Clichés and Bad Body English

Clichés and Bad Body English « on: May 16, 2009, 03:03:36 AM »

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My two sons, 21 and 14 years of age, have lately been watching with keen interest the ongoing series of student debates on ANC’s TV program “Square Off.” As you may already know, this TV show pits two-person debating teams from various universities and colleges, with the young speakers taking on the roles of their adult counterparts in Congress in debating various highly controversial issues.

I really can’t find fault in the English of most of the young debaters, whom I presume to be among the best and most articulate from their respective schools. Despite the pressures of time and competition, their speeches are generally free of such language scourges as footloose modifiers, mangled idiomatic expressions, subject-verb disagreements, wrong pronoun usage, and frequent misuses of prepositional phrases and prepositional idioms. And on the whole, I think, their English pronunciation and accents are generally beyond reproach as well.

But as my two sons are quick to point out whenever we have the chance to watch those TV debates together, the body English of many of the debaters leave much to be desired, and their overuse of such clichés as “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” can be so infuriating at times. Often, in fact, my sons would urge me to write about those things in this column in the hope that the message would somehow reach the debaters.

“Look at how that debater endlessly chops the air with both hands,” my eldest son said one time, a pained look in his face. “Shouldn’t his coach remind him that he’s not in a karate competition?”

“Well, son, that mannerism is part of his body English,” I said, “and I’m afraid that none of my English-usage prescriptions could correct it. Only a knowledgeable public speaking trainer or trusted friend can wean him from it without shattering his self-confidence.”

“But what about this girl who seems to be always sneering at her opponent?” my younger son asked me another time. “Doesn’t she realize it’s bad form to sneer in public, in full view of the TV audience at that?”

“You’re right, but she probably isn’t even aware of it,” I explained. “That’s the problem with TV—it’s a terribly cruel medium. That habitual facial expression of hers probably won’t even be noticed if she were debating onstage in a big school auditorium, but it gets magnified when the TV camera does a medium close-up of her. Somebody has to call her attention to it, though, and she would need a lot of facial practice in front of a mirror to get rid of it.”

“Now look at this guy, dad,” my elder son butted in. “Why does he keep on obnoxiously repeating ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ or ‘Madame Speaker’ in practically every sentence of his speech? He must have used it a dozen times already in three minutes. Isn’t there a debating rule against that?”

“I’m not sure, but habitual expressions like that are actually semantic crutches. When people speak at the speed of light, their brains may not be able to send their next thought to their tongues fast enough. That’s why they need those expressions to fill in the semantic gaps.”

“I see … But what about this other debater, dad? He’s now on his 15th ‘at the end of the day’ and the debate is still far from over. Hearing this cliché many times over takes away the joy in watching these debates. Can’t he and the other speakers just say ‘ultimately’ or ‘after all’? And why don’t the people behind these debates ban that terrible cliché?”

“Patience, my son, patience! Who knows? Without knowing it, some of those people may be habitual users of that dreadful cliché themselves. Anyway, I promise to write about this in my column. Let’s just hope they’d have the chance to read it before the new round of debates next week.” (February 23, 2008)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 23, 2008 issue © 2008 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

English in a Used Jar

English in a Used Jar « on: May 30, 2009, 12:13:57 AM »

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Several summers ago I tried to interest my two sons, then 15 and 9, in learning a third or fourth language. For their age they were already admirably fluent in English and Tagalog, so I thought that perhaps they should learn French, Japanese, or Chinese to give them the edge not only in school but in their future careers as well. I also had an ulterior motive in wanting them to do so. They were using too much time and energy playing those extremely violent Japanese-language computer games. I figured that they might as well put their amazing computer proficiency to use in something more educational, intellectual, and useful in the long term.

The language program that I wanted my sons to get into was an impressive multimedia routine entitled “The Rosetta Stone.”  It offered a suite of 24 languages, if I remember my figures correctly, ranging from Dutch to Swahili and from German to Polynesian. I found the program on the Worldwide Web and I took great interest in it because of a sad experience I had in my early teens. Tantalized by Ian Fleming’s accounts of the romantic adventures of James Bond behind the Iron Curtain, I tried to learn Russian single-handedly. With no tutor and learning tapes and with only a battered English-Russian dictionary from a Peace Corps volunteer who had hurriedly flown back to the United States, that enterprise withered in the bud in less than two weeks.

My sons at first took to Rosetta Stone like butterflies to nectar. The older one began honing his piddling Japanese and also took a fancy to German after a day or two. The younger focused his learning resources on French exclusively, and in three days’ time was already speaking a smattering of the language complete with the schwas and the nasals. But less than a week after that, their elder sister came home from overseas and gifted them with a three-dimensional CD on time travel entitled “The Messenger.” That, in short, was the end (only for the time being, I hope) of Rosetta Stone and of my dream that my sons would become multilingual before entering college.

My predicament with my sons brought back memories of my own travails in learning English in grade school, back in my farming hometown in those years when there were yet no TV sets, no audio-visuals, no computers, and certainly no multimedia educational tools like Rosetta Stone. The only good thing going for us were our teachers, a hardy breed that rarely displayed lawyerly eloquence in English but was deeply steeped in the learning and teaching discipline. What they lacked in methods and tools, they amply compensated for in native resourcefulness. And what they did to make their pupils learn English was simplicity itself.

Our teachers made the whole school compound a strictly English-speaking zone. We were absolutely forbidden to speak any other language or dialect anywhere inside. This rule was rigorously enforced through a used two-ounce glass jar of mayonnaise or pickles. It was labeled “I was caught not speaking English,” and every time you used the vernacular or Chinese or Hindi, you were obliged under a strict honor system to accept the glass jar and drop a five-centavo coin onto it as penalty. You had to screw back the cap and furtively prowl the campus to catch another dialect-speaking violator in the very act and, bingo! the glass jar—plus his five-centavo penalty—could now be transferred to his custody. At day’s end, the last pupil with the glass jar had to surrender it to the teacher and formally remit the coins.

Oh, there were all sorts of complaints from parents and pupils alike against the dictatorship of the glass jar! There were several brawls and black eyes among early jar passers and receivers. But after a week or two, the pupils got the hang of it and started doing their damnedest best to speak straight and fluent English. The complaints stopped, and in a few months pupils from the school began winning English declamation contests at higher and higher interscholastic levels. In my case, I was an inveterate dialect-cursing maverick when the glass jar campaign started, but I learned my lessons early enough. I learned to hate being handed the jar and parting away with my five-centavo coins, which was a big drain on my school allowance. So one day, I just decided to converse and curse consistently in English to bring down my contributions to the glass jar literally to zero.

Looking back to those days now, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if not for that used glass jar, I would not be writing this little piece in English at all. At this very moment I would likely be already out in the old farm, tilling the family’s small parcel of riceland with a carabao-drawn plow, and certain to be doing the same for the rest of my life. Not that I would have hated farming, whose utterly predictable procession of planting, growing, and harvesting has a poignant way of giving you inner peace. But truth to tell, nothing really compares with the psychic reward of getting your thoughts printed in English and having a receptive audience for them.

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

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What do you think of my ideas in this essay? Click the Reply button to post your thoughts on Jose Carillo’s English Forum.

Using Grammar as a Tool for Persuasion

Using Grammar as a Tool for Persuasion « on: June 05, 2009, 10:48:03 PM »

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Most of us will be in familiar territory when we talk about using vocabulary as a tool for persuasion. To begin with, hardly ever are we neutral in our choice of words. Parents slant their words in particular ways to reinforce their parenting. Children do the same things to get what they want or get away with things. Our enemies do it to denigrate us in the eyes of others. Religious fanatics do it to make the faithful suspend their disbelief despite overwhelming evidence that they shouldn’t. Advertisers do it to make us part with our money gladly or without guilt. Ideologues and seekers of public office do it to prime us up for their political agenda. With no exception, all of us subtly stamp our words with a personal bias to persuade others to believe what we believe and to do what we want them to do.

