Redux 5: Remembrances of 10 Christmases Past

December 26, 2015

Dear Fellow Communicator,

Merry Christmas and a Happy, Prosperous New Year!

In the spirit of the Christmas Season, and particularly for the benefit of members of Jose Carillo’s English Forum who joined us only after December 2014, I am reposting this special Christmas feature that first appeared in the Forum five years ago. In this retrospective, 10 Forum members from various parts of the world recall their most memorable Christmas experiences or share their most intimate thoughts about Christmas. Whether celebratory, affirming, or contrarian, their thoughts remain timely and timeless as ever—a veritable springboard for our own reflections about Christendom’s holiest of seasons.

THIS MONTH IN THE FORUM (December 2015):

·       My Thoughts Exactly: Redux 5: Remembrances of 10 Christmases Past (Forum members from various parts of the world reflect on Christendom’s holiest of seasons)

·       Readings on Language: Contemporary Discourse in English Gets Plagued with “Verbal Eczema” (British novelist bewails the rise of subtly insulting and patronizing English expressions)

·       Media English Watch: Frenzied Arrival Reporting for the APEC Dignitaries (News reporters wrack their brains for alternatives to the verb “arrive,” to no avail)

·       Badly Written, Badly Spoken: What Does a Sentence Need to Take the Perfect Tense  (A later event or point in time to show the completion of a prior action or event)

·       News and Commentary: French Expected To Be World’s Most Spoken Language By 2050  (This will be due to sub-Saharan Africa’s burgeoning francophone populations)

·       Use and Misuse: Can “People” and “Persons” Be Used Interchangeably? (Yes, but for the singular form, using “person” is the better, more flexible option)

·       You Asked Me This Question: “Deployment” is Lingua Franca For Sending of OFWs Abroad (This military term is now generic for spreading out people for a deliberate purpose)

·       The Finest in Language Humor: Christmas Q&A for English Buffs (Sampler – “Q: What do you call Santa’s helpers? A: Subordinate clauses.”)

·       Getting to Know English: The Perplexing Workings of the Double Possessive (The evident superfluity of this default usage does seem like grammatical overkill)

·       Time Out from English Grammar: Focusing on Three Things at Once is Courting Information Overload (When a point called “decision fatigue” is reached, it’s difficult to think straight)

·       Advice & Dissent: Two Free-Thinking Advocates Discuss God, Sundry Subjects (Now you can read online the 2011 interview that became a sensation when it first came out in print)

·       Advocacies: William Zinsser on Writing: “Short is Better Than Long. Simple is Good.” (Beloved advocate of clarity and brevity in English prose writes 30)

·       How Good is Your English?: Debatable Answer Choices in English Practice Test (They can confuse when too arithmetical, too arbitrary, and too culture-bound!)

See you at the Forum!

Sincerely yours,

Joe Carillo

Click this link to go the website now: http://josecarilloforum.com

Wordsmithing verbs of destruction in English

A Hong Kong-based Filipina English teacher, Isabel F., recently shared with me this story about the usage of a verb of destruction:

“I’m a longtime listener to BBC iPlayer Radio and early this morning, I caught the program ‘The Why Factor’ hosted by Mike Williams. He read out some of his listeners’ mail criticizing him for using the word ‘decimated’ to describe something that had been destroyed. They pointed out that ‘decimated’ really means having destroyed or killed 1 in 10, according to the historical fact that Roman legions would kill 1 in 10 men as a form of punishment.

“Williams said he consulted an authority, British journalist and writer Oliver Kamm, who told him that the criticism is pure pedantry because ‘decimated’ is accepted today to denote ‘destroy or demolish completely.’

“I thought that you, as a wordsmith, would be interested in this.”

My reply to Isabel F.:

Your account of how the verb “decimate” evolved definitely interests me but not as a “wordsmith” in the context of being a word expert but only as one who happens to work with words as a source of livelihood. I’m making that distinction to make it clear that I’m not putting myself in the same league as Oliver Kamm, whose book on grammar, Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage, I featured in Jose Carillo’s English Forum recently (http://tinyurl.com/o7tgt8o).

Yes, I absolutely agree with Kamm that it’s pure pedantry—the unimaginative emphasis of minutiae in the use of knowledge—to insist that “decimated” be limited to the sense of having destroyed or killed 1 in 10. That’s its original sense, of course, having come from the Latin “decimatus,” for the practice of punishing mutinous Roman military units by the brutal execution of one soldier, chosen by lot, in every 10.”

Over the centuries, however, “decimate” had evolved in usage to mean “exacting a tax of 10 per cent.” It later lost the percentage aspect to mean just “reducing drastically especially in number,” as in “Unchecked urban migration severely decimated the rural population.” Eventually, it also became generic for “causing great destruction or harm,” as in “Serious citizenship and residency questions could decimate the poll-survey frontrunner’s chances of winning the presidency.”

