those many little things you’d expect an intense university professor to haul into a classroom. He bellowed “Good afternoon!” to us, then promptly stumbled halfway to the lectern on the farther side of the room. As he made an effort to check his fall, all the things he was carrying flew helter-skelter over to us in the audience. That startled everyone, of course, so everybody’s impulse was to help the seemingly hapless and goofy lecturer gather his things. We were scampering all over the place picking them up, while he quietly took his time to regain his lost dignity and compose himself behind the lectern.

And when we had retrieved most of his things and had returned them to him, the sly fox spoke to us as if nothing untoward at all had happened: “Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen! And now that I have your attention, I think you are now all ready for my lecture.” As might be expected, despite the ungodly timeslot, he and his talk turned out to be the most interesting and illuminating part of that seminar-workshop.

Of course I’m not saying that we should emulate that lecturer’s guts in pulling off such a messy attention-getting caper; I find it too high-handed and I simply can’t imagine myself doing it in any situation. Still, I think it drives home my point very well. Whether we are selling a presidential candidate, hawking a consumer product, writing a feature story or newspaper column, perhaps writing literary fiction, we simply can’t escape the need to get the reader’s attention. If we can’t get it, the whole writing effort is wasted. That’s where performing our little “Attention” act from AIDA comes in. Call it showmanship, call it skill, call it art, call it creativity, call it by any other name—but do it, and give it the best you can. (April 19, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 19, 2004 © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The power of wordplay