First on our language agenda is, of course, to label people, places and things. Depending on our intent, biases, or predispositions, for instance, a medical doctor becomes a “health professional,” a “physician,” a “cutup artist,” or a “quack,” and a public relations man becomes a “corporate communicator,” a “spin master,” a “hack writer,” or a “flack.” We do this not to denigrate people per se, but only to quickly indicate our attitude and feelings toward the subject. Without labeling our subjects, it would take us an unduly long time to put them in context for our audiences. Rightly or wrongly then, the idea behind labeling in suasive diction is simply to achieve economy in language. We label things simply because time is short and we don’t have all the time in the world to explain ourselves.

Using labels is only the beginning of how we slant our language. Even without meaning to or often without knowing it, we take recourse to idiomatic expressions, clichés, slogans and metaphors to drive home our point more efficiently. Most of us know, for instance, that “it’s water under the bridge” and “as sure as the sun sets in the west” are horribly timeworn clichés, but we still compulsively use them to emphasize our point. We have no qualms of running clichés to exhaustion, unless we happen to be professional speakers or writers who must come up with new ways of saying things as a matter of honor. In fact, the only time we are more circumspect about using them is when we write something for the public record or for publication under our names. Like most everybody else, we don’t want to have any evidence of lack of originality or of shameless copycatting to be taken against us.

There are, however, two major disciplines that methodically and ruthlessly use clichés, slogans, and metaphors for mind-bending purposes: advertising and politics. Here, we enter that region of language where hardly anything said is exactly what it means literally. We come face-to-face with “double-speak” or rhetoric exploited to the hilt, language that often teeters at the very outer edges of the truth and carried out by incessant repetition. It is suasive diction that, for good or ill, seeks to build niches in our minds for all sorts of marketing or political agenda. We can see, of course, that the mass media is chockfull of advertising that uses this kind of slanted language; as to particular specimens of the political propaganda, we need not dwell on them here since we are in the midst of a viciously fought national election season. It is enough that we are forewarned against taking them at their face value, and that we forearm ourselves by learning how to appreciate their messages critically and intelligently. As they say in Latin, caveat emptor, a warning that what we are dealing with here is language that’s barbed all over inside.

These thoughts about advertising and politics bring us to the use of grammatical ambiguity as a tool for suasive diction. Remember our lessons for using “it”-cleft sentences to achieve emphasis? By definition, we defined the cleft as one that “cleaves” or splits a single-clause sentence into two clauses for semantic emphasis, and the “it-cleft” is that variety that uses the function word “it” to highlight an object of special focus or theme, as in this statement: “It appears that our candidate will score a landslide victory.” In advertising and political propaganda, this sentence construction is often designed to artfully hide the source of the statement of the “experiencer” to make it appear as a fact rather than a conjecture. That sleight of language gives the semblance of certainty—a deliberate distortion of language to create what we all know as the “bandwagon” effect.

In suasive diction, therefore, it behooves us not only to watch our own language, but also the language of those who would deliberately subvert it to promote their agenda at our expense. (March 18, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 18, 2004 issue © 2004 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life « on: June 19, 2009, 09:59:27 PM » I have given it a lot of thought, and now I suspect that the original Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was not a living plant but a powerful computer. The Bible was surprisingly silent about the nature of that tree, so artists and writers through the ages had felt free to variously picture it as an apple tree, a fig tree, a pear tree, a dragon’s blood tree, even a banana tree. I understand that in a 13th century cathedral somewhere in France, there was even a fresco that showed Eve finding a serpent coiled around a giant branching European mushroom, the lightly toxic and hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria, drawn with Provencãl innocence to represent the tree that gave us our much-dreaded mortality. These images of the Tree of Knowledge are as charming as the Romans envisioning their messenger-god Mercury as a runner with winged feet, as frightening as the early Christians sketching the devil as a thoroughly beastly creature with serpent’s snout and bat wings, and as heavenly as the Renaissance artists conjuring archangels with majestic, blindingly white eagle’s wings.   All of this ancient imagery, however, miserably fails to capture the essence of a device or icon that is supposed to represent the most powerful source of wisdom and instruction the world has ever known. An apple tree, a banana tree, or a vine-like mushroom as the Tree of Knowledge? This seems to me to stretch the credulity of even a nine-year-old grade-schooler much too much! I would therefore rather think of the Tree of Knowledge as a Pentium 4 personal computer with a 56 kbps fax modem, hooked up by a powerful Internet server to the World Wide Web, capable of directly feeding on the 2.5 billion documents accessible to the Internet and of being able to sift through 520 billion more that are publicly accessible in other databases.* I could not think of any other compendium or structure, no matter how massive, that could draw on such a huge database and merit “Tree of Knowledge” as a sobriquet, much less make this database accessible to even the small populace of the Garden of Eden close to the time of Creation. Of course I realize that a myriad conceptual objections can be raised against this seemingly whimsical intellectual construct. Chief of these is the question of how the Pentium 4 and the Internet could have gotten themselves into the Garden of Eden in the first place. Could it be that they had managed to quietly transport themselves back in time and install themselves into the Tree of Knowledge, or else disguise themselves as the tree itself? Those fixated with time’s immutability would of course deem this too farfetched, as improbable as the tales of extraterrestrial visitations peddled by the Danish writer Erik von Daeniken. But it is at least not as preposterous a concept as a fruit tree being the source of all human understanding and wisdom. A tree as a source of life, yes, like our coconut with its proverbial one thousand and one uses, from food to shelter to medicine to fuel and to lumber; but just any tree as source of all knowledge, I really wonder. And what about the paradox that would result if we believed that the Tree of Knowledge drew its power from a state-of-the-art Pentium? Would that belief still hold if we consider the fact that the computer and the Web are actually the culmination of the series of small and big inventions that sprung from Adam and Eve having eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge itself? Remember that the computer became possible only because somewhere early in time, man discovered and learned how to harness fire, then found a way centuries later to use it to melt the tiny particles of glass in sand into wafers of silicon, then developed a method for converting these wafers into transistor chips and into extremely powerful motherboards and processors that are the heart of the modern computer. Remember, too, that the Internet and the Web are of a much more recent vintage. It was only in 1973 that the Internet came into being, the happy result of American research into technologies to interlink computer networks of various kinds. Another 21 years into the future, in 1994, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to unify and integrate the Internet’s global information and communication structure. Since then it has expanded into a global network of networks, enabling computers of all kinds—including yours and mine—to directly communicate and share services throughout much of our planet. What is perhaps little appreciated in this dizzying train of inventions is that the modern computer and the Web have been essentially a continuing but silent Hindu-Arabic-European-American co-production, and that at the root of it was the ancient Indo-European language and the Arabic number system. We know, of course, that these twin foundations of our civilization moved into Europe and jumped across the English Channel into England, polishing themselves into the English language and into the Arabic number system that we know so well today. It really is no wonder that Boolean algebra, a mathematical system of representing logical propositions that became the foundation for the modern computer, was developed by the English language expert and mathematician George Boole in the very same soil that produced the wonder of English literature that was William Shakespeare. The Chinese may have invented paper, the abacus, and gunpowder, and the Romans may have built their empire that extended all the way to Africa and to the banks of the Mesopotamian River in what is now modern Iraq, but I simply cannot conceive of the modern computer built from Chinese script or from the Roman numeral system, with which no stable building taller than the Roman Coliseum could be built because the system simply could not multiply and divide numbers properly. That the Tree of Knowledge could not have been a fruit tree but a computer linked to the Web may remain debatable, and I will not quibble with that fact. But to me, one thing is clear and certain: the computer and the Worldwide Web have made the Tree of Knowledge much more accessible and closer to us than ever before, and it would be a tragedy if not outright foolish for anyone not to learn to freely partake of its fruits. From English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright 2008 by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. ------- *Since this essay was written, of course, the Pentium 4 processor has since been supplanted in personal computers by much more advanced and powerful processors like the Core-Duo, and Google has grown even more explosively from 2,469,940,685 web pages in 2002 to over 30,000,000,000 today. It can thus be said that the computing machines and the online search engine capability that I had described glowingly in this 2002 essay are now obsolete. What do you think of my ideas in this essay? Click the Reply button to post your thoughts on Jose Carillo’s English Forum.

