tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11813792369153747862024-03-16T11:52:09.314-07:00Jose Carillo on the English LanguageThis blog makes wide-ranging discussions on the use and misuse of the English language. Jose A. Carillo is a nationally awarded writer and editor and an internationally awarded corporate communicator. He has written three books on English usage.JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.comBlogger262125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-16574710348946717472024-03-13T04:23:00.000-07:002024-03-13T09:41:59.246-07:00PRIME SEAT OF POLITICAL POWER IN THE PHILIPPINES<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Tales of the longest-staying Malacañang resident except for one<br /></span></b><b><span style="font-size: medium;">By Jose A. Carillo</span></b> </p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">From its beginnings in 1802 as a Spanish aristocrat’s summer home, Malacañang Palace in Manila was to become the prime seat of political power in the Philippines. It served as the official residence of the country’s governors-general both during the Spanish colonial years until 1898 and during the American occupation until the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935. From then onwards it was to be the official residence of 12 successive presidents of the Philippines</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">1</span><span style="font-size: medium;">—Manuel Quezon, Sergio Osmeña, Manuel Roxas, Elpidio Quirino, Ramon Magsaysay, Carlos Garcia, Diosdado Macapagal, Ferdinand Marcos, Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="300" height="779" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8RZ2FP-4dMTvgKWd9RCQQeBE_eg3h2RG1GBhyphenhyphenopMNF4M1tMpnEd083eW1qxd7gVDkUE74daezSl62mLegd01PALJM7TCuC-gR_h7zQCl-XycEYY7tEOoabrFXi-0cU9x6W0Jwdi6jt64lLbdC3B1U0bcYGVC40hGYjGFejNxGZDzw6_5L3GS9DAQzjyo/w525-h779/MyMalacanangCover_small.jpg" width="525" /></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For all their political power, however, all 12 were simply short-term tenants of Malacañang under the country’s democratic system. Each took residence there for at most a four-year or (later) six-year stay, and could look forward to the possibility of staying longer only if reelected. Indeed, only two managed to stay in Malacañang for more than one term—Marcos, who won a second four-year term and managed to extend his stay to a total of 21 years through the expedient of martial rule; and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, former Malacañang tenant Diosdado Macapagal’s daughter, who succeeded Estrada as president when the latter was ousted after only 30 months in residence, then managed to extend her own tenancy for another six years—a term that, of course, brings us to the present day. (Three of the official Malacañang tenants died during their tenancy: Quezon in 1944 and Roxas in 1948, both from illness, and Magsaysay in a plane crash in 1957.)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Today [in election year 2020], a total of nine presidential candidates want to become Malacañang’s official tenant for the next six years—among them Joseph Estrada, the ousted Philippine president who wants to reclaim Malacañang to vindicate his name; Senator Benigno Aquino III, son of previous Malacañang tenant Corazon Aquino; and Senator Manuel Roxas II, grandson of former Malacañang tenant Manuel Roxas, who, as Noynoy Aquino’s running mate, puts himself in a contingent position to be also a Malacañang tenant. How the political winds will blow in the national elections this coming May [of 2020] will, of course, determine whether that tenancy would be handed over and revert to any of the same families that had previously occupied Malacañang, or go to the serious contenders for first-time occupancy—Senator Manuel Villar, Jr., Senator Richard Gordon, and former Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, Jr.</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Longer-staying Malacañang tenant than most</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Through all the often fierce jockeying for residence in Malacañang over the years, however, one man had largely kept mum about the fact that he had been a longer Malacañang resident than any of the Philippine presidents by this time—except one. This was until that former long-time resident, Raul S. Gonzalez, came out last November with a superb memoir-cum-essay collection, <i>My Malacañang</i>: <i>Essays on <u>p</u>residents, people, places and politics</i>, where he blithely asserts in the very first sentences of the very first chapter: “Except for Ferdinand Marcos, no president of the Philippines lived in Malacañang longer than I did. You read it right—‘than I.’ And yes—‘lived,’ as in resided, ate, drank, slept, wakened, thought, dreamt, fell ill, got well, played, laughed, wept, prayed. And yes, yes—‘longer,’ 12 or 13 years.”