The power of wordplay « on: October 30, 2009, 10:15:38 PM » Part I  We can invest feeling and emotion in what we say by using such figures of speech as the simile, metaphor, and hyperbole. These are not new forms of expression at all. As early as 2,000 years ago, in fact, the Greeks had already made such a fine art of their language by cultivating as many as 80 rhetorical devices—“the flowers of rhetoric,” they called them. The figures of speech, of course, derive their power by unexpectedly comparing a subject to things already familiar to us, while rhetorical devices can stir our emotions with the surprisingly felicitous ways they arrange words in a sentence or passage. Let’s now take a closer look at wordplay, or the witty, clever, malicious, insidious, or cruel manipulation of words themselves as phonemes or carriers of meaning. The most common form of wordplay, of course, is punning. This is the often humorous play on a word’s different meanings or on the similar meanings and sounds of different words—with the requisite mild touch of mischief or malice, of course. The more razor-sharp and wounding the pun is to the target, the better and more satisfying it is to the third-party listener. For instance, if a club chair, unable to stop a talkative but incoherent member from dominating a meeting, tells all and sundry, “Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it,” how do we react? We feel good not only at the wounding of the target’s ego but at the insult—at the power of the words to inflict the wound. But puns fall flat if the speaker and listener don’t have a common referent and depth of understanding of the language. Many of Shakespeare’s puns, for instance, mean little now except to the most studious ears. InHamlet, for example, Hamlet accuses Ophelia of unfaithfulness and verbally savages her: “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go.” Hamlet built his pun around the word “nunnery” to wound Ophelia’s self-esteem and give vent to his rage. Yet up to now, over 400 years later, scholars, dramatists, and English professors still argue over what Shakespeare had really meant when he used “nunnery.” Some take it at face value: a place where disgraced women can take refuge from the jeers of society. Some take it on the figurative level to mean “Get out of here!” Others interpret it on the relational level as “You disgust me!” Researchers of Shakespearean English, however, have found that “nunnery” was a contemptuous allusion to “brothel” or “whorehouse.” This verbal cruelty, of course, is all but lost to the modern reader of Hamlet. Now see how contemporary puns can elicit mirth or laughter (or our anger, if we ourselves are their targets) without us having to go through the same analysis that we have done above: “Cole’s Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.” “Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?” “My accountant always writes religious phrases down the left side of the page. That’s his prophet margin.” “Shin: A very sensitive device for finding furniture in the dark.” “I used to think I was indecisive ... but now I am not sure.” Don’t they all have a delicious ring? People also use wordplay simply for the sound of it, as in these juxtapositions of similar-sounding phonemes: “Is a sea of sequoias aqueous?” (William Waite). “Reverse errors to persevere” rearranged to “Errors prosper over beer” (Mike Rios). Then there is recreational linguistics, or “letterplays,” where words are manipulated by transposing their letters or syllables; the wordplay literature is full of them. But an even more hilarious form of wordplay is taking any word from the dictionary and altering it by adding, subtracting, or changing only one letter, then supplying a definition for the newborn word. The Washington Post, which runs a “Style Invitational” on this type of wordplay, drew out from readers the following gems in the 2003 edition of the contest: “Intaxication. Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.” “Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.” “Glibido: All talk and no action.” “Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.” “Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high. “Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.” “Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.” Marvelous, marvelous! To fully appreciate and enjoy these verbal pyrotechniques, of course, we must continually widen not only our grammar but our semantic grasp of English. Few can enjoy English-language wordplay at all unless they have already graduated from using English simply as a rickety pushcart for conveying information. (October 13, 2003) Part II Ever wondered how some people have moved us or inspired us to do great things their way, or mesmerized us, put blinders on our eyes, then made us do irrational things that we would never have dreamed of doing had we not been under their spell? If so, then the speakers—unless they had recited great poetry—must have been using chiasmus. This figure of speech towers above all the other rhetorical devices in its ability to lower our built-in defenses and arouse our emotions. We could very well call chiasmus the linguistic incarnation of charisma—that rare and elusive power of certain people to inspire fierce loyalty and devotion among their followers. The use of chiasmus dates back to antiquity. In the 6th century B.C., the extremely wealthy Lydian king Croesus went on record using it: “In peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.” Such wisdom in only 13 words! Is it possible that he became fabulously wealthy because he was so adept at chiasmus and—by implication—at compelling people’s obedience? Or did he become so good at coining chiasmus because his wealth had allowed him the leisure to craft it? Now take a look at this familiar line from U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, on which so many English-language elocution students had labored investing their own vocal energies over the years: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Just 17 words, but they give us the feeling of an immensely satisfying four-hour lecture on good citizenship. Then see chiasmus at work in this charming line by the English physician and author Havelock Ellis: “Charm is a woman’s strength; strength is a man’s charm.” And, one more time, hark to this timeless sage advice from Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.” By now you must have already discovered for yourself the fundamental structure and mechanism of chiasmus:  it reverses the order of words in two parallel phrases. Take this chiasmus by the legendary Hollywood actress Mae West: “I’d rather be looked over than overlooked.” “Looked over” is “overlooked” in reverse, making the speaker wickedly but deliciously imply that she enjoys being ogled at. Or take this arresting advertising slogan of a Philippine insurance company: “If someone depends on you, you can depend on Insular Life.” By some linguistic alchemy, the parallel word reversals arouse our senses, disarming us so we readily accept their claim as true. Chiasmus has this power because it heightens the sense of drama in language by surprise. It is no wonder that it holds the distinction of being mankind’s all-time vehicle for expressing great truths and, conversely, also great untruths. Most types of chiasmus reverse the words of familiar sayings in a felicitously parallel way, as in the French proverb, “Love makes time pass, time makes love pass.” For chiasmus to succeed, however, the two insights offered by the word reversals should both be true and survive subsequent scrutiny. (They could also be untrue, and therein lies the danger in chiasmus in the hands of demagogues and charlatans.) But chiasmus need not be an exact reversal of a familiar saying. Take what the English writer Richard Brinksley said on beholding for the first time the woman whom he was to later marry: “Why don’t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.” This implied chiasmus cleverly reverses this usual invitation of proud homemakers: “I’d like you to see my roses.” And chiasmus also nicely takes the form of questions, as in this line from Antigone by the 5th century Greek dramatist Sophocles: “What greater ornament to a son than a father’s glory, or to a father than a son’s honorable conduct?" If chiasmus is this pleasurable, does it mean that we should spend a lot of time composing it ourselves to impress people? Not at all! Chiasmus is meant to be used very sparingly, to be reserved only for those very special moments when saying them can truly spell a make-or-break difference in our lives, like preparing for battle, wooing the hearts and minds of people, ruing abject failure, or celebrating great success. In our everyday lives, it is enough for us to spot a good chiasmus so we can savor its wisdom, and to have the wisdom to know when we are simply being conned with fallacy or propaganda masquerading as great truth. (October 16, 2003) From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 13 and 16, 2003 © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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"Used to" and other grammar trippers