Those are vast leaps in the meaning of “decimate” as a verb of destruction. But if some British English speakers find them disturbing, they would likely be shocked—nay, infuriated—to know that English speakers elsewhere in the world are even more aggressive in wordsmithing verbs like “decimate” beyond recognition.

Among Filipino speakers of English, in particular, the verb “salvage” has suffered an even worse fate. We all know that “salvage” normally means to rescue or save someone or something from wreckage or ruin, as in “Victims of Typhoon Lando came back to salvage their belongings from their devastated homes.” In recent years, however, “salvage” acquired the opposite meaning of “to kill” or “to assassinate,” as in “Which is a better way to deal with a serial plunderer—to salvage him or jail him for life?”

The website ArchipelagoFiles.com describes that sense of “salvage” matter-of-factly: “The word gets a whole new meaning when used in the Philippines wherein it has become synonymous to murder. To salvage is to kill. The word is often used by the media in referring to murder cases wherein the victims were put to death for being criminals. The victims are aptly called salvage victims. So if you are reading this and you happen to be a non-Filipino, consider yourself warned. When a Filipino says he’s going to salvage you, he’s not going to save you, he’s going to do just the opposite.”

In a very real sense, therefore, the benign “salvage” has become a verb of destruction in much the same way as “decimate”—only much deadlier.     

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 24, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

In English, it’s the helping verb that takes the tense

This rant about bad English grammar was posted in the Facebook page of Jose Carillo's English Forum recently by visitor Zzyggy Zubiri:

           

“Pardon my grammar and punctuation, for I wasn’t a very good student then. My English may not be that good but still, I find from reading Internet forums that unlike people in India and in other nations that use English as a second language, Filipinos have a very irritating, if not confounding, way of using the past tense with words like ‘did’ or ‘would,’ as in ‘did helped’ or ‘would cared.’ Now I’m starting to think that by sheer force of numbers, they may be correct.

“Is this what our teachers are teaching in school nowadays or should the teachers themselves be taught? Or, more disturbing is—am I wrong?”

My reply to Zzyggy Zubiri:

Even by sheer force of numbers, not by a long stretch are those Filipinos correct when they use the past tense of the verb with words like “did” or “would,” and I’m absolutely sure that their English teachers aren’t teaching them that terribly wrong usage either. It’s just that being nonnative English speakers, many Filipinos can’t seem to grasp the fact that in English, it’s the helping verb—not the main verb—that takes the tense.

I’ve taken up this grammar quirk every now and then in this column and in the Forum over the years (http://tinyurl.com/olyxuw5). However, as I had pointed out to an incredulous lawyer puzzled by the cluelessness of some people about that usage, it does need some brainwork to grasp the difference between the tensed main verb and the non-tensed bare infinitive in English sentences.

The thing to keep in mind is that in English, the auxiliary or helping verb “do” works in two basic ways: (1) as an intensifier to emphasize or to insist on something, (2) to indicate that a question is being asked and to give an emphatic answer, whether positively or negatively. But mark this rule: in both usages, it’s not the main verb but the helping verb “do” that takes the tense.

1. “Do” functions as an intensifier. It emphasizes a response to a probing question in the present tense or past tense, taking the position right before the main verb of the response. For instance, to the question “Do you really know this woman?” or “Did you really know this woman?”, the typical emphatic positive response is “Yes, I do know this woman” or “Yes, I did know this woman.” In such responses, it’s the helping verb “do” that takes the tense. The main verb remains in its base form (the infinitive stripped of the function word “to”), which we shouldn’t confuse with its present-tense form. Thus, in the examples presented above, “know” is a bare infinitive and doesn’t take any tense at all.

2. “Do” indicates that a question is being asked. As we all know, “do” takes the front-end position in present-tense and past-tense questions, as in “Does she take unsolicited advice?” and “Did she take unsolicited advice?” In future-tense questions, the auxiliary verb “will” or “would” takes the place of “do,” as in “Will she take unsolicited advice?” or “Would she take unsolicited advice?”

Take note that in positive answers to such questions, it’s not the main verb but the helping verb “do” or “would” that takes the tense: “Yes, she does take unsolicited advice.” “Yes, she did take unsolicited advice.” “Yes, she would take unsolicited advice.” When the answer is negative, the helping verb must be positioned before the word that negates the main verb: “No, she does not take unsolicited advice.” “No, she did not take unsolicited advice.” “No, she would not take unsolicited advice.”

Always, it is not the main verb but the helping verb that takes the tense.

