Lessons When Growing Up: "Things My Mother Taught Me"

Forum member Ben Sanchez e-mailed me the piece below way back in 2010 and asked me to share it with everybody. I told him I sure will.

My Mother taught me LOGIC...

“If you fall off that swing and break your neck, you can't go to the store with me.”

My Mother taught me MEDICINE...

“If you don’t stop crossing your eyes, they're going to freeze that way.”

 

 My Mother taught me TO THINK AHEAD...

“If you don’t pass your spelling test, you’ll never get a good job!”

 

My Mother taught me ESP...

“Put your sweater on; don’t you think that I know when you’re cold?”

My Mother taught me TO MEET A CHALLENGE...

“What were you thinking? Answer me when I talk to you... Don’t talk back to me!”

My Mother taught me HUMOR...

“When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me.”

My mother taught me ABOUT SEX...

“How do you think you got here?”

My mother taught me about GENETICS...

“You are just like your father!”

My mother taught me about my ROOTS...

“Do you think you were born in a barn?”

My Mother taught me how to BECOME AN ADULT...

“If you don’t eat your vegetables, you’ll never grow up.

My mother taught me about the WISDOM of AGE...

“When you get to be my age, you will understand.”

My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION...

“Just wait until your Father gets home.”

My mother taught me about RECEIVING...

“You are going to get it when we get home.”

And my all-time favorite thing—JUSTICE…

“One day you will have kids, and I hope they turn out just like YOU…then you’ll see what it’s like.”

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N.B. The photos in this collection of motherly advice are latter-day additions by the Forum.

A Father’s Letter To His Son’s Teacher

During the enrolment period for school year 2006, while buying textbooks for my sixth-grader son at the library of his school in the Philippines, I saw a wall poster whose message touched me deeply not only for its timeless wisdom but also for its felicitous English. Here, I thought, was something I wish I could have written myself and sent to the teachers of my daughter and two sons when they were still in grade school. What a difference it might have made on the content and quality of their teachers’ instruction!

 

The poster was entitled “Abraham Lincoln’s Letter to His Son’s Teacher” and carried the familiar photograph of the American president who led his nation during its devastating Civil War from 1861-1865. The letter that graced the poster was as follows:

  “He will have to learn, I know, 
   that all men are not just.
   But teach him also that
   for every scoundrel there is a hero;
   that for every selfish politician,
   there is a dedicated leader...
   Teach him for every enemy there is a friend.   

   “Steer him away from envy, if you can,
   teach him the secret of quiet laughter.  

   “Let him learn early that the bullies
   are the easiest to lick...
   Teach him, if you can, 
   the wonder of books...
   But also give him quiet time
   to ponder the eternal mystery
   of birds in the sky, 
   bees in the sun, 
   and the flowers on a green hillside.

   “In the school teach him
   it is far honourable to fail than to cheat...
   Teach him to have faith in his own ideas,
   even if everyone tells him they are wrong...
   Teach him to be gentle with gentle people,
   and tough with the tough.

   “Try to give my son the strength
   not to follow the crowd
   when everyone is getting on the bandwagon...
   Teach him to listen to all men...
   but teach him also to filter
   all he hears on a screen of truth,
   and take only the good
   that comes through.

   “Teach him if you can,
   how to laugh when he is sad...
   Teach him there is no shame in tears,
   Teach him to scoff at cynics
   and to beware of too much sweetness...

   Teach him to sell his brawn
   and brain to the highest bidders,
   but never to put a price-tag
   in his heart and soul.

   “Teach him to close his ear
   to a howling mob
   and to stand and fight
   if he thinks he's right.
   Treat him gently,
   but do not cuddle him,
   because only the test
   of fire makes fine steel.

   “Let him have the courage
   to be impatient...
   let him have the patience to be brave.
   Teach him always
   to have sublime faith in himself,
   because then he will have
   sublime faith in mankind.

   “This is a big order,
   but see what you can do...
   He is such a fine fellow, my son!”

Impressed as I was by the letter, I found it strange that something so well said and memorable could have escaped my attention all this time. Could it be part of some long lost Americana that surfaced only recently? It was also odd that the letter’s English sounded too contemporary for something written in the 1860s. I am not entirely a stranger to Lincoln’s prose style because many decades ago, as a high school student, I had to painstakingly memorize his famous “Gettysburg Address” for class recitation. I was therefore sure that the letter’s language patterns were significantly different from those of the address, so I decided to check the letter’s authenticity by sending e-mail to people knowledgeable about the American president and his writings.