"Used to" and other grammar trippers « on: November 06, 2009, 08:20:31 PM »

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Most of us feel comfortable with the form “used to + verb” when using it to mean a past condition or habitual practice, as in these two sentences: “They used to be very close friends.” “She used to jog early in the morning.” In the first sentence, of course, “used to” conveys the idea of an activity or condition in the past that’s no longer true; in the second, on the other hand, “used to” conveys the idea of an old habit that had already stopped. In both cases, however, we’re hardly in any danger of tripping in our grammar because “used to” is clearly functioning as it should—as an auxiliary verb affirming the sense of a past action or state of affairs that had already ceased.

But using “used to” in negative and interrogative statements, which both require the form to take the auxiliary verb “did,” raises serious questions about its grammatical validity. Indeed, how should the two “used to” sentences above be rendered in their negative form? For the first, do we say, “They didn’t used tobe very close friends” (“used” with the “d”) or “They didn’t use to be very close friends” (“use” without the “d”)? And for the second, do we say, “She didn’t used to jog early in the morning” or “She didn’t use to jog early in the morning”?

Then again, how do we put the two “used to” sentences in question form? For the first, do we say, “Did they used to be very close friends?” or “Did they use to be very close friends?” And for the second, do we say, “Did she used to jog early in the morning?” or “Did she use to jog early in the morning?”

The American English prescription is straightforward: take out the “d” from the verb in “used to” every time this form works with the auxiliary verb “did” in negative and interrogative statements. The correct usage for negative “used to” statements is therefore this: “They didn’t use to be very close friends.” For questions, it’s this: “Did they use to be very close friends?” This is an odd and puzzling prescription, for it actually contravenes the supposedly past-tense character of “used to,” but a good thing going for it is that it’s consistent with the standard grammar rule that auxiliary verbs, not main verbs, should take the tense (“Theydidn’t wish to be identified” rather than “They didn’t wished to be identified,” and “Did they want to live in Manila?” rather than “Did they wanted to live in Manila.”).

Some grammarians, however, frown on the American English prescription. They argue that since “used to” exists only in the past tense, its negative and interrogative forms can’t possibly take the auxiliary verb “do.” To them, therefore, both the negative constructions “They didn’t used to be very close friends” and “Theydidn’t use to be very close friends” are unacceptable, and both the interrogative constructions “Did she used to jog early in the morning?” and “Did she use to jog early in the morning?” are unacceptable as well.

For negative “used to” constructions, these grammarians prescribe this form instead: “They used not to be very close friends.” For interrogative “used to” constructions, they recommend these two forms: “Used she not to jog early in the morning?” “Was she not used to jogging early in the morning?” Take note that all these alternative constructions take pains to retain the “d” in “used to” and avoid using the contraction “didn’t,” yielding sentences that don’t have the odd look and sound of their American English counterparts.

Of course, American English is the Philippine standard, so we have to follow its prescription for “used to”—but we need not turn a blind eye to the virtues of the contrary prescription.

We will now proceed to three much more lethal grammar trippers than the form “used to,” namely “the reason… is because,” “the reason why…is because,” and “the reason…is due to.” See what awful and unsightly sentences they make: “The reason she’s absent is because she’s sick.” “The reason why he went out is because he was hungry.” “The reason for the poor attendance is due to the strong rain.”

The three forms give rise to flagrant redundancies, or needless repetitions of the same idea, so we need to methodically root them out: “The reason she’s absent is that she’s sick.” (Even better: “She’s absent because she’s sick.”) “The reason he went out is that he was hungry.” (Even better: “He went out because he was hungry.”) “The reason for the poor attendance is the strong rain.” (Even better: “The poor attendance is due to the strong rain.”) (September 19, 2005)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, September 19, 2005 © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

An English-language conundrum

An English-language conundrum « on: November 13, 2009, 10:59:26 PM »

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While fine-tuning my book, English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, for its second printing [this was four and a half years ago], I received e-mail from faraway Stockholm with this note about a particular usage in the book: “Here’s a conundrum, Jose: Should it be ‘There is more than one way to skin a cat’ or ‘There are more than one way to skin a cat’? Consider this as a question submitted to your column.”