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 22, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

3 US nonfiction bestsellers flawed and faulty like that PHL textbook

June 29, 2015

Dear Fellow Communicator,

I’m sharing in this week’s edition of Jose Carillo’s English Forum a report that will hardly be any consolation to Filipinos who are finding to their disgust that some of the locally produced textbooks for primary and secondary students are not only incompetently written and chockfull of errors but are horribly edited or not even edited.  It’s about the finding that three current nonfiction bestsellers in the United States—Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin, The Road to Character by David Brooks, and On the Run by Alice Goffman—contain factual inaccuracies, false statistics, or shaky details serious enough to warrant disclaimers or frantic assurances of revision by their respective publishers. The culprit? By tradition and by default, nonfiction books in the U.S. are not fact-checked to anything near the standard of a magazine piece. But because of these scandals over bestselling nonfiction running afoul with accuracy, Kachka says, the U.S. publishing status quo might shift a notch this year by finally making pre-publication fact-checking of nonfiction mandatory. Let’s not just hope but prod the Philippine publishing status quo, particularly those engaged in textbook production for public schools, to shift several notches in the same direction.

THIS WEEK IN THE FORUM (June 28 – July 4, 2015):

·       Essays by Jose Carillo: “All” is a Many-Splendored Word Prone To Subject-Verb Disagreement (It’s because it can either be singular or plural depending on the context)

·       Readings on Language: The Lively Craft of Creating Words As Razor-Sharp Social Commentary (Though seemingly overly self-indulgent, they are a delight to read and to hear for the first time)

·       Use and Misuse: How To Use “Only” Without Risk of Being Misunderstood (When everything fails, we need a disambiguating qualifier to clarify things)

·       Advice & Dissent: 3 US Nonfiction Bestsellers Found Riddled With Errors Like That PHL Textbook (The culprit? By tradition and by default, nonfiction books in the US are not rigorously fact-checked)

·       Badly Written, Badly Spoken: A Noun Modified By “Respective” Should Always Be Plural in Form (The adjective “respective” means particular or separate so it needs to modify a plural noun)

·       News and Commentary: French Teenagers “Unable to Cope” With Baccalaureate English Question (They found the question about Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement incomprehensible and impossible to answer)

·       You Asked Me This Question: Is “In Line With This” An Ineffectual Phrase? (No, it effectively says what it means; it’s just that it’s too formal and officious for comfort)

·       The Finest in Language Humor: 50 of Arguably the 100 Funniest English Words (Sampler: Formication - The sense of ants crawling on your skin)

·       Advocacies: William Zinsser on Writing: “Short is Better Than Long. Simple is Good.” (Beloved advocate of clarity and brevity in English prose writes 30)

·       Students’ Sounding Board: Aspiring for Much Better English Than That of Today’s Teachers (A self-imposed, self-monitored improvement program can make the big difference!)

·       Time Out from English Grammar: U.S. Students Not Interested in Their Professors as Thinkers and Mentors (Most look at their teachers simply as grade-givers, not as authority figures or role models)

·       Education and Training: Alternatives to LEAP: Hot Potatoes To Learn Spoken English Quickly (You can use this online program to create your own interactive grammar and vocabulary exercises)

·       My Media English Watch: Shell-Shocked by English Grammar Bombs in Entertainment Reporting (All I can say is that they’re “Awful, awful, eww English!”)

·       How Good is Your English?: Debatable Answer Choices in English Practice Test (They can confuse when too arithmetical, too arbitrary, and too culture-bound!)

See you at the Forum!

Sincerely yours,

Joe Carillo

Click this link to go the website now: http://josecarilloforum.com

When an English teacher prescribes an awful subject-agreement blunder

Arguably one of the prickliest aspects of the English language is that it doesn’t have a singular third-person possessive adjective of indeterminate gender. All that English has are the masculine “his” and the feminine “her," so what happens is that when a sentence has the indefinite pronoun “each,” “everyone,” or “everybody” for its subject, a grammatical dysfunction invariably arises when that pronoun is the antecedent of a possessive-case construction later in the sentence. Consider this example: “Each student should value _____ education.” Should the possessive modifier be “his,” “her,” or “their”? Choosing from among the three usually stumps even the most English-savvy people, for virtually none of them can do the modifying job logically and indisputably. But one English teacher chose the plural “their” without even qualifying it and even had the effrontery to post the usage on Facebook: “Each student should value their education.” Predictably, one doubting student brought it to my attention, and in a recent essay in The Manila Times that I wrote in reply and is now posted below, I described that prescription as “at best contentiously correct and at worst indefensibly wrong” because of the glaring subject-verb disagreement that it engenders. (June 6, 2015)

The possessive disconnect of ‘each’ and ‘everyone’

Let’s talk about the prickly disconnect that develops when indefinite pronouns are used as antecedents of nouns in the possessive case.

A student, Mary Anne Fernandez, recently asked me this provocative question in the Facebook page of Jose Carillo’s English Forum: “My English teacher posted this sentence on his Facebook wall: ‘Each student should value their education.’ Is this grammatically correct?”

My first instinct was to say that her English teacher was prescribing a monumental subject-verb agreement blunder, but I changed my mind and told her that he probably just got carried away by a wrongheaded grammar guidance from somewhere. Indeed, it’s at best contentiously correct and at worst indefensibly wrong to use the plural possessive “their” when the antecedent is any of these indefinite pronouns: “each,” “everyone,” and “everybody.” 