When Even the Passive Voice Isn't Enough

When Even the Passive Voice Isn't Enough « on: June 26, 2009, 10:16:49 PM »

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As we know, the English language uses the passive voice to give emphasis to sentence elements other than just the doer of the action. The passive voice gives us the option to make the indirect object, direct object, or the act itself the logical focus of the statement, allowing us to free our prose every so often from the confining straightjacket of the active voice. For instance, instead of writing a tortured active-voice sentence like “Builders built Rome not just in a single day,” we can write this passive-voice sentence instead to say it more smoothly, elegantly: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Still, there are times when we just feel that even the passive voice falls short of giving us the desired emphasis. That’s when we take recourse to a peculiar grammar device that we learn early on probably without even realizing it. That device is the cleft sentence, so-called because it “cleaves” or splits a single-clause sentence into two clauses for semantic emphasis or style. It is the written equivalent of giving an edge to our voice to call attention to the most important points of what we are saying.

Cleft sentences take two common forms. The first is the “it” cleft, which exhibits the pattern “It + be + [subject of focus] + [action or defining clause],” as in “It was the accusers themselves who fudged the data.” The other is the pseudo-cleft or “wh-” cleft, which normally takes the form “Wh- + [subject]  + [verb] + [form of be] + [rest of predicate],” as in “What she did was a wonderful thing.” Both depart from the usual declarative form to achieve a stronger, defensive emphasis. (The straightforward form of the “it” cleft above is, of course, “The accusers themselves fudged the data”; that of the “wh-” cleft is, “She did a wonderful thing.”)

The “it” cleft. In this sentence construction, the often-derided “empty” function word “it” works to highlight an object of special focus, or theme. In the process, the sentence assumes the tone and form of a statement seeking to correct someone’s wrong idea. The negator “no” or “not,” if unstated, can normally be presumed to precede it. For instance, someone may have just said this pointedly: “The accused, Your Honor, fudged the data.” The defensive—perhaps outraged—reply would likely be an “it” cleft: “No, Your Honor, it was the accusers themselves who fudged the data.”

An “it”-cleft sentence always has a dependent clause introduced by the subordinators “that,” “who,” or none at all, and that dependent clause normally ends the sentence for emphasis: “It was her that I wanted all along.” “It is Alberto who can make things possible for us.” “No, my dear, it is our son [that’s] sleeping on the sofa.” By some peculiar language alchemy, the “it”-cleft achieves a double emphasis: one for the cleft’s theme, and the other for the chosen end-focus. In the examples above, it is the following idea-pairs that get emphasis: “her”/”I wanted all along”; “Alberto”/”can make things possible for us”; and “our son”/”sleeping on the sofa.”

Like the plain passive-voice construction, the “it”-cleft gives wide latitude in emphasizing the actor, the indirect or direct object, or the act itself in the scheme of things. Take this simple declarative: “The judge gave the erring lawyer a sharp rebuke.” Look at just three of the “if”-cleft forms that sentence could take: “It was the judge that gave the erring lawyer a sharp rebuke.” “It was the erring lawyer that the judge sharply rebuked.” “It was a sharp rebuke [that] the erring lawyer got from the judge.” All revolve around the same idea, but with different shades of meaning.

The pseudo-cleft or “wh-” cleft. This construction takes both the main verb and theme (main idea) of the sentence, fashions them into a noun clause, and uses that noun clause to begin the sentence. Instead of  “it,” however, the pseudo-cleft uses “what” to introduce that clause. By an alchemy similar to the “it”-cleft’s, the pseudo-cleft allows us to create several variations of a statement to emphasize a different theme each time.

See what the pseudo-cleft can do to a simple declarative like, say, “We brought Eve some luscious fruits.” Emphasizing the direct object (“luscious fruits”) from the doer’s (“we”) standpoint: “What we brought to Evewere luscious fruits.” Emphasizing the direct object from the doer’s standpoint, but less assertively: “What were brought by us to Eve were luscious fruits.” Emphasizing the direct object from the receiver’s (“Eve’s”) standpoint: “What Eve got from us were luscious fruits.” Emphasizing the action: “What we did was to bring luscious fruits to Eve.” Emphasizing all the elements: “What happened was that we brought luscious fruits to Eve.” Note that a “wh-“ cleft’s theme is always a subordinate clause introduced by “what,” and is always the subject of a passive-voice sentence.

Clefts are potent, high-energy devices for achieving emphasis, but we must use them with restraint—certainly not as habitual forms of expressing ourselves. To overuse them is to trivialize not only the very things we want to emphasize but the rest of our prose as well. (February 11, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 11, 2004 issue © 2004 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

Giving a Touch of Authority to Our Prose

Giving a Touch of Authority to Our Prose « on: July 03, 2009, 10:10:22 PM »

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“What a pair we make,” whispered the Prince of Wales to the pilloried presumptive royal knight William in the riotously charming 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, “both trying hard to hide who we are, both unable to do so.”

For those who have not seen the movie, the prince was constrained to shed off his disguise as a monk among the lynching mob to save the disgraced knight, who a few days earlier had spared him from the ignominy of certain defeat by refusing to joust with him in a tournament. The knight, through the machinations of a villainous duke, was thereafter unmasked as a lowly thatcher’s* son masquerading as a member of royalty, thus leading to his arrest and humiliation on the pillory.

This medieval morality tale gives a powerful insight into the crucial need to speak and act in keeping with who we think, presume, or pretend we are. When we write, in particular, we must use language that conveys our thoughts in ways that validate and support our own self-concept or projection of ourselves. The wife of the Caesar must not only be chaste but must look and sound chaste. The professor must really look and sound professorial. The presidentiable** must really look and sound presidentiable. To fail to do this in both civilized and uncivilized society—or not to have the wisdom or guile to at least sustain the charade—is to invite catastrophe, which is precisely what brought the presumptive knight to the pillory for public lynching.

Be that as it may, our most potent tool for becoming credible is what the linguists call suasive diction. This is using language to persuasively convey facts and the speaker’s feelings toward those facts. No instrument is more potent for doing that, of course, than the writer’s or speaker’s vocabulary. Our words define us. Whether armed with excellent research or dubious information, whether motivated by good or bad intentions, we can turn off the audience with awkward or leaden words, or hold it in thrall with engaging words and well-turned phrases. It is largely through word choice, in fact, that we establish our credibility and rapport with our audience. Short of coercion or the force of arms, rarely can persuasive communication take place without this credibility and rapport.

The most basic technique for suasive diction is the proper use of the pronouns of power, namely “we,” “us,” “our,” “they,” and “them.” These innocent-looking pronouns can confer a sense of authority—the illusion of authority, if you may—to our written or spoken statements far beyond what the first-person singular can give. The first-person “I” and “me” speak only for the solitary communicator; on the other hand, the collective “we” and “us” speak for an entire group or institution, which people normally take for granted as less fallible and less prone to vainglory than the individual—hence presumed to be more credible, more authoritative.

This, for instance, is why newspaper editorials routinely use the institutional “we” although they are usually crafted by a solitary writer not so high on the paper’s editorial totem pole; it’s also why tyrants and despots of every stripe and persuasion always invoke “the right vested in me by God/ law/ the sovereign people” to seize power or hold on to it, and why candidates of paltry qualification and virtue invariably invoke “the people’s great desire for change” or “divine signs in the sky” as their passport to public office.

