Looking back to Easter Sunday’s earthly and celestial foundations

In keeping with the spirit of the Holy Week, I wrote an essay just three days short of 20 years ago for my English-column in The Manila Times. That essay, “Matters of Faith,” touched on things that many of us were taught not to question from childhood until we became adults and parents ourselves—things like the foundations of our faith and the basis for the Holy Week that our predominantly Roman Catholic nation is celebrating now. It was the offshoot of the following questions that my then nine-year-old son asked me: Why was Holy Week not being celebrated on the same dates every year like Christmas Day, which always falls on December 25? Why have the church authorities made the scheduling of Holy Week so complicated and ever-changing? I simply didn’t know the answers then, and my abysmal ignorance compelled me to do some quick research on the subject. My findings became the basis for the essay that first appeared in my column in the Times at about this time in April of 2003. That essay remains as relevant as ever, I think, so I’m reposting it in my blogspot as a Lenten Season retrospective. (April 1, 2023)

Matters of Faith

I was making notes for a possible non-English-language topic for my column, thinking that grammar wouldn’t be right for Holy Wednesday, when my nine-year-old son Jack tapped my shoulder and asked me: “Dad, why is Holy Week from April 13 to 20 this year? Last year, it was from March 24 to 31.* Why not hold it on the same date like that of Christmas Day so it doesn’t get confusing?”

                                                                                             THE CRUCIFIXION BY TINTORETO

Talk about deja vu! I had wanted to ask my own father that same question when I was about the same age as my son now, but never got to ask. Now I am a father myself—three times over, in fact—and yet could only give a stock answer to veil my continuing ignorance: “It’s because the days of the Holy Week are movable feasts, son. They base it on a religious calendar—you know, that kind where there are names of one or two saints for every day of the year.”

“But why, Dad? They could do the same to every other religious holiday, but they don’t. And another question: Why is Easter Sunday called ‘Easter’? This celebration came from the West, so wouldn’t it make more sense to call it ‘Wester’? And one last thing: Why is the bunny a symbol for Easter? It looks funny and doesn’t seem right.”

Those questions stumped me even more, so I told him: “I really don’t know the answers, son, but tonight I’ll get them for you. Go to sleep now and tomorrow we’ll talk again.”

My little research to answer my son’s questions, I must say, yielded more fascinating answers than I expected. To begin with, it turns out that the movable Holy Week schedules are not totally arbitrary at all. They are always exactly timed in relation to the natural, once-a-year occurrence called the vernal equinox. The equinoxes—there are only two of them—are those times in the year when day is precisely as long as night. The vernal equinox comes in March, marking the end of winter and the beginning of spring, while the autumnal equinox comes in September, marking the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.

The advent of spring was, of course, always a cause for great celebration in the ancient world. The Anglo-Saxons welcomed it with a rousing spring festival in honor of Eoastre, their goddess of springtime and fertility. The Scandinavians called her Ostra and the Teutons, Ostern, but they honored her in much the same way. The importance of this festival to the early Europeans was not lost on the second-century Christians, who wanted to convert them to Christianity. They therefore made their own observance of Christ’s Resurrection coincide exactly with the ancient festival. Then they gradually made it a Christian celebration, even appropriating the name “Eoastre” for it. Thus, contrary to what my son thought, the later use of the term “Easter” for the high point of the Holy Week had absolutely nothing to do with global geography.

People in those early times, however, celebrated the spring festival on different days, mostly on Sundays but often also on Fridays and Saturdays. This became a thorny issue. To resolve it, the Roman Emperor Constantine—who had by then become a supporter of the Christian faith—convened the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. This council came up with the Easter Rule, decreeing that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday that occurs after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. The “full moon” of this rule, however, does not always occur on the same date as the full moon that we actually see; it is the full moon after the ecclesiastical “vernal equinox,” which always falls on March 21. By this reckoning, Easter will always fall on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25. This rule has withstood the test of time, remaining unchanged exactly 1,682 years later to this day.