</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="300" height="573" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHlfHpc66DRN3OWr_-CYlcZeP2HyeoRPBuVpJEwnddlIi7AawZl6BVZ7NwuL6SF4FoLRpVA418-l5A6v7bhZccJJEsKu_alRNB_dgFOEekf7naCfGcBL65U9JiXxOiy39TYurJN2SjQXQxtE6vUE1xv1tCBlbvFNN1DMwynfBu4xBKtTebORrS-UPgR2E/w460-h573/GonzalezPhoto_small%5B1%5D.jpg" width="460" /></div><span class="bbc_size" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: #e7eaef; line-height: 1.4em; text-align: -webkit-center;"><strong><div style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="bbc_size" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: #e7eaef; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 1.4em; text-align: -webkit-center;"><strong><br /></strong></span></div><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> </span>Raul S. Gonzalez: Author of <i>My Malacañang</i></strong></span><br style="background-color: #e7eaef; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.48px; text-align: -webkit-center;" /><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Who, one may ask, is this Raul Gonzalez</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> who can refer too familiarly and too nonchalantly to a stately place of residence—a palace, in fact—that many an ambitious Filipino would fight for and die for and likely even lie for just for a six-year stay?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">To be sure, Gonzalez had actually been a non-elective Malacañang resident. He used to live in a chalet within the Malacañang compound because his father, architect Arturo M. Gonzalez, was appointed by Philippine Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon sometime after 1935 as Malacañang’s buildings and grounds superintendent. Architect Gonzalez held the position until his violent death inside Malacañang grounds in December of 1949.</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Strong sense of ownership over the place</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The younger Gonzalez himself sums up his strong sense of ownership over Malacañang in the first chapter of his book: “Malacañang was where I took my first firm steps and uttered my first coherent words, where I rode my first bike, read my first book, stole my first kiss, wrote my first poems. It was, I might add, also in Malacañang where I saw what war did to men and what men did in war, in Malacañang where two sisters of mine were conceived and [where] my father bled to death in my 15-year-old arms from a bullet fired from a crazed soldier’s browning automatic rifle, Malacañang which shaped me into the person I am.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This amazing facility with English prose is vintage Raul Gonzalez, a now-retired communications executive and writer who’s an English-language wordsmith with few equals in the Philippines. His career, spanning several decades until the late 1990s, included a stint in government as press secretary of the late President Diosdado Macapagal and as senior vice president of the Government Service Insurance System; in academe, as vice president of university relations of the University of the East</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">5</span><span style="font-size: medium;">; and in the mass media, as beat reporter for the now-defunct <i>Manila Chronicle</i> in the 1950s and, in the 1990s, as opinion columnist for the <i>Philippine Star</i> and <i>The Daily Tribune</i>. He had also served as public relations adviser and speechwriter for some prominent public figures in the Philippine scene.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In <i>My Malacañang</i>, Gonzalez writes with elegant, sometimes almost rhapsodic prose about life in the old palace by the Pasig River, about Philippine society and politics in general, and about the movers and shakers he had served or had met in the course of his career as communications executive and writer.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Listen to Gonzalez reminisce in <i>My Malacañang</i> about summer of '45 at the end of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“MacArthur returned not a moment too soon, an eternity too late. Our fast had lasted three long years, almost unto starvation, and turned us children in Malacañang into grotesqueries—looking like gnomes and salamanders, eyes bulging out of their sockets and cheeks sunken and hollow, limbs without flesh and stomachs bloated by hunger, some of us so ravaged by <i>beri-beri</i> that taking a single step was almost like carrying the cross up Calvary.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Yet we, starvelings all, found soon enough and quickly learned that we could only munch so many apples, chew only so much gum, gulp down only so much Coke, gobble up only so many Babe Ruths and Tootsie Rolls.”</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">A life-changing encounter with death</span></b></p><div><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And here’s Gonzalez summoning from memory his terrible, life-changing encounter with death in Malacañang:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“The soldier fires, and I see Father knocked off his feet and flung a yard away, a perplexed look on his face, a half-smile playing on his lips. He has always been elegant—Father, that is—and he rights himself and like a leaf whose autumn has come, falls slowly, gently, gracefully to the ground…</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“I rush to where my Father is, cradle him in my arms, and he looks at me with those eyes of his that even in anger never stop smiling, and I see a wet, red spot on his necktie getting larger and larger and larger. ‘Help him,” I cry, “Help him.’</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Hands—I don’t know whose—pull Father out of my embrace but, to this day, I can feel his weight, his warmth, and his blood oozing out of him as he lay dying in my arms on the earth of his Malacañang.”