Of course, “we,” “us,” “our,” “they,” and “them” work just as well as pronouns of solidarity. They foster a stronger sense of closeness and intimacy with the audience, and can more easily put audiences at ease with what the speaker has to say. In contrast, the first person “I” often comes across as too one-sided and self-serving, particularly in writing, while the second person “you” can sound too pedantic and intimidating. We stand a much greater chance of getting a fair hearing from those antagonistic to our position by making them think that we are actually on their side.

Even if we are good at using the pronouns of power and solidarity, however, we must not for a minute believe that they are all we need to achieve suasive diction. The facts supporting our contention must be substantial and accurate. Our opinions must be truly informed, not half-baked, and our logic must be sound and beyond reproach. Otherwise, we may have to put on an act like that of the seemingly enlightened prince in A Knight’s Tale, lying to the lynching mob about the parentage of William the thatcher’s son, then justifying that lie by nonchalantly invoking royal infallibility: “He may appear to be of humble origins, but my personal historians have discovered that he is descended from an ancient royal line. This is my word, and as such is beyond contestation.”
  
A big lie indeed, but said with the confidence of a true royal. (March 16, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 16, 2004 issue © 2004 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

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**Thatcher – A thatch is a sheltering cover, as a house roof, made of straw, grass, or—in our domestic usage—nipa or buri. A thatcher would therefore be someone whose occupation is to install a thatch or that kind of roofing. Of course, the name “Thatcher” became a media mainstay for many years when the feisty Margaret Hilda Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister for 12 years from 1979 to 1990.

*I use the term “presidentiable” here with some strong misgivings, for it is not even recognized in any respectable dictionary. But during every national election season, it forms part of the Philippine journalistic and political vocabulary much too strongly to be completely ignored.

What do you think of my ideas in this essay? Click the Reply button to post your thoughts on Jose Carillo’s English Forum.

When saying it once isn't enough

When saying it once isn't enough « on: July 11, 2009, 02:56:14 AM »

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Each one of us wants to make a deep impression on our readers or listeners. Whether we are a teacher teaching an inattentive, rowdy, or recalcitrant class; a priest or preacher preaching to a flock of insensate, glassy-eyed believers; a lawyer making logical or semantic convolutions to convince judge or jury that a guilty defendant is innocent; an advertising person hawking an old, jaded product as something excitingly new; or a ward leader trying to pass off a thoroughly unworthy candidate as the best there is for an elective post, we will always want to emphasize the things we want to be accepted as true and de-emphasize those we want to be rejected as untrue. The objective is the same in all cases: to convince the audience of the wisdom of the position we have taken, whether we are speaking with the light of truth or with a forked tongue.

The easiest way to emphasize things, of course, is to embellish them with such off-the-rack qualifiers as “new and improved,” “the one and only,” “especially,” “particularly,” “most of all,” and “the best choice,” as in this sentence: “X Facial Cream is especially designed for tropical use, but best of all, it gives 100% expert conditioning for crease-free cheeks.” As tools to snare the unthinking mind, however, such self-serving adverbs could be persuasive for at most only one or two hatchet jobs apiece. Discerning audiences can only take so much of words that demand acceptance not on the basis of logic but on blind faith.

A much better way to emphasize the things that we deem important is creative repetition. This is the technique of repeating in speech or in writing the same letters, syllables, or sounds; the same words; the same clauses or phrases; or the same ideas and patterns of thought. When done just right, this time-tested rhetorical strategy beats most other devices for achieving emphasis, clarity, retention and emotional punch.

Just to see how this strategy works, take a look again at how the first paragraph of this column tried to hook you to the subject of repetition. In the first sentence, the word-pair “teacher teaching” deliberately repeated the first syllable “teach”; the phrase “a priest or preacher preaching” used the “pr-” sound thrice and the syllable “preach” twice (this figure of speech is known as alliteration); the phrase “judge or jury” repeated the first syllable “ju-” sound (alliteration, again); and the five clauses that carry the examples of people wanting to make a great impression repeated the same structure and pattern of thought (parallelism). This reiteration of the same grammar and semantic patterns certainly didn’t come by accident; those patterns were intentionally constructed in the hope of making a human-interest appeal strong enough to make the reader read on. (Did they succeed? You be the judge.)

A staple device to achieve emphasis by repetition, of course, is to use the same key word or idea in a series, as in this statement: “At Village X, enjoy cosmopolitan living with a touch of country: a life with all the amenities but without the inconveniences of the big city, a life amidst lush farmlands fringed by pristine mountain and lake, a life that someone of good taste who has definitely arrived truly deserves.” (Recall from a recent lesson in this column that “a life” here functions as a resumptive modifier.) The repeated use of the key words “a life” emphasizes the promise of “cosmopolitan living with a touch of country,” progressively building up the imagery and giving it a strong emotional appeal. This kind of repetition is actually what most advertising in the mass media routinely uses to persuade us, for good or ill.

Even more powerful than simply repeating key words or phrases is suddenly breaking that pattern once it is established: “Airline X is first in passenger comfort and amenities, first in both in-flight and ground service, and last in delayed departures and arrivals.” The disruption by the word “last” of our expectation of a series of all “firsts” dramatizes the airline’s claim of being the industry leader in flight reliability. It’s a neat semantic device that rarely fails to catch immediate attention.

Persuasion by repetition is a powerful device for inducing audiences to identify, recognize, and respond to our messages, but we have to do it with an eye and ear and feel for words and sentence structure. Uncreative repetition, like the ones that regularly assault us during election campaigns, are too predictable, awkward, tedious, and boring—if not downright untruthful. But when done purposively and competently, like the mesmerizing prayers and chants that we live by and the melodious songs, poems, mottos, and credos we love to sing or recite ad infinitum, repetition could shape our beliefs and likes and dislikes for life, Pavlov-like and unalterable. (March 8, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 8, 2004 issue © 2004 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

Dealing with Various Levels of Intransitivity

Dealing with Various Levels of Intransitivity « on: July 18, 2009, 12:22:45 AM »

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When we were children and just beginning to learn our English grammar, many of us no doubt were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps while watching a magician perform in the circus, we might have exclaimed “He gone the rabbit!” and promptly got told off by our parents for our bad grammar. When we probably corrected ourselves by saying “OK, he disappeared the rabbit!” (the way we’d say “Teacher dismissed the class early” without being censured), again we’d be chastised for yet another grammatical gaffe. Then, when the magician finally made the rabbit reappear, we might have confidently said “Now he appeared it again!”—sure this time that by using “appeared” (as in the case of “missed” in “I missed class today”), we could no longer be possibly wrong. But as we might have learned to expect, such a sentence construction was unacceptable, too! 

So, we might have asked in exasperation, what seemed to be the matter with such verbs? Why couldn’t “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” behave like the good, old verbs we knew—verbs like “scare,” “build,” “fix,” and “receive”? Like “missed” above, didn’t these verbs work perfectly in such sentences as “He scared the rabbit,” “Daddy built a tree house,” “My brother fixed my bike,” and “My sister received a love letter”?

Such were the puzzling dilemmas posed by our first encounters with verbs that don’t possess “transitivity,” or the ability to pass on their action to something that can receive it. As we would learn later, of course, “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” are intransitive verbs, or the kind that simply can’t pass on their action to anything in the sentence. Because they don’t have the power to transmit their action to a so-called direct object, such verbs generally dissipate that action in themselves. When acting as stand-alone verbs, in particular, “gone,” “disappear,” and “appear” can only function in such objectless constructions as these: “The rabbit goesmissing.” “The moon disappeared.” “The freckles appeared.” Such verbs absolutely would not admit any takers of their action, even if we put in many more words or phrases to the sentence.

As all of us already know, of course, it’s an altogether different matter when a verb is of the transitive kind. This time, for the sentence to work properly, it needs to provide an object to directly receive the verb’s action. The basic requirement of transitivity, in fact, is that the subject of the sentence—drawing power from the verb—must be able to act on this direct object.