As to the Easter Bunny, it may be natural for us to think that it is simply a modern-day contrivance to liven up Easter Sunday. It isn’t. Its provenance is even older than that of Easter itself. The prolific rabbit, whose reappearance in spring unerringly marked the end of the brutal winters of those days, actually was the earthly symbol of the goddess Eoastre. Along with the Easter Egg, itself a symbol of rebirth in many cultures, the Easter Bunny was, in fact, a powerful ancient symbol for activity after inaction, for life after death.

In the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Roman Catholics and the rest of the Christian faithful have similarly found such an enduring symbol. They have thus consecrated the Lenten Season in His Name as their holiest of days, ending it on Easter Sunday in a feast where church tradition and ancient belief find joyful convergence.

These are the things I’ll tell my nine-year-old when he wakes up today and reminds me of what I promised him. (April 15, 2003)

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

*This year of 2014, following the celestial mechanism that I describe in this essay, Holy Week happens to fall on exactly the same beginning and end dates as Holy Week in 2003, April 13 (Palm Sunday) to April 20 (Easter Sunday). By this reckoning, Easter Sunday is always the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the ecclesiastical “vernal equinox,” which in turn always falls on March 21. How the ecclesiastics compute this sounds complicated and rather arbitrary, and I really don’t have the competence to satisfactorily explain the process here.

The Roots of English

In 2003, on our way from Washington, D.C., to New York to watch Les Misérables on Broadway, my wife Leonor and I made a side trip to the imposingly neon-lit gaming center of Atlantic City on the East Coast. No, we were not inveterate gamblers out to break the bank at the stately Trump Taj Mahal casino. We were simply being treated to a night out by a wealthy relative who had made a small fortune in the United States by working as many as three day-and-night sales clerking jobs for nearly 20 years. She had given each of us $100 for gambling money, Leonor’s for a try at the slot machines and mine for a sortie at the baccarat tables.

Expectedly, my puny $100 lasted only a few rounds of blackjack. I was actually an embarrassment among the well-heeled players who, as some former and current top Philippine government officials are reputed to do, would bet as high as $20,000 on a single play. I therefore hurriedly left for the slot machines to see how Leonor was doing. Down to her last token, she was in a decidedly foul mood. When she saw me she plunked the metal into the slot machine in a way that plainly meant good riddance, yanked the lever, and stood up to join me. “These things are really designed to dupe you with fierce regularity,” she said. But just as we were leaving, the machine suddenly clanged and a bell started ringing. From the machine’s maw spewed tokens that ran to a few hundred dollars. A minor commotion ensued as an attendant came with a small plastic barrel, scooped the tokens, and brought us to the cashier to change the booty to greenbacks.

Leonor and I gleefully decided to open a U.S. dollar account with our winnings. Our relative, however, wiser to the ways of the world, admonished us that such wealth earned with no sweat was no good and wouldn’t last. He suggested that to exorcise the bad luck from it, we should instead treat everybody in our entourage to a Big Mac and French fries. I promised to do that after a leisurely stroll on the boardwalk along the coast, near which the surf of the Atlantic Ocean crashed with melodious regularity in the darkness.

Later, as I chomped a Big Mac and looked at some of the bloodshot-eyed gamblers wolfing the same, I was reminded of a story about how the English word “sandwich” came about, and how it came to represent a concept that is probably as popular as “love” and “mother.” The roots of “sandwich” had actually been traced to an odd gambling-related practice in Old England, in the same manner that many Filipinos, in both the real and figurative sense, can trace their ancestry or parentage to an “anak ng jueteng.” It is told that in the mid-1700s, John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, got so addicted to gambling that he refused to leave the card table even to eat. He thus would ask his servants to put meat, cheese, and other foodstuff between two slices of bread for him to get by. The Earl’s concoctions were the first of their kind, and in time they were named not after him but after his town. The rest, including my Big Mac, was history.

Let me add as a footnote that Sandwich is a Saxon word that means “sandy place” or “a place in the sand,” which of course has absolutely nothing to do with food. (Or are we really that sure?) And close to Sandwich there was a small village called Ham, which, I must warn you, had got nothing to do with hamburger either; this sandwich variety was first concocted in Hamburg in Germany. The word “ham” actually came from the English word “hamlet,” which means “a small village.” And while we are at it, I might as well tell you that the Anglo-Saxons called a saltwork or a place that produced salt a “wich.” So, it turns out that most if not all of the English towns whose names end in “wich”—such as Northwich, Nantwich, Middlewich, and most likely also Greenwich and Sandwich—once produced salt as a cottage or major industry, like our very own Las Piñas in Parañaque. (Now would you still want to name your new pastry shop Northwich or Southwich?)