</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="297" data-original-width="400" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixIP_x7hPQI43MumKAZHg2Hx6wT1FDgg4g9jrdXeyoHH4Q5KG9FYBqQZWEY7AQrHXW-Jisaeey_OilsY_vzq1SpYCx-buKkhj6UmAFHDJ2KDlr87RxYhwZycyyLYkFZuc61qghv48ejFtOW7iIzDfpgpT-wAgxFPo-p2NjcsJD-dbtsO3j8yihqBUsiNI/w537-h398/Gonzalez-MacapagalPhoto_small%5B1%5D.jpg" width="537" /></div><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Gonzalez as press secretary to Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal, early 1960s</b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Many years after his father’s death, Raul Gonzalez was to become a non-elective Malacañang resident again—if only on a day-job basis—when he was appointed press secretary by President Diosdado Macapagal. After Macapagal gave way to Ferdinand Marcos as the new official Malacañang tenant in 1965, Gonzalez worked with the private sector and wrote off and on as an opinion columnist for some Metro Manila broadsheets. In 1986, under the government of then Malacañang tenant President Corazon Aquino, Gonzalez was named GSIS vice president for public relations, a position he held until 1998 under the Malacañang tenancy of President Fidel Ramos.</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Insights from the corridors of power</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">His having walked and worked in the corridors of political power gave Gonzales deep, unparalleled insights about the workings of government. Listen to his philosophical rant in his newspaper column in 1995 about the inefficiency of government:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Indeed, a lean bureaucracy is a contradiction in terms, as oxymoronic as military intelligence…Thus, where private industry, which is motivated 95 percent of the time by the desire for profit, tries to make do with as small a complement of personnel as it can get by, the government, which is motivated 100 percent of the time by the desire for power, tries to make out with as large a bureaucracy as it can get away with.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Private industry will make one man perform 10 different tasks, but government will make 10 men perform one and the same task. Put another way, private industry fills a job so that it may be done; government creates a job so that it can be filled. Or better yet, private industry will fill a job only when it is necessary for the purpose; whereas government will create a job because it is necessary to its purpose.”</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">A keen eye for high achievers</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Gonzalez had a keen, discriminating eye for high achievers among people—particularly for young student writers in that often awkward, self-conscious stage of growing their creative wings</span><span>3</span><span>, but even for the adult high achievers who had already proven their executive and leadership mettle by winning the tenancy of Malacañang itself. Here, for example, is his recollection of President Fidel Ramos in mid-1996 after the latter’s round of golf at Malacañang Park:</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“He still has a wide-eyed reverence for excellence, especially athletic excellence. He looked at [German ace golfer Bernhard] Langer with a respect I hardly see him accord other men; the same look he gives Luisito Espinosa, Elma Muros, Robert Jaworkski</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span><span style="font-size: medium;">.“He takes a child-like delight in leaving things looking better than when he found them. He couldn’t stop talking about the improvements he had worked in the park and the place itself. ‘You grew up here,’ he said. ‘Come more often and take a longer, closer look at what I have done.’”</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="265" data-original-width="400" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzrRoPlAhY1jm_RAXA1O_gWAkwybJdeZi6_UJXERCgVVwvMfNHQIACrmkNhFR902Y16hp3eRoNmzc_xAQBTyckEeutObraqnQHamF_EoTJX2LhbyqpZSg2hcZAyKvaSqdMV6CMjQ-HQxz5NETo1xjcR07JCanIiy2g8zbL9wjTwH5FR0lyv_exNFTK4I4/w545-h361/Gonzalez-RamosPhoto_small%5B1%5D.jpg" width="545" /></span></div><p style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-size: large;">Gonzalez with former Philippine President Fidel Ramos during the <br />launching</b><b style="font-size: large;">of <i>My Malacañang</i> in Manila, November 5, 2009</b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But the usually mild and soft-spoken Gonzalez could also be savagely indignant and bitingly sarcastic with his prose, although often in high magisterial style. Here’s what he wrote in his 1995 newspaper opinion column about popular Philippine comedian Dolphy’s response to his fans who were then egging him to take a stab at high public office:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>“Paano kung manalo ako?</i> [What if I win the election?]</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“The question Dolphy asked himself is a question no one who aspires to an elective office should fail to ask himself, preferably as soon as the political bug bites and even before the itch to run develops: Paano kung manalo ako? It is not that an honest reply to this question may ensure that our government will not be run by dogs—worse yet, by curs—that got lucky and caught a car. That is simply being patriotic. It is, rather, that Dolphy’s question may stop people less knowledgeable or less honest about themselves than Dolphy from spending the next six years of their lives scurrying from one rat hole to another in the effort to keep their nincompoopery concealed, private, and known only to their mothers. That is surely being kind to oneself.