THE WEB AS OUR VERITABLE PASSPORT TO THE WORLD

Waltzing on the Web: A Retrospective
By Jose A. Carillo

I don’t remember now if it was because the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle had fallen in love with the English phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins, or because she had miraculously acquired such exquisite English under his tutelage that she had convinced the crusty London upper class that she was a member of Hungarian royalty. But there she was ecstatically singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” in that magical bedroom scene of the 1964 movie production of the stage musical My Fair Lady, waltzing all by herself and wondering what brought her so much joy:

I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night
And still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings
And done a thousand things I’ve never done before.
I’ll never know what made it so exciting
Why all at once my heart took flight…

For some reason, this was the image that came to mind when it dawned on me how wonderful and how indescribably powerful the World Wide Web is. That was seven years ago, when my four-year initiation with the personal computer and word processing finally led me to the joys of sending and receiving electronic mail on the Internet, and of entering its chat rooms to talk with friends and strangers in every imaginable place in the planet. I thought then that that was the ultimate high, making my personal presence felt not only in my immediate neighborhood but also anywhere where there was a soul with a computer and a fax modem. But I was wrong. I was soon to discover an even bigger high: that with my personal computer and the Web, the whole world and most everything that it had to offer were now literally at my fingertips.

Like most people, I began using the computer as simply a more elegant and more efficient typewriter. That was when it was no longer possible for me to defend the merits of my portable Underwood against those of its digital counterpart. From there I progressed to making my computer do simple math and spreadsheet accounting for my family business at the time. Every now and then, of course, I would enjoy and amuse myself with the many ingenious games and diversions that could be played with it. Then, with the advent of the fax modem and the Internet, the computer became my indispensable personal communication tool. Not long afterwards, through the Web, it became my veritable passport to the world, my key to the immense body of knowledge and information whose surface I had barely scratched even long after I was through with college.

The beauty of the Web is that you can both literally and figuratively waltz on it while you discover its many treasures. With the click of the mouse you can saunter into any of its millions of sites and discover many things you have not known or rediscover those you have already forgotten, such as what the weather or the price of diapers was when you made your inauspicious debut into this planet, what movie or song album was the rage when you had your first crush, and how much was the price of a bottle of Coke when regular gasoline was 25 centavos to the liter. You can trot from one website to another to find out how much it will cost you to rent a flat in Reykjavik at this very moment, hire a mountain guide in Nepal for an ascent to Mt. Everest, or lease a car in Rome for a land tour of Europe all the way to Moscow. And at any time of day, without leaving your computer desk, you can enter the U.S. Library of Congress and pore over its more than 12 million bibliographic records of books and periodicals, get glimpses of the Smithsonian Institution’s engaging bits of American natural history, or make a virtual tour of the fabulous art collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris.

The Web is especially a great boon to English learners in whatever exciting or exasperating stage of the language learning curve they find themselves right now. This is because English is the lingua franca of the Web, and the latter has everything the learner needs to know about English or anything written in English—from its many idioms and figures of speech to the peculiar conjugations of its irregular verbs, and from the secret feeding grounds of the aardvark to the doomed genetic path of the zebronkey. There are, moreover, hundreds of free English proficiency learning sites on the Web to help the learner perfect his English grammar and diction. And once through with your quest for better English, you can perhaps download the trial edition of the amazingly instructive Rosetta Stone to learn a new language or two from its selection of no less than 22 foreign languages, ranging from French to Japanese and from Polynesian to Norwegian.

I used to snicker at Microsoft’s slogan, “Where do you want to go today?”, as patronizing and pretentious, but now I know in my heart that it captures the fundamental truth about the Web. There truly is no limit to where you might want to roam and wander on it. My favorite Web search engine alone, Google, boasts of an accessible collection of 2,469,940,685 Web pages—almost 2.5 billion pages of knowledge and information, enough to fill hundreds of the biggest physical libraries on our planet! I have peeped every now and then at this hoard and I have discovered veritable gems, like the complete or substantive collections of the poetry and other works of the English poets John Donne, William Blake, and Dylan Thomas, the French poet Jacques Prevert, and the American poet Walt Whitman; the Perseus Project that had put together vast selections from the Greek literary classics; and entire Holy Bibles of every religious denomination.