The interlocutor was my cyberspace friend Niels Hovmöller, a knowledgeable Swedish gymnasium (secondary school) English teacher and educational software developer who had admirably taken it upon himself to help me put the book’s English on even firmer and surer footing. Purely for love of the language, he was going over the text by line and word for word, promptly e-mailing me incisive—and sometimes tart—comments like the one above every time he found some doubtful grammar or semantic usage in my prose.

Before I answer Niel’s question, though, let’s find out first what “conundrum” means. This is a recurrent word in philosophy and linguistics, but probably not very many of us have bothered to find out what it means. The first of its three Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary meanings is “a riddle whose only answer is or involves a pun,” but Niels is obviously using it here simply to mean “a question or problem having only a conjectural answer.”

That said, I will now fearlessly answer his question: without any doubt, the correct usage is the singular construction, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” As in the case of many grammar conundrums, however, I will be able to justify my answer only as we go along.

We all know that in English, “there is” or “there are” expressions—the linguistic term for them is expletives—are commonly used to declare or affirm that something exists. They came about because native English speakers generally feel uncomfortable saying such simple declaratives as “A cat is on my bed” or “Errors are in your manuscript.” To assuage their discomfort, they tack on “there is” or “there are” to such statements even if many grammarians think that expletives only serve to weaken prose: “There is a cat on my bed.” “There are errors in your manuscript.”

The simple subject-verb agreement rule in English, of course, applies even to expletive constructions: use “there is” if the subject is singular, like “apple” or “book,” and if the subject is a non-count noun, like “water” and “air”; but use “there are” if the subject is plural, like “apples” and “books.” In the conundrum above, however, it is not crystal clear if the subject of the sentence, “more than one way,” is plural or singular. Many people would argue that it is plural because more than one way—presumably at least two—is being invoked. For the subject-verb agreement to reflect that plurality, they reason out that the correct expression should be “There are more than one way to skin a cat.” Many of us obviously would bristle seeing such an awkward sentence construction, but we now have to conquer our bias against it so we can objectively determine once and for all if the usage has no possibility whatsoever of being correct.

One English grammar rule can actually help us resolve this conundrum. That rule says that when a clause begins with “there is/there are,” the verb should agree in number with the first noun or pronoun being linked by that verb. Under this proximity rule, we say “There is a woman and three men in the car,” not “There are a woman and three men in the car.” When we decide to put the plural subject ahead in that sentence, however, we obviously can use only the plural construction: “There are three men and a woman in the car.”

Now we are ready to frontally tackle Niel’s conundrum: Should it be “There is more than one way to skin a cat” or “There are more than one way to skin a cat”? Invoking the expletive construction rule above, there should be no doubt now that in those two sentences, the subject most proximate to the expletives “there is/there are” is “one way,” which obviously is singular. Therefore, the noun phrase “more than one way to skin a cat” that was built around that singular subject should also be treated as singular. The plural usage would apply, of course, if the subject were “two ways” or a number more than that—“There are more than two ways to skin a cat.” “There are more than nine ways to skin a cat.”—but this is obviously not the case here.

With this, I am confident that we have now resolved Niel’s conundrum for good. (March 21, 2005)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 21, 2005 © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Logic and language

Logic and language « on: November 21, 2009, 05:01:03 PM »

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Part I

Sometime ago, while watching an otherwise engaging talk show on a local TV network about the decline in the English proficiency of Filipinos, I was taken aback when the following transcripts of supposedly bad spoken English were flashed onscreen for discussion:

“Half of this game is ninety percent mental.” (Baseball manager Danny Ozark of the Philadelphia Phillies)

“We are ready for an unforeseen event that may not occur.” (Former US vice president Al Gore)

“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” (Former US president Bill Clinton)

“Smoking kills. If you die, you’ve lost an important part of your life.” (Former Hollywood actress Brooke Shields)

Having been uttered not by Filipinos but by Americans, I thought that these examples were irrelevant to the discussions at hand—a terribly wrong-headed backgrounder on the subject of English usage by Filipinos. With better research, the talk-show producers surely could have found much more illustrative examples of bad English uttered by Filipino speakers themselves. Also, I think we should be more forgiving towards the inexactitude of such remarks. They are usually made on the spur of the moment under the crushing glare of TV cameras and the press of so many proffered microphones, so their peculiar English are rarely representative of the normal English of the speakers who blurt them out.