Roger Norton, a retired American history teacher who maintains a very comprehensive web site on Lincoln, gave me this assessment: “I have been asked about this letter before, particularly from folks in India where the letter seems to have the widest circulation. There is no source for it. It is bogus. I have over 280 Abraham Lincoln books, including The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, and this letter is in none of them. It’s a thoughtful letter but it wasn’t really Lincoln who wrote it.”

James Gindlesperger, author of two American Civil War books, Fire on the Water and Escape from Libby Prison, made this appraisal: “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like this is one of those things falsely attributed to Lincoln. Most historians agree that this letter was never written by Lincoln. The style of writing is not Lincoln’s and there is no record anywhere that indicates that he could have written this. Its real author is unknown.”

Cindy VanHorn, registrar of the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, gave a similar appraisal: “Thank you for verifying this before publishing it. Abraham Lincoln did NOT write or speak these words. These phrases are not 19th century phrasing and definitely not Lincoln’s language patterns.”

The letter being decidedly spurious, how come that it had been memorialized into an educational poster? How come that it ended up on display unchallenged in the library of my son’s school and perhaps in many other places around the world?

As far as I can gather, the letter’s first recorded appearance was in the web site of the National Council for Teachers Education in New Delhi, India. This was reported by Thomas E. Scwartz in a bylined article, “Lincoln Never Said That,” for the Winter 2001 issue of For the People, the newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association. That web site no longer carries the letter, but its appearance there must have conferred legitimacy to it in education circles, for two years later, on January 22, 2003, The Tribune of India reported that a university vice-chancellor in the Punjab region, in a circular to teachers and students, had quoted extensively from the letter to justify a controversial amendment of a language usage rule. Among the quotes he invoked in Lincoln’s name: “Teach him to have faith in his own ideas even if everyone tells him they are wrong. Try to give my son the strength not to follow the crowd.”

So what do we do with this untenable state of affairs?

I think we have to decisively put an end to the spurious authorship attribution. I suggest that all copies of the poster be removed from educational or public display. Its very sensible advice need not be consigned to total oblivion, however, so the publishers of the piece can perhaps reissue it simply as “An Anonymous Father’s Letter to His Son’s Teacher.” After all, its timeless words of wisdom about educating children could very well stand on their own without guile or Lincoln. (July 3 and 10, 2006)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 3 and 10, 2006 issue © 2006 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Indignities in American Minor

This is much too unglamorous to admit, and my wife Leonor actually blanched when she read the first draft of this essay. But I told her firmly that it was a story I had to write once and for all as a cautionary tale for our times. Four years before September 11, 2001, while I was lined up at Los Angeles Customs for my flight back to Manila, U.S. agents took me away and made me strip down to my underwear. It was not a particularly chilly autumn day in the West Coast, and America then was to my mind still the carefree blonde in a two-piece, traipsing barefoot on Long Beach, singing an innocent little ditty about freedom and clueless of the horrible outrage that was to befall her four years later. But even with the good heating at the airport I found myself shivering. I simply could not take the frisking and the progressive nakedness with grace and equanimity.

        

What a shame, I thought, to be put in the same class as the terrorists, mobsters, drug lords, and potbellied politicians who routinely deserved such searches! There I was, clothesless and listless in the City of the Angels, trying with some delicacy to shield with my hands as much of my crotch from the prying eyes that were all over me. But no matter how sophisticated I tried to look and how impeccable the English I used in my protestations, I was a practically naked alien under a host country’s sufferance, and short of begging, at that moment there wasn’t really much I could do to change that fact.

The female agent also asked me to take off my shoes. She did it in probably much the same way that a fellow agent did it to a Filipino senator who, I read in the news just now, went through the same body search recently in San Francisco. I did not refuse nor even make a squeak, however. One reason was that I wasn’t a senator but a nobody. I would never know the pleasure of breezing through Customs without anybody laying as much as a hand on me, even if it was obvious that I carried contraband or a ton of plastic bomb on my belly. But what really took out much of the sting from the indignity was that I was not the only one targeted. And looking back, I realize now that it actually might have been my fault to be zeroed in along with the six who were behind me in the queue.