All of my readings from grade school through college, in fact, would amount to only a tiny fraction of the readings that I have already done on the Web in the less than six years that I started mining it for its treasures. And I have been enjoying every minute of my freewheeling incursions into its pages, far better than when I had the likes of Professor Higgins telling me to my face to read my English textbook from cover to cover or else fail and repeat his English course. (2003)
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This essay first appeared in the English-usage column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times sometime in 2003, © 2003 by Manila Times Publishing. It subsequently appeared as Chapter 1 in Part IV, Section 1 of the author's book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language, © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

My Fair Lady “I Could Have

Danced All Night”

(Music Video)

As sung by Marni Nixon, dubbing the singing

voice of Audrey Hepburn, in the 1964 film

adaptation of the musical

WHEN RHETORIC GOES BEYOND BOUNDS

Retrospective on the Dangers of Overstatement
By Jose A. Carillo

As a largely self-taught student of rhetoric, I watched and listened attentively to the homily that Sunday afternoon in an in-house chapel of a Metro Manila mall. The Roman Catholic priest officiating the Holy Mass* exuded the verve and confidence of an experienced schoolmaster, speaking in fluent Tagalog interspersed with impeccable English. He obviously knew how to speak rhetorically, and I must say that at the start, his eloquence held me and the rest of the audience impressed if not spellbound.

His elocution was classically Aristotelian. First, although a lector had already given a suitable introduction for him, the priest restated his bonafides to more firmly establish his ethos, or the appeal of a speaker’s character (“Yes, I am a teacher, make no mistake about that.”). Then, for pathos, or the appeal to emotion, he used some academic-style humor that often drew laughter and half-smiles from the full-house audience. I thus imagined that he was conversant with the Grecian flowers of rhetoric, so I naturally expected his homily to have a persuasive logos or appeal to reason as well.

THIS GENERIC HOLY MASS CELEBRATION PHOTO IS USED IN THIS ARTICLE
FOR REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT TO IDENTIFY THE PRIEST
 OR ANY OF HIS ASSISTANTS MENTIONED IN THE NARRATIVE

To my bewilderment, however, he used a strange rhetorical device for the homily. What he did was to pick a native-language phrase—let’s just say “pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“my closest friend”)—then playfully asked everybody what each letter of the first word (“pinakamatalik”) represented. Of course, there really was no way even the most intelligent person could have fathomed what those were. It was like prodding a quiz show contestant with this riddle: “Give me the names of all the persons who perished in the Titanic.” A mind with total recall and steeped in trivia probably could have hazarded a guess if the priest had used a concrete noun instead, like “Doe, a deer, a female deer/Ray, a drop of golden sun…” in that delightful song of the Von Trapps in The Sound of Music movie. But the priest did it in the manner that people with nothing else to do will ask: ‘Ano ang kahulugan ng bawat letra sa katagang ‘San Miguel’? Sirit na? Ang hina mo naman! E, di ‘(S)a (a)ming (n)ayon (m)ay (i)sang (g)inoo (u)minom (e)h (l)asing.” (“In our village a gentleman got drunk.”)

The rhetorical device he used certainly was not a hyperbole, or an extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis or effect, as in “I ate so much that I must now be heavier than an elephant.” It could not have been a simile or metaphor either, because no word was really compared or substituted with another. I had a fleeting feeling—soon gone—that it was some form of synecdoche, a variant of the metaphor that mentions the part to signify a whole, as in “I need six hands” to mean “I need six people.” In hindsight, I can see now that it was a weak fusion of metonymy and prosopopoeia, the first being a figure of speech that substitutes some suggestive word for what is actually meant, and the latter—also called personification—one that invests human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects. In any case, his question was so nebulous that the priest, as might be expected, ended up providing all the answers himself.

The words he assigned to each of the letters of the word “pinakamatalik” were so convoluted and are no longer relevant, so I will not dwell on them here. They formed the core of his logos, however, and from sheer repetition, they ultimately brought home the message of the beneficence, love, and invitation to the communion that God extends to us all. There was no question about that. 

The problem was that the priest simply didn’t know when to stop. Ever the taskmaster giving pupils a grammar drill to the very end, he dunned his listeners many times to repeat each word; when anyone balked, the priest would browbeat him or her until he or she relented and blurted out the words. Then he asked everyone to do what I thought bordered on the impertinent and absurd: to declare this to his or her seatmate “Ikaw ang pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“You are my closest friend”). He sternly badgered the listeners until he was satisfied that their collective voice was loud enough.

That was where, I think, the logic of his logos snapped; the liberties he took with the language simply became too embarrassing. Perhaps “Ikaw ay aking kaibigan” would have been acceptable rhetorically, but to ask someone to tell a total stranger that he or she is “your closest friend”? This gave you the feeling that the priest was more interested in testing his power to elicit the blind and thoughtless obedience of his flock than in planting a divine message in their minds.

In his classic book, Rhetoric, Aristotle argued that persuasion by argument is best achieved when the speaker’s chain of argumentation is not too hard to follow and not too long: “The links in the chain must be few.” I have this feeling that the priest, in coercing his listeners to be party to his convoluted rhetoric, had seriously violated that role on both counts. This is the danger in overstatement that all public speakers must always guard against to retain their persuasiveness and credibility intact.