Recall that “each,” “everyone,” and “everybody” are notionally plural but grammatically singular pronouns that refer to every unspecified person in a group. Despite their inherent duality in sense, however, hardly any unforeseeable subject-verb disagreement arises when these indefinite pronouns are used in the nominative or subjective case, as in “Each has a role to perform in this major undertaking” and “Everyone is expected to be here by 12:00 midnight.” This is true in the objective case as well, as in “I gave each a token of appreciation” and “The teacher treated everybody with respect in the class.”

But these indefinite pronouns have the built-in drawback of giving rise to grammatical dysfunction when used as antecedents in possessive-case constructions—the unhappy result of English not having a singular third-person possessive adjective of indeterminate gender. All that English has are the masculine “his” and the feminine “her.” So, when the antecedent subject is any of those three indefinite pronouns, the equivocal possessive “his or her” is typically used to modify the object noun to ensure grammatical correctness: “Each student should value his or her education.”

The problem with using “his or her,” however, is that it irritatingly suggests that the writer or speaker is clueless—or vacillating—on whether the antecedent subject are males or females. Worse, the more that usage is repeated, the more it frays the nerves of readers and listeners.

The traditional recourse for avoiding this semantic and stylistic problem is to use the masculine “his” as default possessive adjective. With gender equality now the order of the day in most democratic societies, however, “his” as default usage is now widely frowned upon as unacceptably sexist.

This is why the plural “their” has gained some currency as default usage in such grammatical situations:  “Each student should value their education.” I do think, however, that it is misguided—perhaps even insolent—for an English teacher to endorse using “them” to skirt the gender disconnect in possessive usage; to my mind, the subject-verb disagreement is so glaring as to make the cure worse than the disease, so to speak. The better part of valor for grammar teachers would be to qualify that sentence not as prescribed usage but only as an undesirable fallback when every other alternative fails.

But are there, in fact, other options for avoiding that grammatical impasse? There are actually two: one is surefire, and the other advisable only when the syntax of the particular sentence allows it.

The first is to replace those three indefinite pronouns with the plural “all,” then use the possessive adjective “their” to modify the object noun, as in “All students should value their education.” Even without “students” to modify, “all” works very well as a stand-alone subject in that sentence: “All should value their education.”

The second, but only if the sentence will still read and sound right, is to drop the possessive adjective “their” altogether, as in “All students should value education.” This, I must say, is neater and much more elegant than that teacher’s patently objectionable grammar prescription.

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, June 6, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

A serious grammar malfunction about a wardrobe malfunction

In early April, I departed from my usual range of topics by taking up the atrocious English of two recent wedding-related stories that came out in entertainment news and gossip websites (“Shell-shocked by grammar bombs in entertainment reporting”). The first was about American singer Beyoncé Knowles’ mother getting married to an actor, and the other about Marian Rivera and Dingdong Dantes, the recently wed and overhyped Filipino TV-and-movie couple, telling all and sundry that they are now expecting a baby. Having done that despite the fact that critiquing entertainment-cum-gossip English isn’t exactly my cup of tea, it was farthest from my mind to do it again. As it happened, however, an even more provocative and instructive grammar lapse caught my attention in another entertainment story, this time in a leading Metro Manila broadsheet. So, against my strong reluctance to wade into entertainment-cum-gossip waters, I found myself jumping in again by taking up that grammar lapse in an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in the May 2, 2015 issue of The Manila Times. (May 17, 2015)

A grammar malfunction due to a compromised subordinate clause*

Doing critiques of grammar errors in entertainment-cum-gossip news isn’t exactly my cup of tea, and having done that in my most recent column, it was farthest from my mind to do it again. But then my attention was irresistibly drawn back by an even more provocative and instructive grammar lapse, this time in an entertainment story that came out recently in a leading Metro Manila broadsheet.

That story begins with this lead passage: “Alex Gonzaga experience(d) a minor wardrobe malfunction during her ‘AG From The East: The Unexpected Concert’ on Saturday. A part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed while performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G’ during the said concert.”

A wardrobe malfunction—you know, perhaps a breast popping out of a bra or a Delta of Venus peeping through sheer lace—is par for the course in sultry performances by uninhibited female songbirds, but not when nude-colored underwear is, of all things, discovered singing songs beneath a gown! That very curious grammar malfunction thus needs to be looked into methodically and as dispassionately as possible.

The faulty grammar in that lead passage isn’t difficult to spot: “A part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed while performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G’ during the said concert.” The main clause, “a part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed,” is grammatically beyond reproach because it has a legitimate subject and a legitimate verb, but its  supposed subordinate clause is compromised. This is because “while performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G’ during the said concert” turns out to be neither subordinate nor even a clause.