Aside from wearing my old spring windbreaker that I regularly used for Decembers back home in Manila, I had the bad sense to hand-carry all the way from the East Coast a bulky, heavily padded green winter jacket lined with Teflon. I am actually of the lean sort, but I must have looked like a drug runner laden with cocaine whenever my bulk showed on their surveillance monitors. In any case, they asked me and the six others to step aside: a sixtyish woman in a wheelchair, an Oriental-looking gentleman in a very respectable-looking dark gray suit, and four or five Filipinos with their trademark huge shoulder bags and mountainous backpacks.

The agents led us to a nearby inspection room, and in no time they had efficiently dismantled the wheelchair into a neat pile of tubes and nuts and bolts. They cautiously jiggled and peered inside each tube, but found nothing explosive or incendiary. Then the young, portly female agent, who looked every inch of Filipino parentage, frisked the old woman in the wheelchair, ever politely asking and helping her disengage the strap of her bra. Again there was nothing, not even a little vial of cocaine nor a lipstick case of crack for the effort. Then finally it was my turn. She started frisking me. In the best English that I could muster, I asked her: “Why have you chosen me for this? Do I look like a criminal?” And she replied in the best and most dispassionate Tagalog that she could muster: “Trabaho lang po.  Natiyempuhan lang kayo.” (“Just doing my job, sir. You just happened to be it.”) Finding nothing on me, of course, she said: “Sori sir. Pasensiya na kayo.” (“I’m sorry for this. My apologies for doing it.”) She asked me to put my clothes back on, then waved the dignified-looking man to come forward.

As he started to strip, the man tried his best to look nonchalant about the whole thing, but I noticed that his brow began to sweat and twitch a little. I suddenly had the inkling that the agents would not be disappointed this time. True enough, when the man took off his sando and was down to his briefs, there came into view several thick bundles of U.S. currency, securely bound with masking tape to the front, back, and sides of his torso. There must have several hundred thousands of dollars of the notes on him. “I’m sorry, sir,” the agent said with barely suppressed distaste, “you have attempted to take out currency beyond the $10,000-limit without declaring it, a violation of U.S. law.” She then asked all six of us to go, and began reading the man his Miranda rights.

I may make light of the tough security measures that the U.S. now imposes on citizens and foreigners alike passing through its ports, but I do not really wish to trivialize what September 11 has done to the nation that we once knew as the Land of Milk and Honey. The fact is that September 11 has changed most of America’s icons and rules. And make no mistake about it now, because I say this in all practical seriousness: If you are going to San Francisco or LA or New York or Chicago, it will no longer be enough to wear flowers on your hair or make a “Peace!” sign with your fingers. You better be in your best form and best behavior. Give your paunch and toenails a good trim and don’t forget to wear clean socks. Have a nice haircut, and consider shaving off your prized mustache or goatee. Don’t bank on charm and diplomatic immunity. And remember, practice your English and watch your temper! Nothing will better qualify you for being asked to step aside the Customs queue in LA or San Francisco to be grilled or stripped than an atrocious or non-existent English or, much worse, a flare-up of a monumental ego.

Sadly and forever, as the old refrain goes, everything is different now in America because of September 11. (2003)

This essay, which first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2003 and subsequently formed part of my book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways To Learn Today’s Global Language, is part of a collection of my personal essays from mid-2002 onwards. 

Our English Heritage: The Power to Write Sentences Worth Keeping

Language is only a tool for expressing ourselves, and it is simply an accident of history that many of us speak or write in English to do so. If it were not for a naval explorer of Portuguese descent named Fernão Magalhaes who took an impractical westward route from Spain in 1518 to get cloves for his Spanish patrons, dying three years later upon reaching an archipelago that he had just named after St. Lazarus, the Philippines probably would still be a loose cluster of Malay-speaking fiefdoms. But that was not to be. The Spaniards came back 44 years later to rule the islands for almost 400 years, until the Americans routed their naval armada at Manila Bay in 1898. Unlike the Spaniards, who found the Filipino masses unworthy of the Hispanic tongue, the Americans gladly taught us English so we can assimilate their political ideals and culture faster. We probably would still be making do with any of our 169 regional languages if they did otherwise. In any case, we still would have had to learn the grammar and vocabulary of whatever predominant language any of our alternative futures would have given us. There would still be good writers and bad writers among us whether we wrote in English, Spanish, Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, or Tausug.