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When giving vent to his opinions, Gonzalez could throw caution to the winds, too—even get stylishly snarky or snarkily stylish—as in this passage from his August 1990 newspaper column defending President Cory Aquino when the media tide began to wash against her:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“…it takes only one word to explain…why a media contract is out on Cory, why there’s a policy of againstness on her, why the tales against her are bound to grow taller, wilder, dirtier. The word is: Fear. Fear that she just might run. And if she does, <i>paano naman kami?</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“There’s no one in the Opposition now who can beat Cory—and all the polls show it; this despite the ravings and rantings dutifully, and sometimes gratuitously, reported by media about how uninspired her leadership is, how inept her Cabinet members are, how gosh-awful her giggling last July 16 was…”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Flesh-and-blood sketches of people in power</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Except for a few touching, sometimes overly sentimental vignettes about Gonzalez’s personal and family life in the latter part of the essay collection, <i>My Malacañang</i> largely devotes itself to perceptive, flesh-and-blood sketches of the men and women—and their surrogates as well—who had tenanted Malacanang over the past 74 years. He weaves quick, arresting tapestries of their virtues, foibles, and quirks: the imperious Manuel Quezon, “with his short fuse and low boiling point,” unleashing his trademark <i>“puñetas”</i> on those who dared cross him; Carlos Garcia, “the most placid and serene president,” who was probably made so “by composing <i>‘balak,’</i> Boholano poetry, and playing chess to the exclusion of anything else”; Diosdado Macapagal, with his almost mystical respect for the Filipino, but who “lacked the charm to convince the people of the sincerity of his intentions,” thus leading to his political undoing; Ferdinand Marcos, “too calculating to allow himself the luxury of genuine anger” and one who “never uttered any word, made any gesture, showed any expression that had no conscious purpose”; Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, possessing “considerable charms,” but with a temper “hair-trigger in its sensitivity and thermonuclear in its explosiveness”; Cory Aquino with her Noah-nesque kind of political leadership, “unshakable in her faith that everything depends on God”; and Joseph Estrada, whom he likened to the Biblical Samson, “a huge man with a big heart and no guile at all, [who] preferred the simple pleasures and the merry company of commoners.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here, indeed, is the essential Raul Gonzalez, an astute observer writing with the confident, sure-footed voice of a consummate English-language stylist. His singular experience of having been the longest-staying non-elective resident of Malacañang had given him a ringside seat to recent Philippine history and contemporary events. And many of his essays in <i>My Malacañang</i> sparkle in his highly engaging narrative and expository style, some even rising to the level of great, unforgettable prose, as in this vaulting passage about the Filipino mentality of <i>“puede na”</i>:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Name me, show me any bug in the systems we employ, any defect in the goods we produce, any deficiency in the service we render, any blemish in the leaders we choose, any kink in the armor we don, any fly in the ointment we prepare, any flaw in the way we think, comprehend, decide, act—and, believe you me once more, it can be traced to how easily either these two phrases—<i>puede na</i> or <i>puede pa</i>—comes to the Pinoy lips and moves the Pinoy mind…</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“<i>Puede na</i> I blame as the culprit for the mediocrity that the Filipino has become. It is what has held us back as a people despite the agility of our mind, its inventiveness, its thrusting nature; despite the beauty and bounty of our land; despite so many good starts; despite the fact that we have always been pathfinders and trailblazers, first in many things—to drive out our colonizers, to gain political independence, to absorb the ways of the West.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Truly, Raul Gonzalez’s 65 essays in the 320-page book make <i>My Malacañang</i> not only a highly evocative and compelling set of cautionary tales about life and politics in the Philippines but also superb, instructive reading for students of style and rhetoric in English. <i>(2010)</i><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">-----------------</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Copyright © 2010 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information on reprints, please send e-mail to the author at j8carillo@yahoo.com.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span><span style="font-size: medium;">The succeeding Philippine Presidents after Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo--Benigno Aquino III, Rodrigo Duterte, and the incumbent Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Jose P. Laurel </span><span>was president of the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation from 1942 to </span><span>1945 but, based on Raul Gonzalez’s first-hand account in </span><i>My Malacañang</i><span>, Laurel never took up residence in the palace, preferring to always sleep in in his house in <span> </span>Peñafrancia St. in Paco, Manila.