All of these ruminations as I dined along the Atlantic Coast prove my little thesis that the roots of English are not as elegant and romantic as many of us colonial-minded Filipinos think. It’s just that far too many English words and icons had relentlessly pummeled our minds since the Americans came to our shores. Many English words we are fond of using—like Crosby (“village where there are crosses,” by being an old Norse word for “village”) and Milton (“farmstead with a mill,” tun being an Old English word for “farmstead”)—are actually as “baduy” and as wedded to the earth as original Tagalog place names like Maasin (“with plenty of salt”), Marulas (“slippery”), Meycauayan (“with some bamboos”), Malinta (“full of leeches”), and Maahas (“infested with snakes”).

I suppose there were thousands of such Tagalog or vernacular place names that had been blotted out of existence when the Spaniards went on a name-changing spree in our country. You all know that they renamed most of our villages after a saint, such as San Roque, San Agustin, and San Eutiquio and—when the list ran out—even such curiosities as Sta. Mesa and Sta. Cruz. That, of course, is another extremely fascinating story outside plain and simple English that begs to be told. (2003)

This essay, which first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times and subsequently formed part of my book English Plain and Simple, is part of a collection of my personal essays from mid-2002 to date.

Meditation on Our Digitized World: “The Tree of Life”

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 prospect. 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. (2002)

This essay first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2002 and subsequently formed part of my book 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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*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 and much, much more updated. (A note in 2009)

Logical Fallacies Nearer Home

Over breakfast that 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 the fallacy 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.

Memos Pleasant and Unpleasant

In my line of work I am often asked how to write a good memo. By “good,” of course, I take it to mean that a memo that doesn’t bristle with anger, spite, or venom. That type of memo is the easiest thing to produce. All you have to do is settle down on your desk while your temples are still throbbing from some slight or simple injustice, imagine your perceived enemy to be a dragon or a monster and you are Sir George, and start clacking away on the computer keyboard or furiously scribbling with your ballpoint pen until the ink spatters on the copy paper. It’s really all that simple. You will feel good at the moment and the words will wonderfully flow like water from a newfound geyser.

            But I am usually more circumspect than that. I always assume that instead, you want the memo to be sensible. You want it to (a) state your case clearly, (b) help the addressee quickly reach a receptive frame of mind, (c) make the addressee think mostly of good things about you before he decides on your case or fire back a memo in retaliation, and (d) get you the results that you so fervently desire. Now, of course, this is not as simple as it sounds. Some corporate types have actually recognized how complex it is and have even made a whole science of it. They have termed it as the “two-way interactive communication feedback loop” or something. For me, though, I simply call it the art of making a memo.

                                             IMAGE CREDIT: THEHRDIGEST.COM*

            The first thing to do when writing a memo is not to be neurotic about your English. That will often strike you dead on your tracks or force you to retreat behind what the pros call “the writer’s block.” Let good English wait for later. Instead, start by clearly visualizing in your mind, whether in English or the vernacular, exactly who you are writing to. Figure out precisely what kind of person he or she is, what quirks he has, the men and women he likes around him, the club or bar he frequents. You have to intimately know what makes the guy or lady tick and what gets his or her goat. If he loves to have his “Dr.” out front before his name, or his Ph.D., ABC, or DVD at its tail end, give it to him. Depending on your point of view, you will be pleasantly surprised or profoundly shocked at how great the store they put on these things.

            Once, I heard a friend with a doctorate lament that the guy who addressed him in a memo forgot or deliberately omitted the “Dr.” before his full name. To add insult to injury, the guy also forgot or deliberately omitted the “S.” of his middle initials. My friend couldn’t get over the slight for days. He spent hours trying to figure out how to get back at his transgressor. His preparations for it became so intense that it assumed the proportions of a major commando raid. Finally, he was ready. He sat down and composed a memo to the transgressor. Licking his chops, he deliberately and triumphantly omitted not only the latter’s “Mr.” but also his first and middle initials as well as his “Jr.” Then, after positioning himself so that he could see the transgressor’s reaction at his cubicle a few meters away, he asked the office messenger to personally hand the memo to him right then and there. I leave it to you to imagine what happened next.