 

The real issue in writing well is therefore not the language we choose; it is how good we become in using it. Once the choice is made, we have to master as much of it as possible—its words, meanings, form, grammar, structure, diction, and pronunciation. With English, which has become our second or third language, this really should not be that difficult. We have had it for nearly 100 years—an exposure to the world’s wealthiest, most robust language that is second only to India’s in the whole of Asia. Had we taken full advantage of this accidental linguistic heritage, in fact, the Philippines would perhaps now be producing some of the most accomplished writers in the English language.

There is ample proof that one need not be a native speaker of English to excel in it. Two of the finest English-language prose stylists that ever wrote were non-native English speakers. Vladimir Nabokov, author of the highly acclaimed but controversial English-language novel Lolita, wrote in his native Russian and began writing in English only when he was already over 40. Joseph Conrad, author of the classic English-language novel Lord Jim, was a native Pole who started writing in English as a third language (his second was in French) when he was already 32. In recent years, of course, there’s the English-language prose stylist V. S. Naipaul (A House for Mr. Biswas, Half a Life), a writer of Hindu ancestry from the Creole-speaking country of Trinidad who was to win the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. Their key to success was mastering English, assiduously applying it to the writing craft despite the limitations of not having been born to it.

Mastery of a language, however, is not enough even if one is its native speaker. Writers must grapple with an even more fundamental aspect: coming up with something worthwhile to write about. Then like everybody else, they still have to weave the strands of their ideas into a coherent fiber. This is the creative aspect of writing, the process of invention itself. And whether writing a novel or dashing off a quick feature story, rare is the writer who can accomplish this during the first attempt. Even the best of writers are solitary Thomas Edisons trying a thousand times to perfect an incandescent bulb.

A persistent myth that intimidates many beginning writers is that good writers can come up with a torrent of well-organized sentences, paragraphs, and expositions simply as an act of will. That is farthest from the truth. Some of the most accomplished English-language writers, in fact, were or are indefatigable researchers. Charles Dickens kept scores of notebooks for his works, meticulously scribbling plots and outlines in them and making copious marginal notes. And when one reads, say, Truman Capote’s parajournalistic novel, In Cold Blood, or William Shirer’s World War II history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, one immediately sees that the sheer amount of detail in the work could only have come from patient, meticulous research.

Good writers begin to put their ideas into words and whip them into sentences and paragraphs only after they have gathered more material about their subject than they will ever need. But even those sentences and paragraphs are by no means the final thing. They are movable, malleable, changeable. They are simply stages of discovering and clarifying precisely what the writer wants to say. With each draft the writer gets nearer to achieving the full realization of his initial creative impulse, and in whatever language he writes, he makes sure that only the sentences worth keeping are what remain in the final draft. (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 19 in the Usage and Style 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.

Coming to grips with the proper use of “however” once and for all

Who can say right now that he or she has totally mastered the usage of “however,” that slippery word that can’t seem to stay put in just one place to make a sentence yield a desired meaning? I have this feeling that not very many can answer that question with an unqualified “Yes!” In my case, for instance, even after dealing with “however” for the umpteenth time in my writing and editing work, I still sometimes catch myself vacillating where to position it in certain sentence constructions. This is because experience has taught me, sometimes at great risk of social or professional embarrassment, that “however” can make subtle or profound changes in meaning and nuance—even in function—when it’s toggled across clauses and phrases or across sentences. And sometimes, “however” won’t do justice at all to the idea I want to express, so I need to discard and replace it with a more compliant conjunction or adverb.

To put some rough science to the usage of “however,” I wrote a two-part essay about how it works for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in November of 2005. I have posted that essay in this week’s edition of the Forum to give you a much surer footing when building sentences with this very useful but sometimes exasperatingly difficult-to-use word. (August 20, 2010)

One of the most misunderstood and misused words in English could very well be “however,” which works either as a conjunction or as an adverb. This is because many writers, no matter what their writing style may be and no matter how good their English may look, often tumble and fumble when using this very basic and very important function word.

