Settling the often-derided usage of “celebrant” once and for all

Today, January 1, being the birthday of the Year 2011 in the Western world, perhaps it’s a good time to resolve the frequently derided usage of “celebrant” when referring to someone holding a birthday party or marking some other personal milestone. I know, of course, that most people think that “celebrant” is a wrong word choice and that “celebrator” is the only correct usage—but is this conventional wisdom really wise and sustainable?

I wrote an essay about the subject last July in my English-usage column for The Manila Times after attending a birthday party where someone who had called the birthday party host a “celebrant” was savagely if good-naturedly excoriated for his word choice. I thought of posting that essay, “No need to hold ‘celebrant’ in a straightjacket,” in this week’s edition of the Forum in the hope of helping settle this long-standing word-usage issue once and for all. 

I wish everyone a Happy and Prosperous New Year! (January 1, 2011) 

No need to hold “celebrant” in a straightjacket

The Philippines being a predominantly Roman Catholic country, there’s a tendency for the supposedly English-savvy among us to scoff at people who describe as a “celebrant” someone celebrating a birthday or some other auspicious occasion. “Oh, no, that isn’t right!” they would often cut off and gleefully heckle the speaker. “The right word is ‘celebrator’; ‘celebrant’ means a priest officiating the Holy Mass!”

But are people who use the word “celebrant” in that context really wrong? Do they really deserve all that heckling?

Although I don’t usually join the wicked ribbing that often follows, I myself used to think that people who call birthday celebrators “birthday celebrants” are—if not actually unsavvy in their English—at least ill-advised in doing so. Indeed, my Merriam-Webster’s 11^th Collegiate Dictionary defines “celebrant” as “one who celebrates; specifically the priest officiating the Eucharist.” Likewise, the Collins English Dictionary—Complete and Unabridged defines “celebrant” as “a person participating in a religious ceremony” and, in Christianity’s ecclesiastical terms, as “an officiating priest, esp at the Eucharist.”

On the authority of these two dictionaries, I had never really bothered to check the validity of the conventional wisdom that anybody who’s not a priest or cleric should never be called a “celebrant” but only a “celebrator.” By “celebrator,” of course, practically everybody uses it in the context of someone observing or taking part in a notable occasion with festivities.

Recently, though, after witnessing yet another savage if good-natured ribbing of someone who used “celebrant” to describe the birthday party host, I decided that perhaps the issue was serious enough to look deeper into. I therefore resolved to check the usage with at least two other lexicographic authorities, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD).

The OED gives two definitions of “celebrant,” first as “a person who performs a rite, especially a priest at the Eucharist,” and, second, citing North American usage, as “a person who celebrates something.” For its part, the AHD primarily defines “celebrant” in essentially the same vein as the first OED definition, as (a) “A person who participates in a religious ceremony or rite”; (b) “A person who officiates at a religious or civil ceremony or rite, especially a wedding”; and (c) “In some Christian churches, the cleric officiating at the celebration of the Eucharist.” Like the OED, the AHD also makes a second definition of “celebrant” as “A participant in a celebration.”

Then the AHD goes one step further and makes the following usage note for “celebrant”: “Although ‘celebrant’ is most often used to describe an official participant in a religious ceremony or rite, a majority of the [AHD] Usage Panel accepted the use of ‘celebrant’ to mean ‘a participant in a celebration’ in an earlier survey. Still, while ‘New Year’s Eve celebrants’ may be an acceptable usage, ‘celebrator’ is an uncontroversial alternative in this more general sense.”

This being the case, I think people who use “celebrants” to describe people celebrating birthdays and other special occasions aren’t really wrong, and they certainly don’t deserve to be cut down and needled when using that word. And there’s no need for anyone to get upset either when called a “celebrant”—whether as principal or guest—during such occasions. I dare say that “celebrant” is as good a word as “celebrator” in such contexts, and except perhaps in the company of hidebound Christian fanatics, we need not hold the word “celebrant” in a straitjacket to describe only the Christian clergy doing their rituals.