But what I found even more jarring about the quoted statements is that they were not illustrative of bad English at all. The first quotation, in particular, is perfectly good English—“Half of this game is ninety percent mental.” Its grammar and semantics are unimpeachable, and as to its logic and arithmetic, what’s wrong with saying that baseball games are 0.5 x .0.9 = 0.45 mental? We surely can’t fault the logic of such a precise conclusion made by a highly experienced baseball coach.

The other three examples are contextually faulty, of course, yet they are definitely aboveboard in their English grammar and structure. The problem is not in their English but in their logic. Each of them is a “malapropism,” which the Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines as “the usually unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase.” Often cited as a malapropism is the following supposed remark of Henry Ford about the Model T, the American car that he had mass-produced: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Another is this one by the 1940s movie mogul Sam Goldwyn: “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” On the home front, some of us may still remember the following malaprop remark of a Filipina many years back after winning a major beauty title: “I would like to thank my father and my mother, and most especially my parents.” As these examples clearly show, malapropisms may be contextually or logically flawed but are not necessarily grammatically and structurally wrong.

This brings me to the point that I would like to make about English, one that I am afraid the TV talk show missed altogether and that many learners of English as a second language often overlook. It is that logic and language are not necessarily always congruent. Our English may be grammatically, semantically, and structurally perfect but our ideas may be contextually or logically wrong. Such was the case with all but the first of the malapropisms presented by the TV talk show, which therefore doesn’t qualify them as instructive examples of supposedly bad English. On the other hand, our English may sound bizarre or strangely illogical on close scrutiny—like, say, the expression “Please keep an eye on your valuables” that we often see in restaurants—yet make complete sense to our readers or readers.

We will explore this matter more deeply in the next essay when we take up the highly idiomatic character of English as spoken by its native speakers. (May 8, 2006)

Part II

Many people lament the fact that English is so difficult to learn as a second or third language. They complain that although English forces learners to learn so many rules for its grammar, semantics, and structure, these rules are in practice more often violated than followed. How come, they ask, that the verb “turn” (to move around an axis or center) can mean so many things when paired off with different prepositions, such as “turn on” (excite), “turn in” (submit), “turn over” (return or flip over), “turn out” (happen), and “turn off” (lose interest or switch off)? And why do native English speakers say peculiar things that seem to have no logic or sense at all, like “We are all ears about what happened to you and Veronica last night” or “The top city official made no bones about being a former number-games operator”?

English is, of course, hardly unique in being idiomatic. Like most of the world’s major languages, it unpredictably ignores its own grammar and semantics in actual usage. But the sheer richness and complexity of English idioms—or the way native English speakers actually communicate with one another—makes it much more difficult for nonnative speakers to learn English than most languages. With scant knowledge of the English idioms, nonnative speakers may be able to master the relatively simpler grammar, semantics, and structure of English yet sound like robots when speaking or writing in English.

There are five general categories of English idioms: the prepositional phrases, the prepositional idioms,common idiomatic expressions, figurative or metaphoric language, and euphemisms.

A prepositional phrase consists of a verb or adverb form that ends in a preposition. The preposition used often doesn’t have a particular semantic significance or logic but had simply become entrenched through prolonged use, and the literal meaning of the verb or adverb isn’t changed by it. Some examples: “approve of” (not, say, “approve for” or “approve with”), “concerned with” (not “concerned of” or “concerned by”); “except for” (not “except of” or “except with”), and “charge with a crime” (not “charge of a crime” or “charge for a crime”).

A prepositional idiom, on the other hand, is an expression consisting of a verb whose meaning changes depending on the preposition that comes after it. As shown earlier, the verb “turn” can form so many prepositional idioms. Another verb that yields various idioms when paired off with different prepositions is “hand”: “hand in” (submit), “hand out” (to give for free), “hand over” (yield control of), and “hand down” (transmit in succession).