            So what is the moral of this story about memos and the corporate environment? It is that when writing a memo, you should never take anything for granted. Be conscious of both the verbals and nonverbals swirling around you. Learn to listen and feel your way around first before writing the memo. Take time to act. Your situation in the corporate, government, or military organization is like that of a cellular phone. You know that it has no wires but a thousand and one wavelengths of messages are impinging on it every second, wanting to get in but could not either because they are not for you or you do not wish to listen to them. But the frequencies are there whether you like it or not. Sometimes, by a fluke or by Divine Providence, a fugitive one manages to squeak through. Some people call it guilt. Some people call it hunch. Some people call it conscience. Some call it inspiration. Some people call it intuition. Some call it fate.

           Whatever its name, this fugitive frequency is the one that tells you to catch the writer of the dastardly memo in an unguarded moment—probably eating a ham sandwich or having coffee at the office canteen or whatever. Gently tap him or her on the shoulder, say “Hi!”, admit your mistake or transgression, and say you’re sorry. When you do this, he or she will likely smile at you and the two of you will begin to talk. Oh, just trifles, nothing of much consequence! You just fiddle on the ham sandwich and dawdle over your coffee. You simply remember your good times together and you both forget the bad. Funny that when you do this, you seem to reach a common mental state and a union of sorts. There must be something after all in this nonsense they call face-to-face communication. You become active partners in the corporate organization again.

            After the ham sandwich and the coffee, and the parting handshake after that, the corporation suddenly becomes a friendlier and a decidedly less dangerous place. And I will bet you that you may not have to write that memo after all.

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This essay was among Jose A. Carillo’s 158 earliest columns in The Manila Times that were chosen to form part of his first English-usage book, English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways To Learn Today’s Global Language (Manila Times Publishing, ©2004, 498 pages).The choice was based on general and lasting interest to English-language learners and enthusiasts.

*The image of the startled woman that illustrates this article appears in TheHRDigest webpage at https://www.thehrdigest.com/how-to-respond-to-a-rude-email/.

The Pause That Refreshes

Many years ago, flying by happenstance with the late Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. and a leading Defense official* on board the former’s private twin-engine aircraft from Vigan to Manila, I witnessed at close range what I would call a person with a gift for plain talk rather than oratory. At that time, then Ilocos Sur Gov. Luis “Chavit” Singson lay bloodied in a hospital in Vigan, a victim of two grenade blasts that marred a fiesta dance in Cabugao the night before, claiming the lives of eight merrymakers. Sen. Aquino and the Defense official had flown in to tour the scene of the carnage and to visit Gov. Singson, and as a newspaper reporter I followed their every move and took note of every little word they said. I myself had come in from Manila on board my newspaper’s plane, but stayed behind when it became apparent that the bombing tragedy was far worse than the initial news agency dispatch had indicated. So when Sen. Aquino’s Cabugao swing was over, I found myself boarding his plane like it was the most natural thing in the world, thus giving me a vantage point for observing how his mind and language worked.

Apart from his obvious intelligence, what struck me most about Sen. Aquino was his being a nonstop talker who could shift effortlessly from English to Tagalog and vice versa. He was every bit like a munitions expert as he talked about grenades, glibly describing its various types and how each would inflict damage on flesh, and it was amusing that the Defense official, who was his main audience, could only gamely butt in with remarks like “Ganon ba ’yun, pare?” while the senator rattled off facts and figures until we landed at Nichols Airbase.** The wonder of it all was that his talk made complete sense with hardly any comma or period. The only thing you could fault him with was that he spoke a virtual monologue; there simply was no way anybody can get a word in, short of perhaps telling him that the plane was on fire or had run out of aviation fuel. Unlike his political archenemy, then President Ferdinand Marcos, a great talker himself but actually a slurrer with frequent “uhmms” and “ehmms,” Sen. Aquino was not —and hardly made any “ahs” either. He was a perfectly fluent fireside-chat charmer, one who could pedantically lecture you and yet make you feel that he was wooing you. To my mind, he had actually mastered the art of speaking in the same way that Ernest Hemingway had mastered writing, weaving tales and prose with fascinating precision, giving the deceptive feeling that there was really no need for commas and periods—only natural breathing pauses—in this world.