In short, we can freely use “celebrators” to describe people celebrating or attending a birthday party or any other happy occasion, and I think the English-savvy among us need to get used to the idea that the usage of “celebrants” is actually par for the course and doesn’t deserve all that bashing as if it were bad English.  (July 3, 2010)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 3, 2010 © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Misuse of “lie” and “lay” punctures many writers’ command of English

In the English language, there are some sound-alike and spelled-alike verb pairs that often cause a lot of confusion, and the most troublesome of them is arguably the verb pair “lie” and “lay.” Indeed, who hasn’t been tripped yet by this treacherous verb pair? Over the years, I would often come across writing even by professionals—essays, business reports, position papers, news and feature stories—where “lie” is mistaken for “lay,” and vice versa. The semantic damage to the sentence might be slight, but the misuse of either word nevertheless shows a glaring hole in the writer’s command of English.

In a series of essays about vexing errors in English that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2007, I explained the grammatical reason behind the profound tendency of people to fumble when using “lie” and “lay.” I’m sure that reading the essay will clarify whatever doubts Forum members and guests might have about the usage of these two words, so I have decided to post that essay in this week’s edition of the Forum. (December 25, 2010)  

 

Why we often get into trouble using the verbs “lie” and “lay”

As I’m sure you must have already encountered in your own newspaper or magazine readings, some similar-sounding or somewhat similarly spelled pairs of verbs often get annoyingly misused because it’s not so easy to figure out whether they are being used intransitively or transitively. Among these verb-pairs, easily the most troublesome are the intransitive verb “lie,” which means to stay at rest horizontally, and the transitive “lay,” which means to put or set something down.

The intransitive “lie” is most commonly misused when it’s forced to function as a transitive verb in sentences like this one: “The ousted manager went to his office and laid on the couch.” The correct usage here is, of course, the intransitive past tense “lay”: “The ousted manager went to his office and lay on the couch.” On the other hand, the intransitive, past tense “lay down” is often mistakenly used in sentences like this: “The rebels surrendered and lay down their arms.” This time, the correct usage is the transitive, past-tense “laid down”: “The rebels surrendered and laid down their arms.”

Often, too, the intransitive present tense verb “lay” is misused in sentences like this one: “The geographers are checking precisely where the islands detected recently by satellite lay in the Pacific Ocean.” The correct usage here is the transitive, plural present tense “lie”: “The geographers are checking precisely where the islands detected recently by satellite lie in the Pacific Ocean.”

Why are “lie” and “lay” such problematic verbs? To find out, let’s once again clearly distinguish between intransitive and transitive verbs.

A verb is intransitive when it doesn’t need a direct object to work properly in a sentence, as is the case with “yawned” in this sentence: “During his trial, the unrepentant criminal often yawned.” Here, “yawned” is clearly intransitive. It doesn’t need a direct object, and the sentence is complete without one.

On the other hand, a verb is transitive when it absolutely needs a direct object to receive its action, as is the case with “grip” in this sentence: “He gripped my arm.” Drop the direct object of such verbs and the sentence no longer makes sense: “He gripped.”

Now, the problem with “lie” and “lay” is that apart from the fact that they have somewhat overlapping meanings, they are also highly irregular verbs that inflect or change forms in such unpredictable, confusing ways.

The intransitive “lie,” in the sense of staying at rest horizontally, inflects as follows: “lies” for the singular present tense, as in “She chokes when she lies down”; “lie” for the plural present tense, as in “They choke when they lie down”; “lay” for the past tense, whether singular or plural, as in “She got tired and lay down”; and the past participle “lain” in the perfect tenses, as in “She has lain all day while her husband is away.” None of the usages of “lie” above has a direct object.

Now here’s how the transitive “lay,” in the sense of setting something down, inflects: “lays” for the singular present tense, as in “She meticulously lays breakfast for us”; “lay” for the plural present tense, as in “They meticulously lay breakfast for us”; “laid” for the past tense, as in “We laid our laptops on the table”; and the past participle “laid” for the perfect tenses, as in “They had laid their laptops aside by the time their manager arrived.” Here, every usage of “lie” has a direct object.