Verbs that require only a direct object to work properly are what some linguists label “one-place transitives,” as the verbs in these sentences: “The woman received the letter.” “Typhoons damage infrastructure.” “The professor delivered the lecture.” When we drop the direct objects “letter,” “infrastructure,” and “lecture,” so that nothing receives the action of the verb anymore, all the three one-place transitive sentences become nonsensical: “The woman received.” “Typhoons damage.” “The professor delivered.” No direct object, no sentence.

We also know, of course, that some transitive verbs not only require a direct object but may also take an indirect object, or a grammatical entity that represents a secondary goal of the verb’s action. Such a verb is the so-called “Vg two-place transitive,” or short for the linguistic label “two-place transitive like give” (the “g” in “Vg” stands for “give). In this verb type, the verb first acts on the direct object and transmits the result of the action to the indirect object, as in these sentences: “He buys her diamonds.” “She brings him apples.” “They served Joanna breakfast.” The indirect objects in these sentences are the pronouns “her,” “him,” and “Joanna,” while the direct objects are “diamonds,” “apples,” and “breakfast.” But the indirect objects are optional in such sentences, which will work perfectly even with only the direct objects around.

The third and last type of transitive verbs carries the “Vc two-place transitive” label, which is short for “two-place transitive like consider” (the “c” in “Vc” stands for “consider”). In such verbs, the action of the verb actually takes place within the subject or doer of the action, or is done to the subject itself, then is transmitted to the direct object: “They considered the rebellion a lost cause.” “Factual errors like this makethe editors extremely suspicious.” “The beauty queen’s detractors believe her victory to be a fluke.”

In “Vc two-place transitive” constructions, the verb is followed by a noun phrase working as direct object, onto which must be attached an obligatory complement such as another noun phrase, adjective phrase, or infinitive phrase. These complements, however, unlike the indirect objects of “Vg two-place transitives,” don’t function as indirect objects but modify the direct object instead.

From Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

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The Proper Use of "Amount" and "Number"

The Proper Use of "Amount" and "Number" « on: July 25, 2009, 02:07:00 AM »

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One grammar pitfall in English is the misuse of the words “amount” and “number” when referring to the quantity of a particular thing. Every now and then, for instance, our ears would be pinged when a rookie TV anchor or newscaster says, “A large “amount” of people are attending the multisectoral rally at Rizal Park.” The correct word to refer to the size of crowds is, of course, “number,” and although we expect TV journalists to know their English much better than we do, we tend to overlook and forgive this particular grammar transgression because we probably often commit it ourselves.

For good measure then, let’s do a full-dress review of how to deal with the countable and noncountable nouns in English. As we all know, something is countable if we can figure out without great difficulty how many of it there are; we then use “number” as an indefinite measure for it, as in “the number of candidates,” “a number of job openings,” “the number of parties involved,” and “the growing number of complaints.” In contrast, something is noncountable if it is in bulk form and counting its constituent units would be insufferably difficult or impossible; we then use “amount” as an indefinite measure for it, as in “the amount of potable water,” “a great amount of energy,” “a great amount of patience,” and “a large amount of dissatisfaction.”

Notice in the examples above that “number” is used as a measure for so-called plural count nouns (“candidates,” “job openings,” “parties,” “complaints”), meaning that they are nouns that generally can be pluralized with the suffix “-s” or “-ies.” On the other hand, “amount” is used as a measure for so-called singular mass nouns (“water,” “energy,” “patience,” “dissatisfaction”), meaning that they are nouns denoting a homogeneous substance or an indivisible concept and as such generally can’t be pluralized with the suffix “-s” or “-ies.”

We can better appreciate the difference between “number” and “amount” by relating them to the usage of the comparatives “fewer” and “less.”

As we already know, “fewer” is used as a comparative for plural count nouns, or things that use “number” as measure; thus, using the nouns earlier given as examples, we say, “There are fewer candidates for club president this year,” “We find fewer job openings in the classified ads these days,” “Fewer parties took interest in the public bidding for the irrigation project,” and “The city police reported fewer robberies in 2008 than those of the previous year.” As in the example given in the first paragraph above, native speakers of English would get the same ping in the ears if we used “less” instead of “fewer” in these sentences.

On the other hand, “less” is used as a comparative for singular mass nouns, or things that use “amount” as a measure; thus, also using the same examples of singular mass nouns given earlier, we say, “We consumed less water this month than last month,” “Our factories should consume less energy to remain competitive,” “The manager proved to have less patience with the student interns than we anticipated,” and “The latest consumer survey shows less dissatisfaction with our products than last quarter’s.” Try using “fewer” in place of “less” in these sentences and you’ll surely get the same ping in the ears as before.

We need to know, however, that when plural count nouns are thought of as an aggregate, “amount” instead of “number” can be used as a measure for them, as in the following examples: “We will supply you with whatever amount of Hawaiian pineapples you will require.” “No amount of words will convince a rational-thinking person that Earth is only 5,000 years old.” Also, in certain cases, it is grammatically correct to use a singular mass noun in the plural-count sense, like “food” in the following sentence: “We need to reduce the number of kilos of food we buy weekly.” (November 1, 2008)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, November 1, 2008 issue © 2008 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

One-Word, Two-Word Mix-ups

One-Word, Two-Word Mix-ups « on: August 01, 2009, 12:47:57 AM »

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In my work as an editor, I often spend considerable time correcting a good number of single words that should have been spelled out in two, or two words that should have been spelled out as just one word. I sometimes wish I could leave those words well enough alone so I could save time, but most of them could actually mean something different—even wrong—if not rendered in the proper way.

The word “everyday” is a particularly instructive case. Many writers habitually use it to mean “each day” in sentences like this: “She tends to her garden everyday.” That’s wrong usage, of course, for “everyday” is an adjective that means “encountered or used routinely,” as in “Our prim lady professor shocked us when came to class in everyday dress.” So the correct word choice in the sentence in question is the two-word variant: “She tends to her garden every day.” Here, it literally means “each day without fail.” As computer-savvy people might say, “every day” is wysiwyg, which is computer-speak for “what you see is what you get.”

Another recurrently misused tandem is “maybe”/“may be,” which not a few writers often use interchangeably. But the single-word form is, as we know, an adverb that means “perhaps,” as in “Maybesabotage is what caused that plane crash.” On the other hand, “may be” is a verb form indicating possibility or probability, as in “You may be right about that woman after all.” We don’t say, “You maybe right about that woman after all.”

I strongly advise writers to also clearly differentiate between “awhile” and “a while.” The single-word form is an adverb that means “for a time”—a short period reckoned from a particular action or condition—as in “Dinner’s almost ready; please wait awhile.” On the other hand, the noun “while” preceded by the article “a” serves as the object of the preposition in expressions like these two: “It’s raining hard; stay for a while.” “We thought for a while that she could be trusted.” But take note that when we knock off the preposition “for” in such expressions, changing “a while” to “awhile” becomes a correct, natural option: “It’s raining hard; stayawhile.” “We thought awhile that she could be trusted.”

In the same vein, I must caution writers from giving their prose the wrong drift by using the two-word “all together” in such sentences as “The committee’s assessment of the situation was all together inaccurate.” It delivers an incorrect meaning for that statement because “all together” means “everyone in a group” or “all in one place.” The correct word is the adverb “altogether,” which means “wholly, “completely,” or “as a whole”: “The committee’s assessment of the situation was altogether inaccurate.”

Some of the manuscripts I copyedit also misuse the “anyway”/“any way” tandem every now and then. We know that the one-word variant means “in any case” or “anyhow,” and its two-word counterpart, “any particular manner, course, or direction.” So it’s incorrect to write, “We told her to avoid seeing that man, but she continued to date him any way”; instead, it should be, “We told her to avoid seeing that man, but she continued to date him anyway.” Conversely, it’s incorrect to write, “Do it anyway you like; after all, you’re the one paying for it”; instead, it should be, “Do it any way you like; after all, you’re the one paying for it.”