*At that time he looked like he was somewhere between his mid-30s or early-40s.
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This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times circa 2003 and subsequently appeared in his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, ©2004 by Jose A. Carillo. © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

GIVE DEPTH AND MORE LIFE TO YOUR WRITING

Playing Boldly with English Sentences
A Personal Critique by Jose A. Carillo
of Lucille Vaughhan Payne's The Lively Art of Writing

One of the most lucid and delightful books I’ve read about writing is Lucille Vaughan Payne’s The Lively Art of Writing. The slim volume, which I discovered many years ago when I was still very self-consciously grappling with writing technique, taught me one unforgettable truth about doing a sentence: it’s all a matter of developing a basic idea. No matter how complex our thoughts are, we can actually boil down each of them to a few words that capture its essential meaning. The emotional turmoil that seizes a love struck person, for instance, can normally be whittled down to this deadpan statement: “I’m in love and I don’t know what to do.” The righteous anger that a manager feels when a subordinate violates a time-honored corporate rule usually culminates in two words: “You’re fired!” And the feeling of certainty of a religious convert usually gets affirmed in these words: “I believe.” They are all that simple.

It is only when we ask ourselves—or when other people ask us—to support and justify those simple ideas that we have to elaborate on them with more words. Who are involved? Why? Where? When? How? And so what? To answer these questions, we begin to build our sentences. We make them long and complex to the extent that will make our thoughts clear, not only to ourselves but also to anyone who would care to read or listen to us.

Building those sentences can actually get much easier once we understand clearly that any sentence falls under either of three patterns: loose sentence, periodic sentence, or combination sentence. As delightfully discussed by Ms. Vaughan Payne in her book, every sentence begins with a basic idea or statement: “The doves flew.” “Ana lost her temper.” “The manager burst into laughter.” It is how we build structures upon these basic ideas that determines how good a writer or speaker we are.

We come up with a loose sentence every time we add a string of details to the tail end of a basic statement: “The doves flew, flapping their wings in the still air, breaking the morning stillness with their shrill cries, warning their kindred of the approach of the deadly hawks.” On the other hand, we produce a periodic sentence when we place additional details before or inside the basic statement: “The imperturbable Ana, ever the patient one, the girl who never got angry even with the worst provocation, lost her temper.” In a combination sentence, of course, we add details before, inside, and after the basic statement, freely combining the elements of both the loose and periodic sentence: “The morose and demanding manager, with an ax to grind against anything and everything, was so pleased with the quarterly sales that he burst into laughter, the first time in so many years in his beleaguered company.”

You must have already noticed that periodic sentence structures usually expand the subject or verb, while loose structures expand the verb or object. The usual methods of expanding the subject in a periodic sentence are, of course, description and the use of appositives, adjectives, prepositional phrase, and participles. In her book, Ms. Vaughan Payne suggests that the easiest way to make details flow in a periodic sentence is to think of the subject as being followed by a pause.

It is, she says, the same kind of pause that occurs in conversations every day, as in these sentences: “My friend [pause] a Political Science graduate [pause] wants to run for town mayor.” “That volcano [pause] sheer and high as it is [pause] is not really that hard to climb.” “The school [pause] in keeping with tradition [pause] required graduates to wear togas and gowns.” “Annabelle [pause] grown tired of her boyfriend [pause] broke off with him last night.”

In the case of verbs, whether in periodic or loose sentences, we can expand them by showing how their action progresses. We can use adverbs and adverbial phrases to do the expanding: “The interviewer listened, attentively at first, but distractedly and impatiently towards the end.” “The soldiers paused at the road junction, wearily scanning the horizon for jet bombers, fearfully spying the buildings for snipers.”

As in the case of subjects, we can likewise expand objects to form loose sentence structures by using appositives, adjectives, prepositional phrase, and participles: “Today I am seeing Miss Jennifer Cruz, the human resources manager.” “The newlyweds took the bus, a rickety affair that perilously transported the mountainfolk and their produce to the nearest lowland town.”

There’s actually no limit to how much we can expand subjects, verbs, and objects in our sentences—except, of course, good sense and a keen awareness of how much our readers and audiences can take. In the end, the good writer is one who exercises restraint: not saying too little as to be irritatingly cryptic, nor saying too much as to be a big, tiresome bore.
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This personal essay first appeared in Jose Carillo's English-usage column in The Manila Times and subsequently as Chapter 80 of his book Give Your English the Winning Edge,© 2009 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The Lively Art of Writing by Lucille Vaughan Payne, a 192-page paperback published by Berkley in 1969, is sold by Amazon.com (https://www.amazon.com/Lively-Writing-Lucile-Vaughan-Payne/dp/0451627121).