Take note that among these inflections, the past tense form of the intransitive “lie”—“lay”—is exactly the same as that of the present tense plural of the transitive “lay”—also “lay.” It is this quirk of the language that makes it difficult for us to see whether “lie” or “lay” is being used transitively or intransitively, so we must be very careful indeed when using these two highly irregular verbs. (September 15, 2007)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, September 15, 2007 © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Using the serial comma isn’t just a matter of stylistic preference

It might seem like it’s just a matter of personal stylistic preference, but unlike most journalists and writers, I am a consistent user of the serial comma in both my private correspondence and published work. The serial comma is, of course, the comma placed immediately before the conjunctions “and,” “or,” or “nor” that precedes the final item in a serial list of three or more items, as in this sentence: “The European tourist visited Manila, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok last summer.” Most newspaper writers and editors do away with that serial comma, though, and would write that sentence this way: “The European tourist visited Manila, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok last summer.”

Now the question is: Am I just being dense or bullheadead in using the serial comma when most everybody else routinely gets rid of it? I had the occasion to defend my preference when it was challenged by a foreign reader of my English-usage column in The Manila Times over a year ago, and I thought of posting that defense in this week’s edition of the Forum for the appreciation of those who still have an open mind about the matter. (December 18, 2010)      

Why I consistently use the serial comma 

Sometime ago, a foreign reader of my column in The Manila Times raised an eyebrow over my use of the comma before the conjunction “and” in this sentence: “The [author] unravels the various mechanisms and tools of English for combining words and ideas into clear, logical, and engaging writing.”

He commented: “There is a comma after the second to the last adjective, and I noted that you do this all the time. Has some authority changed convention?”

That comma that made him uncomfortable is, of course, the serial comma, which is also called the Oxford comma and the Harvard comma. It’s the comma placed by some writers like me—but avoided by most editors of Philippine newspapers and magazines—immediately before the conjunction “and,” “or,” or “nor” that precedes the final item in a list of three or more items. Admittedly, its use has remained debatable up to this day among writers and editors in various parts of the world.

Here’s how I justified my consistent use of the serial comma to that foreign reader:  

Yes, I use the serial comma all the time as a matter of stylistic choice. I just happen to have imbibed the serial-comma tradition from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, the Chicago Manual of Style, and H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage. However, during my early days as a campus journalist and later as a reporter for a daily newspaper, I would routinely knock off my serial commas because the newspaper I was working with had adopted the no-serial-comma preference of American print media, particularly The New York Times and the Associated Press. If I didn’t knock off those serial commas myself, my editors would do so anyway and sullenly admonish me not to foist my personal preference over the house rule.    

But no, the convention on whether or not to use the serial comma hasn’t changed at all. I’m aware that the no-serial-comma tradition remains a widespread stylistic practice of the mass media in the United Kingdom as well as in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. But personally, I just want to be consistent after making a personal choice based on my own experience with the problems of punctuation over the years.

Of course, the usefulness of the serial comma might not be readily apparent and appreciated when the items in a sentence with a serial list consist only of a single word or two, as in the following sentences:

“She bought some apples, oranges and pears.”

“For the role of Hamlet, the choices are Fred Santos, Tony Cruz, Jimmy Reyes and George Perez.” 

But see what happens when the listed items consist of long phrases with more than four or five words:

“The major businesses in the domestic pet services industry are traditional veterinary services, fancy pet grooming and makeover shops, a wide assortment of animal and bird food, freshwater and marine fish of various kinds and aquarium equipment and supplies for industrial and home use.”

Now, try to figure out where each enumerative item ends and begins in the phrase “freshwater and marine fish of various kinds and aquarium equipment and supplies for industrial and home use.”

In contrast, see how clear and unequivocal the last two items in the list become when we deploy a serial comma between “various kinds” and “aquarium equipment,” as follows:

“The major businesses in the domestic pet services industry are traditional veterinary services, fancy pet grooming and makeover shops, a wide assortment of animal and bird food, freshwater and marine fish of various kinds, and aquarium equipment and supplies for industrial and home use.”