And just in case you are among those who still have trouble mistaking “everything” for “every thing,” let’s clarify the difference between them once and for all. The single-word “everything” means “all that there is” or “all that is important,” as in this sentence: “She took care of everything for me—from my speaking engagements to my travel bookings.” The two-word variant, however, means “each thing individually” and usually allows an adjective in-between: “Every little thing means a lot to her.” (August 30, 2008)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 30, 2008 issue © 2008 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

Verbal Fallacies Nearer Home

Verbal Fallacies Nearer Home « on: August 08, 2009, 12:34:14 AM »

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Over breakfast last Monday, just when I was about to wrap up my series on the logical fallacies, my wife Leonor wagged the front page of her favorite newspaper at me and said: “Look at this headline at the very top of the paper. It says ‘State of public education: 1 doctor per 90,000 studes.’ I can’t say exactly what the problem is, but I think there’s something terribly wrong here.”

I stared at the headline and blinked: “‘State of public education: 1 doctor per 90,000 students’? Mmm... I think the headline-writer really meant ‘State of school health care: 1 doctor per 90,000 studes.’ The poor guy must have missed a lot of sleep. That there’s only one doctor per 90,000 students in the public schools certainly couldn’t be a measure of the state of public education. Literacy and quality of instruction perhaps, but doctors? That’s really weird!”

“So why do they make a headline like that?” Leonor asked. “Look, they must have been pretty convinced that they were correct. They even printed exactly the same headline on Page 2.”

“Well, in formal logic, that headline would be called a fallacy of irrelevance, which is better known by its Latin name of ignoratio elenchi, meaning ‘irrelevant conclusion.’ This type of fallacy tries to establish the truth of a proposition with arguments that support an entirely different conclusion.”

“You mean the guys putting out this paper don’t know that? Don’t they teach formal logic in mass communication or journalism?”

“Of course they do! Formal logic is a college requirement, but sometimes, when mental fatigue sets in, even the best minds become susceptible to fallacies of irrelevance. The worst case is the non sequitur, another Latin term that literally means ‘it doesn’t follow.’ Non sequiturs are arguments that fail to establish a connection between their premises and their conclusion. And then, of course, there are the so-called verbal fallacies, those false conclusions people make when words are used improperly or ambiguously. That headline is, if I’m not mistaken, also a classic case of the verbal fallacy of abstraction. That’s the logical error of focusing on only one aspect of reality and then pronouncing it to be the whole truth.”

“Well, I’m sure the country’s Education officials can simply ask schools to teach logic better. It’s scary. If this newspaper can be this illogical right on the front page, I can’t imagine how it will be with the lesser ones.”

“It’s really scary, Leonor, but I’m not very sure if our Education officials will be of much help,” I said. “It looks like they have the same problem with English and logic—probably even worse. Just yesterday, while passing by their central offices along Meralco Avenue in Pasig, I saw a huge streamer and a big billboard of theirs that almost made my eyes pop out.”

“Why?” she asked, sipping her coffee. “What did the streamer and billboard say?”

“Well, the streamer on the front gate carried an Education department message in big, bold letters: ‘Join in the Observance of the Celebration of the 105th Anniversary of the Proclamation of the Philippine Independence Day.’ Those words exactly.”

“You must be kidding! That sounds so wordy and so stilted and so convoluted to me, even if I’m not a grammarian like you. I would have simply said, ‘Let’s All Celebrate Our 105th Philippine Independence Day.’ But is that a fallacious statement?”

“No, just very bad English usage,” I said, “but it makes me wonder how they can enforce President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s directive to restore English as the country’s language of instruction. I think they have a language proficiency problem themselves.”

“Well, Dear, that’s just too bad, but that’s not your problem,” she said. “You have your own day job to worry about. So finish your coffee now. But wait, you haven’t told me yet what was in that billboard. What did it say?”

“Well, the billboard had something to do with iodized salt. It said that it was a joint project of the LGU, DEC, DOH, Kiwanis, Australian Aid, and UNICEF—the big guns in development, you might say. But you wouldn’t believe the slogan they had on that billboard. It said: ‘Be Intelligent. Use Iodized Salt Every Day.’”

“So what’s wrong with that? Seems to me like sensible nutritional advice.”

“My dear,” I chided her, “don’t you see? That slogan is actually a very serious verbal fallacy. It’s called thefallacy of equivocation. It uses the word ‘intelligent’ in more than one sense, yet gives the impression that only one is meant. The first fallacy is that you can make yourself intelligent simply by an act of will. The second is that using iodized salt every day will make you intelligent. They are a double non sequitur, a double absurdity. Both childish oversimplifications—and very dangerous.”

“I see what you mean. You’re right, and now that really scares me like hell!” (June 26, 2003)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, June 26, 2003 issue © 2003 by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The Grammar of Manners

The Grammar of Manners « on: August 14, 2009, 11:02:11 PM »

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“Mind” is a very tricky English word, probably as deceptive as the statistical practice of equating popularity with fitness for the presidency. My dictionary defines “mind” in so many ways. As a noun it is “the seat of awareness, thought, and feeling”; “the intellect”; “memory and remembrance”; “one’s opinion”; and “the focus of one’s thoughts and desires.” As an intransitive verb, it means “to object to”, “to remember,” “to take care of,” “to take charge temporarily,” “to apply or concern oneself with something,” “to be obedient to,” and “to take heed or notice.” With such a profusion of meanings, it is no wonder that “mind” is among the most misused of English words.

The most embarrassing misuse of “mind,” I think, happens in the grammar of manners. I remember long ago my abysmal ignorance about this when I attended a party in Manila for the first time, one hosted by an English professor. I was the last to enter her living room among a batch of adolescent guests, and as I did so she called out with quintessential sophistication: “Mr. Carillo, do you mind closing the door? The wind and flies outside are so bothersome.” The remark was so incomprehensible to me that I could only stare at her for several pulse-pounding seconds. Finally I stammered: “Yes, of course, Mrs. Reyes!” And with that I gingerly closed the door.

Then, as I walked towards her to pay my courtesies, I noticed her staring at me as if she had seen a ghost. But she regained her composure quickly and became her professorial self. “Mr. Carillo,” she began gently, “You didn’t answer me right. You should have replied, ‘No, Ms. Reyes, not at all!’ That’s the polite and cultured way of saying that you didn’t object to my request for you to close the door. You see, the verb ‘mind’ in ‘Do you mind closing the door?’ doesn’t mean ‘please.’ It means ‘object,’ as in ‘Do you object to the idea of closing the door?’ It’s not the same as “Could you, please?’, which you can politely answer with a ‘Yes.’ Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mrs. Reyes, I understand,” I said, and made a motion to leave.

“Don’t you go yet, Mr. Carillo,” she said, gently taking hold of my wrist, “I’d like to give you a few more lessons in the grammar of manners. The food can wait. When I said that ‘No, not at all’ is the polite reply to ‘Do you mind?’, it doesn’t mean you don’t have the option to say ‘Yes.’ For instance, if I asked, ‘Do you mind not staring at me?’, you actually have the option of saying ‘Yes, I do mind, because I just love staring at you,’ but of course that would be impolite—not the answer, but the act of staring at me. If I asked, ‘Do you mind if I light my cigar?’, you can politely tell me, ‘Yes, Mrs. Reyes, I mind very much—I am terribly allergic to cigar smoke, and I don’t like women who smoke cigars.’ Of course, if the idea of cigar smoke or women doesn’t bother you, you can readily tell me, ‘No, not at all’ or ‘Go right ahead.’ Do you get the drift?”

“Yes, Miss Reyes, I do.” 

“Great, Mr. Carillo! That means we’re off to a good start. You may go now and join the guests for dinner.” 