The problem with that construction is that it has no subject at all. Recall from basic English grammar that a clause needs an obligatory subject—whether noun or pronoun—to qualify and work as a clause. But here, what we have is only an adverbial phrase improperly clinging for dear life to the singer’s “nude-colored underwear” in the main clause. In a word, it’s a dangling modifier, creating the absurd mental picture of nude-colored underwear not doing its job of covering the performer’s private part but—like a portable karaoke—actually performing prerecorded songs for her.

Now, before attempting to fix that grammar malfunction, let’s do a quick review of that technique in English grammar of streamlining sentences by reducing adjective clauses and adverbial clauses into adjective phrases and adverbial phrases, respectively. For instance, in the sentence “She flirted like an Arabian temptress while she was performing her act,” we can drop the second “she” and the verb “was” to reduce the subordinate clause “while she was performing her act” into the grammatically simpler subordinate phrase “while performing her act.” This streamlines the complex sentence into this simple sentence: “She flirted like an Arabian temptress while performing her act.”

The thing is, such a reduction is possible only when the subject of both the main clause and its subordinate clause is one and the same, as “she” in the example I presented above; otherwise the reduction is a big no-no. In particular, in the sentence “A part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed while performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G’ during the said concert,” the subject of the main clause—“her nude-colored underwear”—is different from that of the subordinate clause—the unstated “she.” This triggers the grammar malfunction in that wardrobe malfunction.

The simple fix for that grammar malfunction should be obvious by now. It is to restore the subject “she” and the verb “was” to the the subordinate clause that has been improperly reduced into an adverbial phrase:  “A part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed while she was performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G.’”

Now everything is decently in its proper place.

This essay first appeared under the title “A serious grammar malfunction about a wardrobe malfunction” in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 2, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

Tough grammar question at the end of a litany of proofreading woes

The essay below is the last of a trilogy of essays that I wrote based on a well-meaning, constructive letter sent to me by a staffer of the Philippine Supreme Court who asked if he could consult me once in a while when he’s in doubt about his work. He said that part of his job is to proofread court decisions and resolutions drafted by a ponente or the designated writer from among the justices.

The letter-writer—I will keep him nameless for obvious reasons—told me he’s neither a lawyer nor an English major, so his proofreading is confined to just typos and grammar. “I used to be very strict,” he said. “I’d correct ‘back wages’ or ‘in so far’ into one word, and put a comma or period where I think it’s needed. This is because my idea of proofreading is that it’s for publication purposes; when the document gets printed, you can no longer correct it.” He then shared with me very instructive proofreading predicaments that constrained him from doing his correcting job thoroughly.

In my third essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times, I answer this devilishly equivocal grammar question that the letter-writer posed at the end of his litany of woes over grammar “wormholes” in Supreme Court rulings: “What should the verb be in this sentence: ‘He insisted that she (stay, stays or stayed) in the house’?” (April 26, 2015)

A devilishly equivocal English grammar question

Last week, towards the end of my essay about wormholes in certain Supreme Court rulings and correspondence, I said that the unnamed letter-writer who brought them to my attention asked this devilishly equivocal grammar question: “What should the verb be in this sentence: ‘He insisted that she (stay, stays or stayed) in the house’?”

I replied that the answer could be the subjunctive “stay,” the indicative present-tense “stays,” or the indicative past-tense “stayed.”  Since the explanation would involve some grammatical complexities, however, I decided to devote a separate column to it.

Let me start by rearranging the answer choices for that sentence: “He insisted that she (stays or stayed, stay) in the house.” This will allow us to discuss the more familiar grammar concepts first and work our way to the more complicated ones.

Recall now that there are three moods of verbs in English, mood being that aspect of the verb that expresses the speaker’s state of mind or attitude toward what he or she is saying. These moods are the indicative, the imperative, and the subjunctive. The indicative and imperative both deal with actions or states in factual or real-world situations; in contrast, the subjunctive deals with actions or states as possible, contingent, or conditional outcomes of a want, wish, preference, or uncertainty expressed by the speaker.

The most common and familiar of the three moods is, as we know, the indicative. It conveys the idea that an act or condition is (1) an objective fact, (2) an opinion, or (3) the subject of a question. Indicative statements seek to give the impression that the speaker is talking about real-world situations in a straightforward, truthful manner; their operative verbs take their normal inflections in all the tenses and they follow the subject-verb agreement rule religiously.

Now let’s closely examine the sentence in question when it uses the first answer choice: “He insisted that she stays in the house.” This sentence is perfectly grammatical when it is said or understood as an indicative statement, where the speaker declares in a persistent but straightforward and truthful manner what he believes is an objective fact: that the female referred to currently stays—that’s the verb “stay” taking its normal present-tense inflection—in that particular house.

That sentence is also perfectly grammatical when said or understood as an indicative statement when the verb in the “that”-clause is in the past tense: “He insisted that she stayed in the house.” Here, the speaker declares in a persistent but straightforward and truthful manner what he believes is an objective fact: that the female being referred to stayed for sometime—that’s the verb “stay” taking its normal past-tense inflection—in that particular house.