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span><span style="font-size: medium;">Raul S. Gonzalez the writer and communications executive is not the same Raul M. <span> </span>Gonzales, the former Philippine justice secretary.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">3</span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>From the late 1960s up to the mid-1970s, Raul S. Gonzalez was adviser of the college <span> </span>student newspaper of the University of the East, the </span><i>Dawn</i><span>, with a circulation that grew to <span> </span>over 65,000 copies weekly.</span></span></p><p><span face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="background-color: #e7eaef; font-size: x-small;">4</span><span style="background-color: #e7eaef; font-size: medium;">Luisito Espinosa, Elma Muros, Robert Jaworkski were at the time the leading Filipino <span> <span> a</span></span>thletes in professional boxing, running, and basketball, respectively.</span></span></p><div><b style="font-size: large;">RELATED READING:</b></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;">To refresh the memories of the Filipino electorate, check out the list of 15 Philippine Presidents (and their qualifications and fitness for public office) since the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935. Click this link to Wikipedia: <br />https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Philippines</span></p><p><b style="font-size: large;">POSTSCRIPT: </b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Former journalist and Philippine Press Secretary Raul S. Gonzalez, the author of <i>My Malacañang</i>, died on May 15, 2013 at Medical City in Pasig City, Metro Manila, after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.</span></p></div>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-82806186231669654922024-03-06T06:43:00.000-08:002024-03-06T06:49:03.427-08:00RETROSPECTIVE TO A 2003 PERSONAL ESSAY<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">The Quixotic Quest for Good Teachers</span></b><br /><b><span style="font-size: medium;">By Jose A. Carillo</span></b></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span>P</span></b><span>ublic-school teachers are comparatively the most productive professionals a nation can have on a continuing basis. In a whole lifetime of teaching, where a teacher handles, say, five sections of 60 pupils each every school year during a 40-year career span, she helps educate something like 12,000 pupils and nudges them a grade or year closer to becoming productive professionals themselves. Of course, nine other teachers have to work with her to achieve that, so the country’s current public teaching force of 327,000, if just trained and motivated to do a superb job, can assure the Philippines with something like 98,100,000 capable high school graduates every 10-year cycle and a total of 392,400,000 graduates within the teacher’s 40-year career span—more than enough to replace all of the undesirable products of the previous half century’s half-baked and largely misdirected teaching.</span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><img border="0" data-original-height="410" data-original-width="600" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTrumhfkE2gNibGxJjDvT5Cz3Dem903rKJyi4ZHLw_pjjqh_NeSDoMA1yRRyxiF8BKddssNItMfWWXzBdevJik9T_Q-guwwg8AoN3vIyfdnzx9-UD7niyv_JeDxAAwQWJiOV8XSJPNIUvGIuq3J10rDeNzR4rWKvFoMyTWeEdNDKclRa0-KpSLXrYEAlg/w632-h434/Filipino-teacher_classroom-1A.png" width="632" /><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">IMAGE CREDIT: STEEMIT-BETA</span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">This visionary mathematics for our public school system performing at peak efficiency is probably too fancy, too idealistic, and too incendiary, and those with only a piddling understanding of mathematics really should not fret if they don’t get it. But the numbers are probably reasonably accurate and for real. They are as real as the fact that in a longer career span of probably 50 or 55 years, a good number of lawyers—the most glamorized and usually the most lucrative-earning professionals of all—probably will litigate only a few hundred cases that only serve to keep moneyed criminals and organized deceivers out of jail, work out schemes for maybe a dozen corporations to do gray-area or outright unethical things legally, or legislate laws that often only get our law enforcers in a perfect bind (like those that prevent them from evicting professional squatters without giving them a relocation site). </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">As to the medical doctor and the dentist and the engineer and the accountant and the journalist, it’s probably prudent to keep them out of this productivity equation. We may not avail of their services very often or deal with them directly, but when we do, they sure can alleviate suffering and give us comfort and reliable information—thus giving us peace of mind and helping make our lives demonstrably better.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">But before we hear again that righteous platitude about all professions being equally honorable (as if professional con artists and professional pyramiders and Ponzi schemers could be honorable), let’s go back to the baseline data about this country’s public school system. The Philippines, as already mentioned, currently has something like 327,000 elementary school teachers, with more than 80 percent of the country’s Department of Education budget of 106.5 billion Philippine pesos (US$2 billion) going to their salaries. And, in what seems to be a jolting surprise, a recent World Bank report says that Philippine public school teachers are among the best compensated in the world. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Based on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, according to the World Bank report, the starting salaries of Filipino teachers were much higher compared to those of most Asian, Latin American, and even some European Community countries. They were higher than Korea’s and matched only by Jordan’s. But then we should be very careful about these worldwide macro level comparisons. Too many inter-nation adjustments are brought to bear on their computations as to render them meaningless in real domestic terms.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Viewed more realistically at the micro level, the compensation for Philippine public school teachers boils down to a starting salary of about 11,000 Philippine pesos (US$208) a month.* This is lower than what a salaried janitor gets in the better-paying government corporations or private companies in urban areas. The even more shocking downside is that this entry-level salary for teachers stays practically at that level even after 15 years of service. In high-teacher-salary countries like Korea and Jordan, those entry-level salaries almost get doubled after 15 years by performance incentives and regular salary increases. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In contrast, for the backbreaking job the Philippine public teacher puts in, the system provides her absolutely no incentives or rewards at all. It plays a blind eye to the need to motivate her to teach well and to keep her in the profession. Worse, the World Bank study found, the Philippine public school system–in an unbelievable act of illogic–keeps the salary scales the same for both primary and secondary teachers even if the work and the required qualifications vastly differ. Indeed, after more than a century, the Philippine public education system is thus still ridiculously muddling through in managing its most important development resource.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">So, if we need better proof of why the teaching profession cannot attract the best and the brightest of the land, look no further. If we need better proof of why students would rather become lawyers in a nation already perilously awash with lawyers, or would rather lead lonely lives abroad working as machine-room engineers and nurses and physical therapists and housemaids, or would rather work as card dealers in the world’s casinos or as boilermen in the darkest recesses of ocean-going ships, it is this. If we need the smoking gun for why this country will forever be engaged in a quixotic quest for good teachers, and why it will forever be gripped by a vicious cycle of national incompetence and illogic and superstition, it is this. <i>(July 14, 2003)</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><i>This essay appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in</i> The Manila Times<i>, July 14, 2003 issue, © 2003 by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">------------------<br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">*I initially worried that the 2003 salary figures here for public school teachers would have grown so substantially today as to render this column seriously obsolete. However, my information is that the salary level of public teachers in the country has hardly changed all these years, making my observations in this column still essentially accurate and relevant.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-23437710027754898632024-02-20T16:00:00.000-08:002024-02-20T16:46:29.733-08:00THE NEED FOR AN ENGLISH STANDARD FOR OUR DICTIONARIES<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Looking More Closely at Our Dictionaries</span></b><br /><b><span style="font-size: medium;">By Jose A. Carillo</span></b></p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">S</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;">everal years ago, when I was still managing an English-language service, I chided one of my English-language tutors for insisting on using her 1980-vintage <i>Webster’s Desk Dictionary</i> as reference. The day before that, I had the 11th edition of <i>The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary</i> in compact disc loaded on the computers in our office, and had asked my staff to delete from their hard drives all old dictionaries, particularly the British-English ones—the venerable <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i> included. I had also asked my staff to put away all of their print copies of the <i>British-English Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture</i> and the <i>Collins Cobuild English Dictionary</i>, both of which had long ago been bought inadvertently for our use.