                                                     IMAGE CREDIT: PROWRITINGAID.COM

Consider these representative samples of “however” misuse that I have gathered (all italicizations of quoted text mine):

(1) From an online essay on legal matters: “Correctly, both decisions are cited as saying that conversations and correspondence between the President and public officials are privileged…Once a firm decision, however, has been reached, like who will pay for the Venable contract, the conclusion reached is a matter of public concern no longer covered by privilege.”

(2) From a state university’s admission prospectus: “If however, some graduation requirements are completed beyond the deadline, the student must register during the succeeding semester in order to be considered a candidate for graduation as of the end of that semester.”

(3) From an online update on international trade: “The proposal of the United States…has provided a big push to the negotiations. Trade analysts however are quick to point out that the US and EU proposals amount to nothing more than empty promises once again.”

(4) From a newspaper opinion column: “Anyway, the bill proposing the punitive tax has gone through committee deliberations and has been elevated to the plenary stage. Though this has more to do with legislators in customary fashion, humoring rather than indulging their colleague who is spearheading the bill, however, nonsensical its content and intent.”

The sentence in Item 1 shows the classic case of “however” misplacement. Here, “however” works as an adverb to mean “on the other hand” or “in contrast,” so it should logically be placed either at the beginning of the second sentence, where it can link this sentence firmly to its antecedent sentence, or right after the subordinate clause of the second sentence has been stated fully.

But the problem is that many writers habitually sneak “however” just anywhere in their sentences except up front, creating those abrupt interruptions of thought that needlessly bewilder readers. I think this is the result of being taught by English teachers who foist the grammatically, structurally, and semantically ruinous rule never to begin a sentence with “however,” and about this rule I have more to say later.

The quickest way to make cliffhanger “however” constructions smoother and clearer is to put “however” up front: “Correctly, both decisions are cited…However, once a firm decision has been reached, like [on] who will pay for the Venable contract, the conclusion reached is a matter of public concern no longer covered by privilege.” For even better rhythm, though, “however” can be deferred until the subordinate clause has been stated fully: “Correctly, both decisions are cited…Once a firm decision has been reached, however, like [on] who will pay for the Venable contract, the conclusion reached is a matter of public concern no longer covered by privilege.”

It’s likely that the strong resistance to using “however” to begin sentences has also led to the awkward “however” placements in Items 2 and 3. Note that in Item 2, even if the requisite comma after “if” is supplied to make the sentence structurally correct, the sentence would still sound stilted. But simply putting “however” up front fixes the problem, though: “However, if some graduation requirements are completed beyond the deadline, the student must register…”

In Item 3, on the other hand, the dysfunctional placement of “however” makes it difficult for readers to fathom what that word is supposed to be doing. Putting “however” up front clarifies the logic of the statement: “The proposal of the United States…has provided a big push to the negotiations. However, trade analysts are quick to point out that the US and EU proposals amount to nothing more than empty promises once again.”

In Item 4, “however” also functions as an adverb, this time to mean “no matter how” modifying the adjective “nonsensical.” But setting it off between commas has turned the second sentence into gibberish, no matter if the second comma might have been placed there not by the writer but by the proofreader. For the sentence to make sense, though, that second comma has to be dropped so that “however” can logically form part of the phrase that modifies the word “bill”: “Though this has more to do with legislators in customary fashion, humoring rather than indulging their colleague who is spearheading the bill, however nonsensical its content and intent.”

Now let’s examine the awkward consequences of forcing “however” to do a job that’s better performed by the conjunction “but.”

Take a look at the dysfunctional placements of “however” in the following passages:

(1) From a religious website: “To this, we agree. However in recent years, certain details about the Days have become ‘common knowledge’ to friends and family members of Dazers.”

(2) From a civil society website: “Steiner’s ideas found widespread acceptance in a Europe devastated by the First World War. However the hyperinflation of post World War I Germany demolished practical attempts by Steiner and his colleagues to make the threefold society with an active and independent cultural sphere a reality.”

(3) From an online Philippine festival backgrounder: “(Magellan) died in the encounter. That was on April 27, 1521. The remnants of Magellan’s men were however able to return to Spain to report the incident and the possibility of conquest.”