Finally, let’s closely examine the sentence in question when it uses the third answer choice: “He insisted that she stay in the house.” There’s now an apparent subject-verb disagreement in the “that”-clause between the singular “she” and the plural-form “stay.” However, if that sentence is said or understood to be subjunctive, it would be grammatically and semantically correct. Indeed, one of the uses of the subjunctive is to denote a speaker’s insistence that a particular action be taken, not that it’s true or factual. 

So then, always keep in mind this rule for subjunctive sentences with a “demand,” “require,” or “insist” main clause followed by a “that”-clause indicating the action to be taken: the operative verb of that clause always takes the subjunctive plural present tense (without the suffix “-s”) whether the doer of the action is singular or plural: “I demand that all of you leave right now.” “The company requires that all job applicants take an IQ test.” And, in the same token, “He insisted that she stay in the house.”

I trust that I have adequately clarified this particular form of the subjunctive.

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 11, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

So now as it was then, this is the world in 854 words

I wrote the essay below in the early 2000s but once again, at the risk of being deemed unduly assertive, I am posting it here to help make sense of the appalling resurgence of religious, political, and ideological genocide in our time in many parts of the world. It’s clear that we still need to answer the big question that has remained unanswered over the centuries: “When will humanity learn to be peaceably rational and rationally peaceable?” (April 5, 2015)

If I were asked to describe the world as I see it today, I would readily give this answer: it has hardly changed since 2,200 years ago when Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and physicist, was said to have bragged that he could move the world if only he had the lever to lift it. For all his ingenuity and imagination, however, Archimedes was dead wrong on this count. He knew the power of the lever like the back of his hand, assiduously applying this knowledge to design military catapults and grappling irons; he figured out with stunning accuracy the mathematical properties of circles and spheres, including the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, or what we now know as pi (3.14159265...); he began the science of hydrostatics, or the forces that govern stationary fluids, after discovering the now familiar Archimedes Principle; and he even invented the Archimedes screw, an ingenious water-raising machine still used today to irrigate fields in Egypt.

But on hindsight, we know now that Archimedes obviously exceeded his mind’s grasp when he thought of lifting the world with a plank. It wouldn’t have been possible to do so even if a suitable fulcrum could be found. The world was actually (and still is) an ovaloid sphere 12,760 km in diameter, one that rotates on its axis in 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds and that revolves around a much bigger sphere—the sun—in 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.6 seconds. The object Archimedes had bragged of lifting actually has a mass in tons of about 5.98 x 10 raised to the 21st power, and a volume in cubic meters of about 1.08 x 10 raised to the 21st power—figures too mind-boggling to even think about, much less to trifle with.

These elemental things obviously went beyond the ken of Archimedes’ overarching genius. It was only 1,750 years later, in fact, that the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was to make the startling, heretical thesis that Earth was not the center of the universe but simply one of the planets that orbited the bigger, stationary sun. But on this even Copernicus, who began the scientific reawakening that came to be known as the Copernican Revolution, was only partly right. The sun, it turned out centuries later, was not stationary in the heavens at all. It was rotating on its own axis in a perpetually moving spiral arm of the galaxy that we now call the Milky Way.

All of these facts about our world are now well-established certainties. Despite this accumulated knowledge, however, mankind still acts more primitively and more irrationally than its ancestors before the time of Archimedes. Humanity is still as mired as ever in superstition and religious fundamentalism. Organized religion, superstition, and nationhood have no doubt been great civilizing forces, instilling fear, awe, faith, and patriotism in man, and marshaling both the motive and creative energies for such architectural marvels as the Stonehenge in England, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the stately cathedrals in Europe, the great mosques in the Middle East and in Asia, the Borobodur temples in Cambodia, and the huge statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. Yet these very same forces— organized religion, superstition, and nationhood—are now methodically destroying not only human lives by the thousands but even the physical, social, and cultural legacies humanity had accumulated in the interim.

Intolerance on the religious, political, or ideological plane has always plagued mankind through the centuries, of course, both long before and long after the time of Archimedes. It brought about so many of the horrible depredations on either side of the major religious or geopolitical divides, from the time of the Crusades—those armed Christian expeditions to the Holy Lands and Constantinople in the 11th century—to the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. But more deeply disturbing is the fact that this intolerance and bloodshed have persisted even with the civilizing influence of the Age of Reason and Scientific Enlightenment. Today, people in many parts of the world are still murderously lunging at each other’s throats, intolerant of one another’s religious beliefs, disdainful of one another’s politics and ideology, and covetous of one another’s personal or national possessions. Humanity obviously has not learned its lessons well.