The common idiomatic expressions are concise, nonliteral language that native English speakers have grown accustomed to using for convenience. Some examples that also play on the verb “hand”: “to wash one’s hands” (to absolve oneself), “hand to mouth” (having nothing to spare beyond basic necessities), and “out of hand” (beyond control).

Figurative or metaphoric language is a form of idiom that compares two things in an evocative, nonliteral sense to suggest the likeness or similarity between them. It uses the so-called figures of speech, such as the simile and metaphor. A much-used example is the expression “the face that launched a thousand ships”—a literary allusion to Helen of Troy—to mean a provocatively beautiful woman.

Finally, a euphemism is a polite expression that people customarily use for things that they find unpleasant, upsetting, or embarrassing, such as sex, death, bodily functions, and war. Some examples: “to pass away” (die), “to rightsize” (to lay off excess personnel), and “collateral damage” (civilian deaths).

Obviously, the thousands upon thousands of English idioms can only be learned through long and intensive exposure to English as spoken and written by its native speakers. Formal grammar, semantics, and structure can only lay the bare foundations for English proficiency. Only when we have become adequately conversant with its idioms can we really say that we know our English. (May 15, 2006)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 8 and 15, 2006 © 2006 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Shoptalk on jargon and gobbledygook

Shoptalk on jargon and gobbledygook « on: November 28, 2009, 12:53:15 AM »

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An essay that I wrote for my column in The Manila Times away back in 2002, “The Great Gobbledygook-Generating Machine,” was featured in the January 2006 issue of Vocabula.com, a well-regarded English-usage web magazine based in Massachusetts. That essay, which later became Chapter 12 of my book, English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, takes a playful dig at a little electronic device on the Internet that can churn out around 40,000 insights on how to run companies in grammar-perfect but nonsensical English. Click this link to read that essay in the Bookshop section of the Forum.

I was quietly happy just to see that little piece of mine still alive and relevant even after the passing of the years, but I was truly delighted when I received a very touching congratulatory e-mail for it from a fellow editor and writer in Wales in the United Kingdom. Jude Roland, who runs a professional writing service in Monmouthshire, wrote me a note so evocative about the travails of putting other people’s English writing into good shape that I have decided to share it with Times readers.

Here’s that e-mail:

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Dear Jose,

I enjoyed your piece enormously. Much of what I laughingly call my “career” has been spent in trying to de-mystify the corporate jargon and obfuscation of other writers, who seem to feel more important and knowledgeable when they issue incomprehensible communications.

For more than three decades, I have advocated and encouraged clarity and directness. But those of us who care deeply about the potency of English now have to contend with something worse than commercial nincompoops [mishandling the language]. In the UK in particular, for at least five years in the 1980s, educational “experts” had been saying that it was “more important for children to express themselves in writing than to worry about spelling and grammar.” And oh, have the chickens come home to roost!

Add to this the universal overreliance on computer spell-checkers with their inherent idiocies, and you have a formidable problem. Neither you nor I, alas, will be able solve it!
But please do go on fighting the good fight and continue writing lively, cogent essays. Perhaps, when climate change finally destroys Earth, some remnants of humanity will remain, and in the long, slow climb back from the brink, their leaders may again learn to cherish and venerate “the word.”

Jude Roland

And here’s my rejoinder to that note:

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Dear Jude,

I apologize for this much-delayed reply. I have been so frenetically busy during the past two weeks doing a very challenging substantive editing job for a major client that I could hardly find time to deal with my correspondence.

I’m glad to know that you are a kindred spirit pursuing a career demystifying corporate jargon and other forms of gobbledygook, but I beg to differ with you by saying that I rarely find my job a laughing matter. It’s always a deadly serious business to be welcomed with wide, open arms. I’m sure that many professionals—medical surgeons, dentists, and physical therapists in particular—feel the same way about their work even if few of them would dare to admit it. In fact, I’ll probably be ruing the day when people all over the world have finally learned how to write English on their own clearly, precisely, and without obfuscation. By then, I’ll really have no choice but to pull down my shingle for keeps.

In the meantime, Jude, you and I will just have to continue the good fight for plain and simple English—both as an honest livelihood and as a thankless personal advocacy. We should do it in much the same way that the magnificent peacemakers of this planet have been suing for lasting peace on earth for thousands of years now—assiduously, sometimes so stridently, but largely to no avail.