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="383" data-original-width="256" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2XiBw9ywp1miP3G5HKlEOHDJOJMe2QZgU2-FyUxsngd0Kj9-z1wDuzHTcSfwJBZJ1WmtKThrSlSYhrw1sRnXHOUJegNZPNJDqbU72TF3pS5xf3prhyphenhyphenYDpIXdDYvL58SlWRy1Wuzp9FD5Z9Z2ejY-Qr2dhB5UFt9FaObKQ8oGQEDpEqPcTFEGsUhTYvg/s320/Merriam-Webster_11th-Edition_cover-1B.jpg" width="214" /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR6CyoKeYQ_pg79cpgQh2zk9PD4Bfb9bTKuNrsTxc1mopwUA11AvuBB49XfYw9Pta3oCTj6ipj_rVHy4Zi0bBR8r7Rww9gssE2Ti8zeoOypkQAcgKpe5L7DyKVBVvFGlYeXEQ9rY8jqAFb51q0qLqoIZRkrp_2aA5mYzYz3j40z9docXgUfcuUTs40gXA/s300/Cambridge-Dictionary_cover-1.png" style="clear: left; display: inline; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR6CyoKeYQ_pg79cpgQh2zk9PD4Bfb9bTKuNrsTxc1mopwUA11AvuBB49XfYw9Pta3oCTj6ipj_rVHy4Zi0bBR8r7Rww9gssE2Ti8zeoOypkQAcgKpe5L7DyKVBVvFGlYeXEQ9rY8jqAFb51q0qLqoIZRkrp_2aA5mYzYz3j40z9docXgUfcuUTs40gXA/s1600/Cambridge-Dictionary_cover-1.png" width="300" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaabTiQKppSHB-w2PyM5Nd19ESRrFe9SXRaDq9gpFIDRrNYlyijLCrPZqyM6YxWPmXDVKt93rDV_H00xqFT2y4F1c_qlJ1b_ME4YkYnWbgd46ztfDVst7ZtmhyIDmCOE64SOgz5kBWsLI4omLixIntsWQMbsY3Ye0YgeqRjUWqHCjmp8siS5GhdSqyGUg/s300/American-Heritage-Dictionary_cover-1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaabTiQKppSHB-w2PyM5Nd19ESRrFe9SXRaDq9gpFIDRrNYlyijLCrPZqyM6YxWPmXDVKt93rDV_H00xqFT2y4F1c_qlJ1b_ME4YkYnWbgd46ztfDVst7ZtmhyIDmCOE64SOgz5kBWsLI4omLixIntsWQMbsY3Ye0YgeqRjUWqHCjmp8siS5GhdSqyGUg/s1600/American-Heritage-Dictionary_cover-1.png" width="300" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-RGJJIKuwIMu_4OjHA-tqR_4EjNPmO-DuPT72MhfHPEj7-Fz71mgepjksLUdufns_gzzLZOu-A6nQ3m2vp2X8vLYoqqp2VvCWQUn3D99fHqUi31oakLTpHpRttAuRY33F4LjE81GhJwH0bgaTBNCHVenNeTFmTpEzlVYt8pv9HH0e1gL7ccbHVdW0_m4/s320/MacMillan-Dictionary-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="202" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-RGJJIKuwIMu_4OjHA-tqR_4EjNPmO-DuPT72MhfHPEj7-Fz71mgepjksLUdufns_gzzLZOu-A6nQ3m2vp2X8vLYoqqp2VvCWQUn3D99fHqUi31oakLTpHpRttAuRY33F4LjE81GhJwH0bgaTBNCHVenNeTFmTpEzlVYt8pv9HH0e1gL7ccbHVdW0_m4/s1600/MacMillan-Dictionary-1.jpg" width="202" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div> <p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">These acts may sound like that of an Anglo-hater gone mad, but I assure you that there was rhyme and reason to them--I wanted to thoroughly bring the small company’s English usage to the American English standard. I was therefore a bit miffed that one of my staff should cavalierly resist the standardization effort, claiming that she was more comfortable using her fading but trusted <i>Webster’s</i>. So, not entirely in jest, I gave her an ultimatum: keep that dictionary out of sight, or I would throw it into the dustbin myself.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">My reason for banning British-English dictionaries and outdated American-English dictionaries from our office was dictated not by a sudden anti-British feeling or spite for things old, but by a very pragmatic consideration: the business depended greatly on the consistency of our English grammar, form, and semantics with American English as the standard. We could ill afford even the slightest variation in the spellings, meanings, and usage of the language, in our understanding of its idioms, and in its punctuations, prepositions, and conjunctions.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhoR1_DymQY4RpujRQo4_6IxcBs4vhQQ6cvPOUfXlGFk7Cdy0Pp1_QiK1UavndNLPUBFaCwUmy414OyCoz0CtB5D8wvNqkiPZ0_nwXWK2UytzijZd1rUyaX9lXzTDUr24LiAJf1yhBPdkf2967xmK1nVtJb2XcTlPqX5cwrrPJvwug2-TlpsjDnH3YtRg/s372/Oxford-American-Dictionary-1F.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="291" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhoR1_DymQY4RpujRQo4_6IxcBs4vhQQ6cvPOUfXlGFk7Cdy0Pp1_QiK1UavndNLPUBFaCwUmy414OyCoz0CtB5D8wvNqkiPZ0_nwXWK2UytzijZd1rUyaX9lXzTDUr24LiAJf1yhBPdkf2967xmK1nVtJb2XcTlPqX5cwrrPJvwug2-TlpsjDnH3YtRg/s320/Oxford-American-Dictionary-1F.jpg" width="250" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5BbzuF1lGAd9VYhsYhFam4CnSxhT8TPY04gHyd8P5R15W6A3tsAPGWQ3Ur1Urx9VANUBiMSXEAfQ5znqjj6yQOqUhN8g_2BCNXWz7vgglxtJ0VNKNtEf4BYHBvC_VvHVGztuSn1R8F7iwi62VPk7wFet0BB1iytGjEzc0LpY9aR5HqOxWTw7exUYGrFk/s350/Longman-Dictionary_cover-1A.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5BbzuF1lGAd9VYhsYhFam4CnSxhT8TPY04gHyd8P5R15W6A3tsAPGWQ3Ur1Urx9VANUBiMSXEAfQ5znqjj6yQOqUhN8g_2BCNXWz7vgglxtJ0VNKNtEf4BYHBvC_VvHVGztuSn1R8F7iwi62VPk7wFet0BB1iytGjEzc0LpY9aR5HqOxWTw7exUYGrFk/s320/Longman-Dictionary_cover-1A.jpg" width="296" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It had become clear to me that our mixed use of British-English and American-English dictionaries had been responsible for not a few of our gaffes—some innocuous, some serious—like spelling the word “center” as “cen<i>tre</i>,” “check” as “che<i>que</i>,” and “aluminum” as “alu<i>minium</i>”; thinking of </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>“</span><span>corn” as “</span><i>grain</i><span>” instead of “</span><i>maize</i><span>”; using the wrong prepositions in sentences like “We live </span><i>in</i><span> a quiet street </span><i>in</i><span> the city and stay </span><i>in</i><span> a farm cottage </span><i>at</i><span> weekends” (that’s how the British say and write it, while Americans put it this way: “We live </span><i>on</i><span> a quiet street </span><i>in</i><span> the city and stay </span><i>in</i><span> a farm cottage </span><i>on</i><span> weekends”); and worse yet, using the wrong quotation marks and putting commas at the wrong places in quoted material.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">A few months back, in particular, when a new editor of ours made a final copyreading pass on a long manuscript, she methodically replaced all of the double quotes with single quotes and took out all of the commas inside them and put them outside the quotes, British-style, like this: ‘This was the title of Paul Zindel’s book, “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds”, and I thought it rather queer.’ Before that, the sentence used American-English punctuation, like this: “This was the title of Paul Zindel’s book, ‘The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,’ and I thought it rather queer.” We were already way past our deadline, so we had to undo her well-meaning but ruinous work in white-hot haste.