Thus, the great flowering of scientific knowledge and rational thinking that began with Archimedes and pursued with vigor by such great scientific minds as Copernicus, Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein—not to mention Charles Darwin—seems not to have really amounted to much. Our mindsets and dispositions as a species have remained largely primitive—there are disturbing signs, in fact, that we have deteriorated as social and reasoning animals, perhaps irreversibly. It is therefore not at all surprising that today, on a shocking improvement on Archimedes’ claim that he could lift the world with a lever, people by the thousands could think and claim that they could move the world simply on pure belief—no lever, no fulcrum, no hands or physical effort even—just belief and absolutely nothing else.

This essay first appeared in the weekly “English Plain and Simple” column of Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times in the early 2000s and later formed part of his book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

RELATED READINGS:
“The Starry Messenger,” January 19, 2013 editorial of The New York Times
“Pakistan horror: When the war comes to schools,” December 16, 2014 news dispatch in CNN.com

LATE-BREAKING RELATED DEVELOPMENTS:

43Philippine police killed by Muslim rebels while hunting bomb makers (January27, 2015)

Bombexplodes during pro-Ukrainian rally (February 22, 2015)

 2 New Yorkwomen accused of ISIS-inspired bomb plot (April 3, 2015)

147 dead, Islamistgunmen killed after attack at Kenya college (April 3, 2015)

PopeFrancis laments killing of Christians (Associated Press, April 4, 2015)

RELATED BOOK READINGS:

Read a review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic:WhyIslam Needs a Reformation Now in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (April 1, 2015)

Read Bangsamoro History: A Nation Under EndlessTyranny by Salah Jubair (pseudonym of Mohagher Iqbal)

Dealing with semantic wormholes in some Supreme Court decisions

I don’t think they’d qualify as “loopholes,” contrary to what a reader suggested online upon reading the first installment of my March 22, 2015 column in The Manila Times about egregious proofreading glitches in two rulings of the Philippine Supreme Court. The term “loopholes” means “ambiguities or omissions in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded,” but I think neither a missing “a” nor a subject-verb disagreement arising from misuse of the plural “were” would constitute a legally or logically defensible ground for such evasion.” I therefore suggested the the more innocuous term “semantic wormholes,” which the Urban Dictionary pejoratively defines—only the “wormholes” part, I must admit—as “a phenomenon that has a way of completely absorbing the attention of its user.” Is my nonlegal opinion sound or unsound? So you can figure that out yourself, I posted that column of mine, “Part 1: How to proofread questionable or downright wrong legalese,” in this week’s edition of the Forum. Do tell me what you think after you’ve read it. (March 22, 2015) 

Part 1: How to proofread questionable or downright wrong legalese

I received a well-meaning, constructive letter recently from a Supreme Court staffer asking if he could consult me once in a while when he’s in doubt about his work. Part of his job is to proofread court decisions and resolutions drafted by a ponente or the designated writer from among the justices.

The letter-writer, whose name I won’t disclose for obvious reasons, says he’s neither a lawyer nor an English major, so his proofreading is confined to just typos and grammar. “I used to be very strict,” he says. “I’d correct ‘back wages’ or ‘in so far’ into one word, and put a comma or period where I think it’s needed. This is because my idea of proofreading is that it’s for publication purposes; when the document gets printed, you can no longer correct it.”

He cited two very arresting examples (all italicizations mine): “Once, I came across the phrase ‘without authority so to do’ in a quoted Rule of Court. My immediate impulse was to correct it to ‘without authority to do so’ but when I checked with the Rules of Court, I found that it’s how it is written in Rule 27. In another instance, the decision in Diamonon v. DOLE has this phrase, ‘to serve the interests of a justice.’ The ‘a’ is certainly not needed there but you can’t change it because it’s as good as law. This is a very good example of how even the article ‘a’ can change meaning if used improperly.”

My comment: I checked those dubious usages and found that “so to do” and an even more curious variant, “to so do,” have precedents in British English and in American jurisprudence. Here’s a “so to do” usage by the University of Oxford: “The Green College Development Office will only issue information about Old Members when those Old Members give written permission so to do.” And here’s a “to so do” usage by a law of the State of Arizona: “Intentionally intercepts the deliberations of a jury or aids, authorizes, employs, procures or permits another to so do.” No matter how awful-sounding then, let’s allow both usages to pass unchallenged.

But as to the extraneous “a” in the Diamonon v. DOLE decision, it’s a very serious proofreading error that gives a derogatory sense to an appellate court’s broad discretionary powers in considering matters not assigned as errors on appeal, in effect allowing it to arrive “at a just decision and complete resolution of the case or to serve the interests of a justice or to avoid dispensing piecemeal justice.” The mere thought of a justice making a decision for his or her self-interest is too subversive to contemplate, so even if that offending “a” now forms part of the Rules of Court, it ought to be knocked off in the interest of justice, semantics, and good sense.

The letter-writer continues: “I began to be more lax when I noticed resentment in my being strict as evidenced by my simple corrections not being implemented, especially when it comes to subject-predicate agreement. This may just be a feeling, but it’s possible that because of their higher educational attainment, lawyers feel bad about being corrected by a nonlawyer.