That terribly humiliating lesson in the grammar of manners sent me on a weeklong search for the other meanings of the treacherous word. In fact, I was to discover so many other slippery idioms using “mind” and set out to internalize all of them: (1) “We’re of the same mind” means we share the same feeling or opinion; (2) “They can’t fool around with me if I just put my mind to it” means they can’t do any hanky-panky if I firmly don’t allow them; (3) “We’re not in our right minds if we elect overtly deceptive people” means we are crazy to do that; (4) “Mind to think out clearly who to trust” means we should remember not to trust the untrustworthy; (5) “Mind to figure out why these politicians are suddenly all over media endorsing commercial products” means we should find out what they really are up to; and finally, (6) “Mind what our conscience tells us” means to obey what we know to be true, ethical, and just.

Now that we have looked closely at the various meanings of “mind,” I’ll ask this question: Do we mind that some pollsters are foisting on us the deceptive art of equating popularity with fitness for the highest post in the gift of the nation? I pray that the answer is “Yes, we do mind and we’ll tell them to go practice their modern witchcraft elsewhere!” I do hope this is our answer, or else God help us all! (July 3, 2003)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 3, 2003 issue © 2003 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Playing Boldly with Sentences

Playing Boldly with Sentences « on: August 15, 2009, 12:22:30 AM »

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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.

The State of Our English

The State of Our English « on: May 22, 2009, 08:02:14 PM »

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Sometime ago, my wife Leonor brought home something that took me off balance for a moment, then had me laughing in stitches for minutes. It was an imported product in a white polypropylene tube labeled “Glowing Skin Cream,” with this product claim right below it: “One Minutes Dispel Horniness.” I must admit that I had not displayed so great an ardor in such matters in recent years that my wife should want to curb it, nor that a glowing aspect was ever needed for such things, so I concluded offhand that the tube was a practical joke. But a practical joke it wasn’t, as evidenced by the apparently sober instructions that came right below the label, which I now quote verbatim:

“USE: Days for sub-two,first shall face wetness, and weild then product gently knead, then with cleanly water washing. Notice: avoid into eyeball, if immodesty,shortly washing for cleanly water.”

Only after reading the instructions did it dawn on me that the product was for real; that it was, in fact, an honest-to-goodness skin-whitening cream; that by “horniness” it meant “roughness”; that “first shall face wetness, and weild then product gently knead” meant “wet the face first, then gently apply and rub the cream”; that by “Days for sub-two” it meant “during the first two days”; that “avoid into eyeball” meant “do not apply near the eyes”; and that “if immodesty,shortly washing for cleanly water” meant “if applied in excess, wash with clean water right away.”

In short, the English I was reading was a literal, word-for-word translation of the original Chinese elsewhere on the tube. When I stopped laughing, I pondered how lucky we Filipinos were for having been exposed to English usage for at least 100 years, thus making us incapable of committing such a linguistic atrocity.

Several months after that incident, however, I am no longer too sure if we Filipinos do have a firm hold on that century-long advantage. We may have made a quantum leap in the use of cellular telephony, and over 12 million of us may have already spread to practically every point of the globe, but in matters of English, we may in fact be backsliding to the point of writing the same English as that of the Chinese “horniness cream” ourselves.

Consider these few unsettling examples of our current English usage:

(1) In the Ortigas Complex in Pasig City, inside some of the 180 men’s rooms of a twin-tower building there (and presumably inside some of the 180 women’s comfort rooms as well), is posted this sign: “Kindly flush the toilet after used.” This misguided use of the noun-form “use” in the past tense (or maybe the past participle, who knows what the true grammatical intention was?)—done perhaps only because the word was preceded by “after”—must have made thousands of expatriate managers and foreign dignitaries squirm and think so low of us while perusing the bad English. Quite simply, of course, that sign should read: “Kindly flushthe toilet after use.” Here, “use” is a noun, not a verb.

(2) On the take-home boxes of a leading Philippine food chain is printed this baffling instruction: “Quality is Best / If Consumed Promptly / Upon Take-Out/Delivery.” Making statements elliptical to fit tight printing spaces is justifiable, of course, but not at the expense of logic and clarity. In the elliptical construction above, the reader clearly gets the wrong message that “quality can be consumed and should be consumed promptly.” And even from a purely product assurance standpoint, the “quality is best” claim is itself doubtful; if ever, quality would be “best” at source, and would start to deteriorate the moment the product leaves that source. The problem here arose because the instruction writer mistook “quality” as the subject, not the product itself. If he didn’t, he could have put the instruction the good, old, clear elliptical way—without the thoughtless rhetorical flourish that often puts advertising copy in trouble: “Best If Consumed Promptly / Upon Take-Out/Delivery.”

(3) On the obverse side of the pre-paid plastic card of a Manila-based Internet service provider is this statement: “Credits loaded on this card cannot be exchange for cash.”

Only last week, an irate Englishman sent me e-mail from the United Kingdom berating me for advocating the use of correct American English, saying: “I have been reading your columns with much amusement for quite some time and have often wondered how you thought you were going to educate people by your constant ramblings about items as the ‘past participle’ and other grammatical idiosyncrasies.”

Well, I offer the stark error in using the verb-stem “exchange” in that Internet card as further justification for my constant ramblings about the past participle. That statement does need the past participle to cease to be an embarrassment in the Internet Age: “Credits loaded on this card cannot be exchanged for cash.”

Enough said about the state of our English for now. (December 18, 2003)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, December 18, 2003 issue © 2003 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

A primer on political propaganda

A primer on political propaganda « on: August 29, 2009, 12:41:49 AM »

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Propaganda did not start as something undesirable or downright evil. In fact, it had its origins in what many of us would consider the holiest of causes. Almost four centuries ago, in 1622, Pope Gregory XV was confronted with a twin-horned problem: heathens were fiercely resisting Christianity in the new lands that the papacy wanted to evangelize, and where the faith had already made a beachhead, heretics were attacking its very genuineness and patrimony.

Alarmed, the 68-year-old pope, once a fiery and outspoken doctor of laws but now afflicted by a dreadful bladder stone barely two years into the papacy (he died of the illness a year later), decided to form a special task force. He called it the Congregatio de propaganda fide, or “the Congregation for propagating the faith,” and gave it the task of putting more teeth to the worldwide missionary activities of the Roman Catholic Church.

That congregation’s successes and failures are today firmly etched both in the world’s religious geography and in the inscrutable, sometimes shockingly irrational ways that people on both sides of the great religious divide view that world. That, of course, is a fascinating subject crying for an intelligent discussion, but at this time, we will limit ourselves to how the entirely new word “propaganda” crept into the language, first into Latin and later into English, and how its practice evolved into a deadlier hydra than the twin-horned devil it was originally meant to vanquish.

Today, as most of us know, the word “propaganda” has become a noun that means “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” In plain and simple English, it is a one-sided form or persuasion seeking to make people decide and act without thinking. This blight on the logical thought process becomes virulent when serious clashes in religious, political, and ideological beliefs become inevitable. And what makes the once pious word and activity even more unchristian and linguistically anomalous is that it is waged as fanatically by the really bad guys as by the presumably good guys on our side.

The essential problem with propaganda, of course, is its single-minded goal of short-circuiting rational thought. As practiced in the Philippine election campaign, for instance, it is excessively bigoted in agitating our emotions, in exploiting our insecurities and ignorance, in taking advantage of the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of the language, and in bending the rules of logic whenever convenient or expedient. Propaganda can delude both the ignorant and intelligent alike, and the even greater danger is that even astute people could become its victims and crazed believers, as we are witnessing right now.

To fortify our defenses against political propaganda, we have to do two crucial things ourselves: (1) know at least the most basic tricks used by political propagandists to subvert rational thinking, and (2) cultivate an open and objective mind to counter their deceptions and sleights of the mind.

A practical first step for this propaganda-defusing process is to critically scrutinize those aspiring for the top national positions. For our own and this country’s sake, and no matter what the poll surveys and the TV or radio commercials say, we must cut the candidates down to size. We must for decision-making purposes think of them simply as applicants for a specific job, or consider them as nothing more than branded products on the supermarket shelf.