To do what Sen. Aquino could do with speech and Hemingway with prose, or to imitate James Joyce by banishing all punctuations altogether (as in his novel Ulysses), requires at the very least a small touch of linguistic genius. That, however, is something not all of us are fortunate to claim, much less to have. Thus, when we write or talk, we have to mind at all times our punctuation marks, using them with precision so that we can get ourselves clearly understood and avoid lapsing into incoherence. To use the advertising catch phrase of a popular softdrink brand long ago, we have to provide our readers or listeners with “the pause that refreshes,” one that periodically restores the mind’s capacity to absorb what we are drilling into it.

Among the very first things we have to do with our English, therefore, is to master its major punctuations: the period, or what the British call the “full stop,” and the comma. Periods should not be a problem at all. They are, as you know, mainly used to mark the end of sentences as complete statements, as the ending dot in the “The world is an apple.” They are, of course, also used to mark abbreviations, as in “Ph.D.” for Doctor of Philosophy, “Brit.” for British, and “Ford Co.” for Ford Company. The only caveat we should remember is not to write the period twice when the abbreviation occurs at the very end of a sentence, as in “There is doubt about the English of our teachers in the English Dept.” Not a very well-bred way to close, but perfectly okay as punctuation goes.

The comma, on the other hand, is a somewhat more complicated linguistic creature. It has more specialized uses than the period, and the choice to use it involves more than just a stylistic decision. A sentence is either correct or wrong without it. At one extreme in the use of commas is the license taken by certain poets in overusing them, as in Jose Garcia Villa’s poem, “Anchored Angel":

And,lay,he,down,the,golden,father,

(Genesis,fist,all,gentle,now).

between, the, Wall, of,China,and,

The,tiger,tree (his, centuries,his,

Aerials,of,light)…

Anchored,entire,angel!

He,in,his,estate,miracle,and, living,dew,

His,fuses,gold,his,cobalts,love,

And,in,his,eyepits,

O,under,the,liontelling, sun,

The,zeta,truth-the,swift,red,Christ.

At the other extreme, of course, is the extremely sparing use of it, which could be as downright confusing if you are not as articulate as a Sen. Aquino or as artful as a Hemingway.

We obviously cannot afford to take liberties with commas then, so we will confine ourselves to their more conventional uses. Here they are: (a) To indicate where to pause in reading a text to make the meaning clear and unambiguous, as in: “I believe in his intelligence, integrity, and honesty.” (b) To set apart multiple adjectives before a noun, except when the final adjectives form a compound with the noun itself, as in: “Jennifer was a tall, fair, and attractive Filipina advertising executive.” (c) To separate a non-defining relative clause from its antecedent, as in: “My friend Alberto, who had his visa interview only last week, is now scheduled to fly to New York for a plum advertising job.” (d) To allow for parenthetic expressions within sentences, as in: “To see more of Europe, unless pressed for time, tour it leisurely by backpacking.” (e) To separate items in a list, especially shorter ones, as in: “The annual summit took up the following urgent global issues: famine in undeveloped countries, pollution, water scarcity, and ozone layer depletion.” and (f) To mark off and make it easier to read large numbers such as hundreds, thousands, and millions, as in: “The price tag of $12,820,422 for a yacht is mind-boggling any way you look at it.”

This, in a nutshell, is really all there is to know about English commas. (Written circa 2003-2004) 

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times and subsequently appeared as Chapter 50 in the English Grammar Revisited section of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*This official was unnamed in the original appearance of this essay and the author felt that for authenticity’s sake, it’s better to keep it that way.

**Renamed in 1982 as the Jesus Villamor Air Base.

NB. Former Sen. Benigno Aquino III, returning to the Philippines after three years of self-exile in the United States, was gunned down by an assassin and died upon arrival at the Manila International Airport on August 21, 1983.