In Item 1, “however” is supposed to mean “on the other hand,” but without the requisite comma to set it off from the contrasting clause, it erroneously gives the sense of “no matter if” and makes the sentence nonsensical. Adding the comma makes the correct sense emerge: “To this, we agree. However, in recent years, certain details about the Days have become ‘common knowledge’ to friends and family members of Dazers.” The rhythm of the statement gets even better when “however” is made to follow “in recent years” instead: “To this, we agree. In recent years, however, certain details about the Days…”

But there’s actually a much more efficient way of constructing such “however” statements. The problem, though, is that many people are afraid to use it because of this other dubious grammar rule taught by some English teachers: Never use “but” to begin a sentence. This rule, which is meant to discourage incomplete sentences, isn’t of much practical value. On the contrary, using “but” instead of “however” to begin sentences makes their construction more forthright and their meaning clearer, as in this reconstruction of the sentence in Item 1: “To this, we agree. But in recent years, certain details about the Days have become common knowledge…”

In Item 2, “but” can also do a much better job than “however” in delivering the contrastive idea. Take a look: “Steiner’s ideas found widespread acceptance in a Europe devastated by the First World War. But the hyperinflation of post World War I Germany demolished practical attempts by Steiner and his colleagues to make the threefold society…” Similarly, the historical vignette in Item 3 flows much better when “but” is used to begin the third sentence: “(Magellan) died in the encounter. That was on April 27, 1521. But the remnants of Magellan's men were able to return to Spain to report the incident and the possibility of conquest.”

Indeed, unless we want a very strong contrast, “but” is often a better choice than “however” in setting two ideas in opposition. And we need not worry about the claim of some grammarians that “but” is not dignified enough to begin sentences in formal writing. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, for one, assures us that “‘but’ may be used to begin a sentence at all levels of style.”

Now we can perhaps already agree on these more sensible ground rules for using “however” and “but”:

(1) Ignore the misguided caveats against beginning a sentence with “however” or “but.” Those rules only impede clear expression and the logical development of ideas. Up front, both “however” and “but” work just fine when used to mean “on the other hand” or “in contrast.” When “however” is used to mean “nevertheless,” though, the best position for it may not be up front in the sentence, and putting it within the sentence may sometimes also be inappropriate. Using “but” instead can usually fix the problem: “The trip is long and costly. But the destination is worth the trouble.”

(2) Although beginning a sentence with “however” is perfectly acceptable, we must minimize doing it. “However” is an extremely emphatic conjunctive adverb, one that tends to sound more important than the contrastive or opposing idea that it introduces. Functionally, “however” serves best as a conjunctive adverb in compound sentences where two independent clauses are strongly set in opposition: “They want the house; however, their money simply is not enough.”

When we use “however” primarily for such compound constructions, we also get the bonus of not being forced to use it much too often to begin sentences, which admittedly can make our sentences sound too irritatingly legalistic.

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This essay combines and condenses an original two-part version written by Jose A. Carillo for his weekly column “English Plain and Simple” for the November 14 and 21, 2005 issues of The Manila Times. The original two-part version, in essentially the same form, later appeared as Chapters 109 and 110 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

An English-language conundrum

While fine-tuning my book, English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, for its second printing [this was sometime in 2006], I received e-mail from faraway Stockholm with this note about a particular usage in the book: “Here’s a conundrum, Jose: Should it be ‘There is more than one way to skin a cat’ or ‘There are more than one way to skin a cat’? Consider this as a question submitted to your column.”

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

                                     SO MANY LOVELY CATS, BUT JUST FIGURATIVELY, HOW MANY WAYS ARE THERE TO SKIN THEM?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A World Without English

In the farming village where I grew up there was a man—a maker of homemade coconut oil—who did not believe in anything his mind could not grasp or which lay outside the life he knew. Let us call him Pedro de la Cruz. He was born at about the same time as my father in the early decades of the last century, but for some reason his schooling was cut short in the second grade, while my father went on to normal school in Manila to become a schoolteacher. Pedro thus could not understand, write, or speak English beyond the usual peremptory greetings like “Good morning!” or “Good afternoon!” Even these he affected to be beneath his dignity saying. In fact, he viewed with contempt people who spoke English in his presence; once they had left, he would spit on the ground and call them social climbers who surely would not make it to wherever it was they were going. “Mark my words,” he would say in the dialect, “they who think they are so good in a foreign tongue will soon come crashing to the ground!”