“To illustrate, when I changed the verb ‘were’ to ‘was’ in the phrase ‘the alluded delay in the completion of the subject project were traceable to…,’ the correction was returned to me marked by an ‘x’ and with ‘the series’ added to ‘traceable’ to justify the use of the verb ‘were.’ (Your opinion, please.) So I just confine myself now to correcting very obvious mistakes, such as ‘the property can only be assessed through a narrow road’ (accessed), ‘hinge of doubt’ (tinge), and ‘the country’s national resources’ (natural).”  

We’ll take up more of his very instructive proofreading predicaments next week.

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 21, 2015 issue © 2015 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

Tales of perdition

Tumultuous times like these, both here in the country and in many other places in the world, prompt me to hark back to a cautionary essay I wrote in the early 2000s, “The Strength of Materials and the People’s Folly,” where I bewailed our tendency as a people “to consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.” It’s an essay that I think is as relevant and as timely as ever, so I’m posting it in this week’s edition of the Forum. (March 1, 2015)

The Strength of Materials and the People’s Folly

In the engineering discipline there’s this thing they call the strength of materials, or the ability of substances to withstand stress and strain. The maximum stress a material can sustain and still be able to return to its original form is called the elastic limit, and engineers designing structures—bridges and buildings, for instance—savagely subject them to forces beyond their ultimate strengths. For safety’s sake, they have models of the structures “tested to destruction.”

The closest popular expression of this that I can think of is the English idiom about “the last straw that broke the camel’s back.” The allusion is, of course, not only to the danger of overloading beasts of burden but also to the perils of blind, unconditional trust in the capacity of things and people to perform beyond their natural, God-given limits. The folly of such behavior is captured chillingly in this haunting English lullaby:

Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Down will come baby, cradle, and all. 

Lewis Carroll, that humorous English mathematical logician, also captured this logic of destruction in this rhyme about the fallen Humpty Dumpty’s fate in Alice in Wonderland:

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

Literature and history are, in fact, replete with accounts of tragedies resulting from a failure to recognize the limits to the strength of materials. In Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, for instance, five apparently morally faultless people on a religious pilgrimage plunge to their death when a suspension bridge over a deep canyon snaps. Afterwards, a cleric investigates if there was anything bad or evil the victims had done in their lives for them to deserve such apparently senseless deaths.

Little attention was given to the state of the bridging materials and to their possible deterioration over time, nor to the possibility that the victims might have been, say, excessively overweight, that they may have clustered too close to one another at a weak spot, or that they might have gone into such religious frenzies—as in the Mardi Gras or our very own Ati-Atihan—for the bridge to snap in sympathetic vibration. Any of these circumstances might have been “the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” so to speak.

A parallel incident with similar religious overtones happened in Naga City in the Philippines way back in September of 1972. Right after a fluvial procession in honor of Our Lady of Peñafrancia, the region’s religious patroness, had passed underneath an old wooden bridge over the Bicol River, the bridge collapsed. Several dozen devotees and onlookers, most of them boys and girls, were crushed to death or drowned. To my knowledge, no religious investigation was done to connect their tragic fate to possible moral or reprehensible misdeeds in life, as was done by the cleric in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but just a few hours after the bridge collapsed, I went to the scene and this was what I saw: the wooden rafters and railings were severely rotted, split, or cracked after years of exposure to sun, wind, rain, and termites. To my mind, there was no way the badly decayed wood could have held the weight of those hundreds of people jostling one another in religious frenzy on the bridge or hanging from its rafters. The faith of the devotees was strong, but the materials of the bridge simply had become so weak for it.

In shipping as well, even the “battleship quality” steel of the ocean liner RMS Titanic fractured and broke when it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic that fateful night on April 14, 1912, killing over 1,500 passengers aboard. The ship’s hull, although made of probably the best plain carbon ship-plate material available during the time, was damaged by the iceberg, and the rivet heads in the areas of contact simply popped off because of the tremendous forces created by the collision. This caused several seams in the hull to open up, flooding the ship’s watertight compartments. Because of their ductility, the rivets normally should have deformed first before failing, but according to some strength of materials analysts who examined materials from the wreckage many years later, they must have become extremely brittle in below-freezing water temperature. Their safety factor had been breached and they failed.

As in these tales of perdition, the danger to all of us is that we have been so mercilessly conditioned by popular culture, religion, and media to believe that everything is possible. We hardly put any safety factor in our personal, social, and political affairs. We thrive and even revel in blind faith and wishful thinking. We observe no minimum and maximum measures, no standards, no limits to anything—be it a dream, a plan, a product, a support system, a mode of conveyance, an advocacy, or a vote or aspiration to an elective post. In sum, we don’t think logically and rationally. We consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the The Manila Times. This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 151 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Using causative and factitive verbs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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