I therefore think it’s best to use a serial comma by default in such situations regardless of how long the phrase for each item is in the enumerative sequence. This way, we can consistently avoid confusing readers and avoid violating their sense of rhythm and balance. (July 4, 2009)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, June 4, 2009 © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

A rather curious state of affairs in the grammar of “do”-questions

In my essay on the usage of the pronoun “none” that I posted here last week, I explained that “none” is treated as singular when it means “not one” and as plural when it means “not any.” But the senior PR executive who wondered about this particular usage had an interesting related question about the usage of the pronoun “you”: If, in fact, “you” is either singular or plural depending on the speaker’s or writer’s intention, why is it grammatically correct to say “Do you (still) have a problem with your grammar?” but grammatically wrong to say “Do you (still) has a problem with your grammar?” Indeed, from the looks of it, there seems to be a grammatical contradiction here.

This is why in a subsequent issue of The Manila Times, I wrote a follow-up essay, “It’s the helping verb that takes the tense,” to explain this rather curious state of affairs. In that essay, which I am now posting in this week’s edition of the Forum, I discussed the even  more compelling grammatical reason for using “have” instead of “has” in “do”-questions like the one that had puzzled the senior PR executive. (December 10, 2010)

It’s the helping verb that takes the tense

In my previous column [posted here in the Forum last week], I explained to a senior PR executive why I used the singular verb form “has” for the subject “none” in this sentence construction of mine: “I hope none of you still has a problem choosing between ‘bring’ and ‘take’...” He had wondered if I should have used the plural verb form “have” instead in the same way that it’s used in this example that he provided: “I don’t want to be caught saying ‘Do you (still) has?’ We should all ask ‘Do you (still) have?’” 

I explained that he was correct in using the plural verb form “have” in that sentence construction because in contrast to my sentence construction, the subject is clearly the pronoun “you.” This, I pointed out, is because “you”—by some quirk of English grammar—always requires the plural form of the verb regardless of whether it’s meant to be singular or plural. But I added in closing that there’s an even more compelling reason for using “have” in “do”-questions like the one he had supplied. 

That reason is the same I gave to a Hong Kong-based Filipina journalist-teacher who—almost at the same time as the senior PR executive—wrote me seeking an answer to this question posed by an adult Chinese student of hers: “Why do we combine the past and present tenses in sentences like ‘I did not go to school yesterday’? Why isn’t it ‘I did not went to school [instead]’? How do you define that sentence construction? Is there a special term for it, or do we just say ‘It’s that way because that’s the rule’?” 

Here now is the common reason for that usage that baffled both the senior PR executive and the adult Chinese student of the Filipina journalist-teacher: English has three primary helping verbs—“do,” “be,” and “have.” Also called auxiliary verbs, they help the main verb in a sentence form questions, negatives, and some verb tenses. The general rule is that when a helping verb is used in a sentence, it’s the helping verb that takes the tense, while the main verb takes its base form (the infinitive of the verb without the “to,” as in “make” from the infinitive “to make”). 

“Do” in particular is used to (a) indicate questions, (b) indicate the negative of a statement, and (c) emphasize a statement. Here are the particulars of its usage:

(a) “Do” to indicate a question: “Did he take the bus?” “Does he take the bus?” In both the past and present tense, it’s the helping verb “do” that takes the tense. The main verb “take” doesn’t take the tense and remains in its base form. 

Note that when “do” is used as a helping verb to form a question, the main verb always takes its base form—which just happens to look like the plural form when, in fact, it’s really not—regardless of whether the subject (or doer of the action) is singular or plural. In all cases, it’s the helping verb “do” that takes the tense, as in these questions that have plural subjects: “Did they take the bus?” “Do they take the bus?” “Did we take the bus?” “Do we take the bus?” 

(b) “Do” to indicate the negative of a statement: “I did not take the bus.” “I don’t take the bus.” In both these sentences, it’s the helping verb “do” that takes the tense. The main verb “take” doesn’t take the tense and remains in its base form. 