By looking at a candidate as just another job applicant, we can greatly loosen the grip of his or her propaganda on our senses. That will allow us to dispassionately go over his or her application and résumé and make a reasonably sound judgment on the following basics: (1) communication and writing skills, (2) quality of mind and self-appraisal, and (3) qualifications and job-related work experience. Anybody who skips this elementary procedure for hiring entry-level stock clerks and senior corporate executives alike is obviously an incompetent, irresponsible fool who deserves to be fired outright. And yet, as we can all see, skipping this very basic process is what many propagandists of national candidates would like the Filipino electorate to do.

It would be even more instructive to treat the candidates simply as products on a supermarket shelf. We can then proceed to mercilessly strip them of their elaborate branding and packaging to see the intrinsic worth of the actual product inside. It would shock many people to know that the cost of the packaging of certain shampoos in glitzy sachets can run to as much as 85 percent of their total selling price. How much more profound their shock would be to find that some highly touted candidates, when stripped of their glitzy imaging and positioning, have less probative value for the national positions they are seeking than the paper their faces and names are printed on.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 29, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The nature of true idioms

The nature of true idioms « on: September 05, 2009, 12:14:10 AM »

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Idioms are collocations—the linguist’s term for certain common arrangements of words—that don’t translate. Every learner of a new language discovers this when he or she starts encountering its idioms. Whether a phrasal verb, an idiomatic expression, a proverb, or a euphemism, an idiom congeals into a fixed, indivisible form once established, and it loses both cogency and meaning when we attempt to express it in different terms or in a different language. For instance, the idiom “eat your heart out” (be jealous) disintegrates when we change, say, “eat” to “chew”(“chew your heart out”), “heart” to “aorta” (“eat your aorta out”), or “out” to “bits and pieces” (“eat your heart to bits and pieces”). Worse, it becomes nonsense when translated into another language, as what happens when we say it as “laklakin mo ang puso mo” in Tagalog.

These things happen because idioms are essentially metaphors that draw their communicative power from shared knowledge or experience between the speaker or writer and the audience. It’s either we know and accept an idiom or we don’t, and it would be foolhardy to use it—much less to fiddle with it—without being sure that the audience knows it, too. True idioms are embedded in the culture of most native speakers of the language, which is why nonnative speakers can’t really get proficient in another language unless they make an effort to learn its most common idioms.

We must beware, though, that not every collocation is a true idiom. For instance, the expression “spirits are up” may sound like an idiom but it really isn’t. We can actually replace its operative words—“spirits” and “up”—with other words and it would still hold and be meaningful in other ways: “spirits are down” or “spirits are low,” “energy is up” or “energy is down,” or “motivation is up” or “motivation is down.” In contrast, the phrasal verbs “turn in” (hand over), “turn out” (to prove to be), “turn off” (to cause a loss of interest), “turn over” (to overturn), and “turn down” (to reject) are true idioms, each change in preposition giving the collocation an entirely different meaning.

Indeed, the true idioms of a language share three common features that differentiate them from plain and simple collocations: (1) They are not compositional, (2) Their words are not substitutable, and (3) They are not modifiable.

An idiom is not compositional. We can’t compose or construct an idiom from the individual meanings of its component words. For instance, the idiom “take a lot of flak” (get strongly opposed or heavily criticized) draws its metaphorical power from the quandary of combat pilots whose aircraft are met by bursting shells (the “flak”) fired from anti-aircraft guns. In its current form, however, this collocation no longer has anything to do with combat pilots, flak, or aerial warfare; only the aspect of strong opposition is retained in its meaning and it has since been largely applied to serious intra-office or political disputes.

The words of an idiom are not substitutable. When a word in a true idiom is replaced with a related word or even a close synonym, the idiom collapses and loses its intended meaning. This is what happens to “take a lot of flak” when we change “take” to “sustain” and “flak” to “gunfire” to form “sustain a lot of gunfire”—a different but purely literal collocation.

An idiom is not modifiable. Changing the way the words of an idiom are put together or inflected alters its meaning or, worse, changes it beyond recognition. Imagine the semantic consequences when we modify “take a lot of flak” to, say, “get flakked a lot” or “take so much flakking”!
True idioms are meant to make ourselves quickly understood through the common knowledge and understanding we share with our audience, so it doesn’t really pay to monkey around with them.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 23, 2007 issue © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
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Caution in times of reasonable doubt

Caution in times of reasonable doubt « on: September 12, 2009, 01:39:23 AM »

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There was a time when the spread of false information took a much slower and largely linear path. A jealous or enraged person concocts a lie against a perceived enemy, whispers the lie to a neighbor’s ear ostensibly in the strictest of confidence but certain that in no time at all, that neighbor will break that confidence and whisper the same lie to another neighbor, who, in turn, can be expected to ensure that the process gets repeated ad infinitum. The lie then acquires an attractive reality of its own. Still, there was a downside to the process. Word of mouth was relatively slow, so even the most resourceful prevaricator needed at least a few days or weeks to fan the tiny flame of a lie to a major conflagration.

Modern communications technology has changed all that. These days, radio and TV, the daily papers, landline and mobile telephony, e-mail, and now even the mechanisms of the law itself make disinformation as fast as blabbering a sound-bite over the broadcast networks, punching the “Send” key of a cellular phone or computer keyboard, or filing fabricated charges against one’s target in a fiscal’s office. Organized deception has become a thriving industry, ruthlessly exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of the very same mechanisms that make democracy possible.

This is clearly manifest in the current election campaign. Every seeker of public office is a prime target. Both the good and the bad are fair game for political demolition. Each of them—whether a true leader, visionary, zealot, crackpot, or nincompoop—is prey to the dangerous phenomenon described by the British psychologist R. H. Thouless in his “Law of Certainty”: “If statements are made again and again in a confident manner, then their hearers will tend to believe them quite independently of their soundness and of the presence or absence of evidence for their truth.”

Thouless has pinned down one fundamental flaw of the human psyche: its profound tendency to believe statements based on repetition instead of actual evidence. Of course, few would take pleasure in the notion that even the intelligent and more discerning among us can be so gullible, but other investigators have validated the “Law of Certainty” and have come up with even more disturbing corollaries: (1) The exposure effect, demonstrated by Borstein in 1989, which states that repeated exposure of people to a stimulus results in the enhancement of their attitude toward it; (2) The twin repetition-validity effect and the frequency-validity effect, established by Brown and Nix in 1996, the first confirming that belief in a supposed truth increases with repeated exposure to it, and the second, that the rated truth of a stimulus is determined by how often it is repeated; and (3) The truth effect, demonstrated by Schwartz in 1982, which states that when messages of questionable truth value are repeated, their repetition tends to move their truth-value ratings toward the truer end of the scale.

The “Law of Certainty” and its corollaries are, of course, the principal tools of ideologues, religious extremists, and political propagandists in foisting untruths in the minds of their targets. They know that by sheer repetition, the feeble resistance of rationality soon caves in and crumbles. This is why in this election campaign season, practically all of the communication channels in our midst are bristling with deceptive messages. Their financiers and practitioners have no time to lose and everything to gain, and can take comfort in the fact that the effort costs so little and that the laws against it are so weak and inutile.

Now, the big question we have to ask ourselves is this: Shall we be sitting ducks to these blatant deceptions? What is our defense against the syndicated lie and half-truth? Thouless gave us what I think is a sound course of action: be thoughtful and skeptical, and adopt a position of caution when there’s reasonable cause for doubt about a particular assertion. In plainer terms, we should never, ever make a fool of ourselves by taking scurrilous political messages at their face value.

So the next time we see a derogatory blind item in the papers, a slanderous e-mail in our electronic mailbox, or a poison text message on our cellular phone, we should not honor it even with a single thought. We should resist the temptation to pass it on. We should stop it on its tracks by skipping it or by zapping it with the “Delete” button. That’s the only way we can run the character assassins out of business. If we don’t, who knows, they just might succeed in getting us to elect people who will send this country further down the road to perdition.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 27, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.