COMMUNICATING BETTER WITH OUR ENGLISH

Getting rid of wordy beginnings for our writing

Let’s start aiming our guns today on two of the most blatant enemies of good English writing--the empty legal-sounding phrases that frequently worm themselves into the beginnings of sentences, and the similarly hollow expletives that only deflect emphasis from what’s being written about. We often welcome these deadly grammatical scourges in the mistaken hope that they will lend elegance to our prose; instead, they only waste precious space and time to the discomfort and consternation of our readers.

To begin with, let’s do ourselves a great favor by cultivating the art of eliminating wordy legalisms or pompous phrases, which do nothing but give a false sense of importance to our writing. Here’s a laundry list of 31 of the most common wordy phrases in English:

“as regards,”

“as to,”

“in view of,”

“the fact that,”

“due to the fact that,”

“what I believe is,”

“in my opinion,”

“the reason is,”

“along the lines of,”

“at this point in time,”

“for the purpose of,”

“cognizant of the fact that,”

“in order to,”

“in spite of the fact that,”

“despite the fact that,”

“in such a manner that,”

“in the event that,”

“with respect to,”

“on the basis of,”

“by means of,”

“on the part of,”

“relative to,”

“such that,”

“in connection with,”

“in the nature of,”

“in relation to,”

“in case of,”

“in terms of,”

“to the extent that,”

“in the course of,” and

“in acknowledgment of the fact that.”

Examined closely, these phrases turn out to be wordy equivalents of some of the coordinating and subordinating conjunctions as well as conjunctive adverbs. The phrase “in spite of the fact that” is actually the fanboy* “yet” in disguise; “in recognition of the fact that” is the subordinating conjunction “because” in lawyerly garb; and “despite the fact that” is roughly the conjunctive adverb “nevertheless” in argumentative disguise. By dumping these awkward phrases and routinely replacing them with the appropriate conjunctions, we can inject a surprising freshness and vigor to our writing.

Let’s engage right now some of these roundabout phrases to show how we can jettison them right after with more sensible, concise equivalents. Awkward: “As regards your request, please be advised that it has been approved.” Forthright: “Your request has been approved.” Awkward: “For the purpose of paying off your loan, we recommend selling your townhouse.” Forthright: “We recommend selling your townhouse to pay off your loan.”

Awkward: “At this point in time, it is not appropriate to debate old issues.” Forthright: “It is not appropriate now to debate old issues.” Awkward: “In the course of the trip, we encountered major delays.” Forthright: “We encountered major delays during the trip.” Awkward: “In acknowledgement of the fact that you returned the defective goods, we are sending you this refund check.” Forthright: “We are sending you this refund check for the defective goods that you returned.”

Now let us deal with the expletives, those meaningless words that often terribly weaken the fiber of our sentences. These handy but shady grammatical operators allow us to manipulate sentences at the expense of their true subjects; they also de-emphasize action by forcing us to construct sentences in the passive voice. Used habitually, they make our prose sound amateurish, stilted, and flat.

Here are the expletive forms that we should consciously avoid in beginning our sentences:

(1) “There” when used with any form of “be” as the main verb. The expletive “there” moves the subject to a position after the verb, which as we know creates a weak, passive sentence. Example: “There were five airborne squadrons that engaged the enemy troops.” Shorn of the expletive: “Five airborne squadrons engaged the enemy troops.”

(2) “That” and “whether” when they introduce noun clauses. “That” does not do work within a noun clause; and when it begins a sentence, it often just creates a convoluted sentence structure. Example: “That she closed the windows last night is what Alicia said.” Shorn of the expletive: “Alicia said she closed the windows last night.” The expletive “whether” also does not do any work within a noun clause; since it carries important information, however, it can only be omitted if replaced by the simpler “if.” Example: “Whether his battalion had surrendered is something the soldier wanted to know.” Shorn of the expletive: “The soldier wanted to know if his battalion had surrendered.”

(3) “As” when used in certain transitive verb sentence patterns to connect an object and objective complement. Beginning with the expletive “as” forces the construction of a convoluted sentence. Example: “As a role model is what we think of her.” Shorn of the expletive: “We think of her as a role model.

Wordy phrases and expletives will always crop up in our early drafts, but there is really only one thing we should do to them: to better see our way to good writing, we should strike them off mercilessly and keep no prisoners.

This essay, 184th in the series, first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the April 15, 2003 issue of The Manila Times, © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*Recall that “fanboy” is the acronym for the seven basic coordinating conjunctions, using the first letters of “for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so.”