           

                               IMAGE CREDIT: ADAPTED FROM PINTEREST.ES PHOTO

Pedro, along with his whole family, was intensely religious. Prayer colored his day as it did his wife Pilar, who was also hardly literate; his eldest son Gregorio, who was my classmate in grade school; Jacinto, the next born; and Teresita, their only daughter. Every morning when the parish church bell rang some two kilometers away, and again at Angelus, they would stop their hand-driven coconut press and pray all the Mysteries of the Holy Rosary. Sundays they would don their Sunday’s best for Holy Mass without fail, all five going to church on foot. Their religiosity, together with the almost unceasing oil-making in their small, hand-driven mill, was the central unifying force of their lives.

Pedro was fiercely obstinate about the worldview that sustained this way of life. One time, back from Manila during a summer college break, I made the mistake of discussing Darwin’s Theory of Evolution with him. I explained that Darwin had determined that man might have sprung from the same prehistoric ancestral stock as that of the apes. This launched Pedro into a strangely eloquent diatribe against the false beliefs fostered by science and the infidels they produced. He gave me the disconcerting feeling that I was the biology teacher being prosecuted by William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes Monkey Trial, the only difference being that Clarence Darrow was nowhere around to defend me. And on matters like this, Pedro simply had to have the last word. You had to give up the argument because if you didn’t, it would go on past midnight in his hut, which in those days without electricity would be lit only by a flickering coconut-oil lamp.

                                        IMAGE CREDIT: “PRAYER BEFORE MEAL,” PAINTING BY VICENTE MANANSALA

Pedro’s deep religiosity resulted in a frightening determinism. “Not a leaf will fall from the tree if God will not will it,” he would intone with fire in his eyes, “and that leaf will surely rise back to the twig if he wished it.” He also believed that God would surely provide for his family no matter what happened. For this reason, he did not think it necessary for any of his children to be educated beyond the level he had attained. In fact, he thought that every learning beyond this was simply a form of needless expense, a totally irrelevant enterprise that would only corrupt the way one ought to earn a living, grow into adulthood, raise a family, and end up in the grave like everybody else.

The impact of this worldview was most profound in the case of Gregorio, who was in the same class with me from the second to the sixth grade. Gregorio’s talent in arithmetic was astonishing. He could add an eight-level array of ten-digit numbers in less than a minute, and could multiply a ten-digit number by another ten-digit number almost as fast. His grasp of English, unfortunately, was just above rudimentary. There had been no English-language reading materials in the de la Cruz household to stoke the fires of his otherwise brilliant mind, and the siblings could not or did not dare speak English with him. There was also no radio to stimulate his English comprehension; his father thought it a nuisance and a vexation to the spirit (TV was still a good 25 years away into the future). Had his English been at least as good as mine, which was by no means that good, I have no doubt that he would have been our class valedictorian. He could have gone on to high school and college and surely could have made something of himself, perhaps a mathematics or physics professor in a major university. But this was not be.

Because Pedro did not send anyone of the siblings to high school and kept a life of penury, no money went out of the family bourse except those that went to food and the upkeep of their manual oil-making equipment. He kept his hut the thatched roof affair that it had always been, dismissing galvanized iron sheets as no good because they got so hot in summers; bought no motor vehicle, preferring to move on foot as always and to continue using a carabao-drawn cart to haul coconut and other cargo to his oil mill; and forced his family to live totally without entertainment and vice. This made the de la Cruz family outwardly prosperous and even enabled them to extend loans to the neighborhood in the form of coconut oil or petty cash. An emboldened Pedro could thus boast to the villagers that without even learning a word of English and without making his children take nonsense subjects in high school and college, his family was better off than most except the jueteng operator and the U.S. Navy pensionados in town.

The neighborhood grew and flowed out; villagers moved to town, to the cities, to countries unknown and previously unheard off; houses big and small, built by money from overseas, sprouted all over. But Pedro’s hut stood unruffled and unchanged. After he and his wife passed away, the de la Cruz siblings continued to live in the same small, unfenced plot of land. They built satellite huts around their father’s, raised families, and set up their own hand-driven oil mills. But each had no dream or ambition beyond what their father had decreed. From each of the four hand-driven mills there would issue, day in and day out, the same peculiar sweetish odor of burnt coconut. Pedro’s legacy of a world without English would keep it that way until it had totally spent itself. (Written circa 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 writte from mid-2002 onwards.