(February 13, 2006)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 13, 2006 © 2006 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Using causative and factitive verbs

Using causative and factitive verbs « on: December 04, 2009, 09:44:01 PM »

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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 earthquakemade 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 overtheir 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 signthe 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)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 20, 2006 © 2006 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The proper use of the English subjunctive

The proper use of the English subjunctive « on: December 19, 2009, 03:55:33 PM »

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The wrong use of the English subjunctive—the mood of the language that allows us to speak of acts or states not as they really are but as possibilities or as outcomes of our wishes, desires, or doubts—recurs very often in Philippine journalism but hardly anybody makes a case against it. I have actually come across several instances of such misuse during the three years that I have been writing this column, but I let all of them pass without comment on the presumption that they were simply typographical or misreading errors. A few days ago, however, I came across a sentence in a newspaper column that left no doubt that it was unknowingly misusing the subjunctive. The construction used two verbs in a row in the incorrect subjunctive form, so I was sure that typographical error was not the culprit this time. The sentence, quoted verbatim here except for the subject (I used a fictitious name to avoid giving any political color to this grammar discussion), runs as follows: “It is not enough that Mr. Romano minimizes his public appearances or goes on self-exile.”

At first blush, of course, there seems to be nothing wrong with that sentence. After all, “Mr. Romano” is in the third-person singular, so it stands to reason that the verbs expressing his actions, “minimizes” and “goes,” should also be in the third person singular. This happens not to be the case, however. By some quirk in English usage, verbs in the singular third-person subjunctive ignore the subject-verb agreement rule. They drop the “-s” or “-es” at their tail ends and take the base form of the verb (the verb’s infinitive form without the “to”), so the verbs “minimizes” and “goes” become “minimize” and “go” instead. Thus, strange as it may seem, the correct construction of our subjunctive sentence specimen above is this: “It is not enough that Mr. Romano minimize his public appearances or go on self-exile.” (Unfortunately, when there’s only one operative verb in a subjunctive “that”-clause, copyeditors and proofreaders who don’t fully understand the subjunctive simply restore the missing “-s” or “-es,” so the wrong usage often gets into print looking simply like a typographical error.

The corrected sentence construction above is the so-called “necessity or parliamentary motion” or “jussive” form of the subjunctive. (In linguistics, “jussive” means an expression of command.) These two highly formal terms sound intimidating, but they neatly capture the insistent attitude of the speaker in this form of the subjunctive, which occur in subordinate “that”-clauses that state an implied command or indirectly express a wish, desire, intention, or necessity. We will discuss the particulars of subjunctive usage in much greater detail later on, but first, we need to clearly understand the behavior of the third-person form of operative verbs in subjunctive “that”-clauses.

Contrary to how verbs generally behave, verbs in present-tense subjunctive “that”-clauses don’t change form at all. In our subjunctive sentence specimen, for instance, the base verb forms “minimize” and “go” remain unchanged regardless of what number or person the subject takes. Look at the form those verbs take in the first person (“I,” “we”): “It is not enough that I minimize my public appearances or go on self-exile.” “It is not enough that we minimize our public appearances or go on self-exile.” In the second person (both the singular and plural “you”): “It is not enough that you minimize your public appearances or go on self-exile.” However, in the third-person singular (“he,” “she,” or actual name), we would expect these verbs to obey the subject-verb agreement rule: add “-s” or “-es” to their tail ends to become “minimizes” and “goes.” But the third-person subjunctive ignores that rule, too, using instead the verb’s base form like what the first person and second person forms do. This results in the following constructions as the correct subjunctive usage for the third person singular in the present tense: “It is not enough that he [she] minimize his [her] public appearances or go on self-exile.” “It is not enough that Mr. Romano minimize his public appearances or go on self-exile.”

Admittedly, this prescription for the subjunctive strongly goes against the grain of what most of us have learned about English usage. This is why many people remain doubtful and suspicious of the subjunctive and will actually go at great lengths to avoid using it. No matter how we feel about it, however, the subjunctive is a very important form of the English language, so we need to clearly understand its unique function and usage if we want to make ourselves truly proficient in our English. (July 11, 2005)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 11, 2005, © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.