(c) “Do” to emphasize a statement: “I did take the bus.” “I do take the bus.” Here, “do” works to strongly emphasize a response to a particular question like, say, “Did (or “Do”) you really take the bus?” Again, in such cases, it’s the helping verb “do” that takes the tense. The main verb “take” doesn’t take the tense and remains in its base form. (June 20, 2009)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, June 20, 2009 © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The pronoun “none” can mean either “not one” or “not any”

Is the noun “none” singular or plural? This is a question that I’ve been often asked by readers of my English-usage column in The Manila Times over the past eight years, and the question I invariably give is: “It depends.” It depends on whether the sense intended by the speaker or writer for “none” is “not one”—in which case it’s singular—or “not any”—in which case it’s plural.

In mid-2009, a senior PR executive called my attention to what he thought was my erroneous usage of the pronoun “none” in an explanation I made for the usage choice between “bring” and “take.” By way of reply, I wrote the essay below, “My reason for using the singular verb form for ‘none’,” which I would like to share with you by posting it in this week’s edition of the Forum. (December 4, 2010) 

My reason for using the singular verb form for “none” 

Sometime ago, in response to e-mail I sent out inviting selected people to visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, I received this very interesting reply from a senior PR executive who was currently vacationing in Europe:

“Just wanted you to know I share your passion for correct English usage. Sometimes I feel guilty of being ‘holier than thou’ when I shower my employees with pieces of advice on English communication.

“But you know, we are all human and we do make mistakes, too, or ‘typos’ if you will. We are [as they say] entitled to make such errors once a year.

“Take a look at your first sentence [in the e-mail]: ‘I hope none of you still has a problem choosing between “bring” and “take”...’

“Don’t you think you should instead say ‘I hope none of you still have a problem choosing between “bring” and “take”...?’

“I don’t want to be caught saying, ‘Do you (still) has?’ We should all ask ‘Do you (still) have?’

“Just wondering! (I don’t know the subtleties of grammar, and I certainly don’t know how to conjugate. I write only on the basis of how the sentence sounds.)”

Here’s my reply to the senior PR executive:

You’ve raised a valid and very interesting question about my usage of the singular verb “has” for that sentence.

Actually, the pronoun “none” could be singular or plural depending on how the writer uses it. As noted by The American Heritage Dictionary, “The choice between a singular or plural verb depends on the desired effect. Both options are acceptable in this sentence: None of the conspirators has (or have) been brought to trial.” Here, the sense of “none” could either be “not one” or “not any.”

In my sentence, my intent was to use “none” in the sense of “not one,” so I chose to use the singular form “has” for the verb. Still, it’s perfectly valid to ask: Why not the plural form “have” instead?  

Here’s the reason for my choice:

My basic sentence—with its complicating modifiers removed—is actually this: “I hope none of you still has a problem.” Here, the subject of the sentence is clearly the pronoun “none”; it’s not the plural pronoun “you,” which is simply a part of the phrase “of you” that modifies “none.” In fact, we can further boil down the sentence to this more basic form: “I hope none has a problem.” Here, it becomes much easier to appreciate the logic behind my choice of the singular “has.” Indeed, it would be odd if not grammatically wrong to write or say, “I hope none have a problem.”

Still another way to understand this usage is to analyze this other sentence: “I hope one of you [is, are] willing to help me do the annual budget.” Here, of course, the subject is clearly the singular pronoun “one,” so it obviously makes sense for the verb to take the singular form “is”: “I hope one of you is willing to help me do the annual budget.” Because “you” isn’t the operative subject of the sentence, its closeness to the verb doesn’t in any way determine whether that verb takes the singular or plural form.

With the usage examples the PR executive presented, however, the situation is different. Definitely, you and I don’t ever want to be caught asking, “Do you (still) has a problem with your grammar?” As you pointed out, we should ask, “Do you (still) have a problem with your grammar?” This is because here, the subject is clearly the pronoun “you,” which, regardless of whether it’s meant to be singular or plural, always requires the plural form of the verb. (June 13, 2009)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, June 13, 2009 © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Next week, I’ll post my follow-up essay discussing an even more compelling reason for using “have” in “do”-questions like the one presented above.