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Using a dictionary in the wrong English standard could, in fact, not only wreak havoc on our English but trigger needless controversies as well. Once, when a Filipino-Canadian reader of my English-usage column in <i>The Manila Times</i> used the word “<i>miniscule</i>” in a letter that I quoted in that column, the newspaper’s editor in chief told me in good-humored ridicule that I was foisting the wrong spellings of English words on readers. “‘<i>Miniscule</i>’,” he said, “should be spelled ‘<i>minuscule</i>’—with a ‘u’ and not an ‘i’.” When I stood my ground, he opened the <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i> for me and for all of the other editors who were present to see. To my dismay, it confirmed “<i>minuscule</i>” as the official spelling, making only a passing reference to “<i>miniscule</i>” as a variant.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Checking the online <i>Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary</i> later, I discovered that it was even harsher on “<i>miniscule</i>”: “a common spelling of ‘<i>minuscule</i>’ that is not correct.” To my relief, though, the <i>American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language</i> accepts the variant without comment, and I also took comfort in my electronic <i>Merriam-Webster’s</i> assurance that while “<i>miniscule</i>” continues to be widely regarded as an error, it now commonly occurs in published writing.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Most of the English dictionaries we had on hand, of course, whether using the American or British English standard, were products of great scholarship, but in that former language business of mine, there was a screaming need for only one English standard and only one English-language authority. We simply had to be scrupulously consistent and current in our English, and it just so happened that in the Philippines and in many parts of Asia, <i>the standard for English is American English</i>. We really had no choice then but to begin to live up to that standard by getting a good, up-to-date American English dictionary—and that, I am happy to say, was precisely what I had done. <i>(circa 2005)<br />------------------</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in </i>The Manila Times <i>and subsequently appeared as Chapter 130 of my book </i>Give Your English the Winning Edge<i> published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-22830769686172245352024-02-12T22:09:00.000-08:002024-02-12T22:12:40.114-08:00INSTILLING LOGICAL THINKING EARLY AMONG OUR YOUNG PEOPLE<div class="separator"><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Teaching Our Children to Think Logically</span></b></p></div><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">By Jose A. Carillo</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;">N</span><span style="font-size: medium;">ot</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;"> that I ever entertained the notion that they couldn’t think very logically, but sometime in 2008, I casually asked my two school-age sons whether they had been formally taught logical thinking sometime in their studies. The elder, now 22 (he attended primary school in a leading sectarian university and is now in college taking information technology), said the only time it was taken up was in Grade IV—and only in passing in language arts (<i>“jumping into generalities is illogical”</i>); there was no further discussion of it ever after. The younger, now 14 and in Grade VII in another sectarian school, said he hadn’t heard the word “logic” in class ever; neither was it taught in Montessori School during his kinder. In short, except perhaps in a very few schools in parts unknown in the Philippines (and I’ll be grateful to know where they are), logical thinking is not formally taught to young children at all.</span><br /><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh194U2wsZWQa33HfaO6WHgYrmE2XJvzWIEF3YCrg4tVRJnbjaGJ-coykh9VJh7WHI-PRID87s5QT9uq_9FM0qy2ErRYVqPhqn3T5jRFYB2tXaalRnhpRiFBN9Hb0TpwpgwHQyCqoHBHW4BeUe_yyL3wT6dN8HB4og3zqjsovadHakAVgqVGZ4y_wStzMI/s411/LewisCarroll_reclining-1C.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="244" data-original-width="411" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh194U2wsZWQa33HfaO6WHgYrmE2XJvzWIEF3YCrg4tVRJnbjaGJ-coykh9VJh7WHI-PRID87s5QT9uq_9FM0qy2ErRYVqPhqn3T5jRFYB2tXaalRnhpRiFBN9Hb0TpwpgwHQyCqoHBHW4BeUe_yyL3wT6dN8HB4og3zqjsovadHakAVgqVGZ4y_wStzMI/w634-h376/LewisCarroll_reclining-1C.jpg" width="634" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="269" data-original-width="307" height="552" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi139s5hXrEPpRfD6PBrEIa0HUr99OoULSdgGsmmPJHxQkuIQU0y9Ag-f_tm0dTtW1p7YuCBohyphenhyphenS_Ae9aDrzlELIVE_H35HqYwhgBhZc3EaO-gJPyOuRuEecRjWdtZrc_TvMr1Qd1ZTBKT-BbHN-ASPeUl8BeXioy-tnpxL2TamMDLc4AWksxjE-f82P0Y/w629-h552/Alice-Symbolic-Logic-1A.jpg" width="629" /></div><p></p><p><span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">We can be sure, though, that our children are taught many other things our educators traditionally deem more important, such as religion and physical education and civics and ethics. On these the instruction—indoctrination is perhaps a better word—is forceful and intense, very successfully for the first two I must say, yet mostly middling for the other two. Formal instruction in logical thinking, however, is surreptitiously made to wait till first year college. It is, in fact, difficult not to suspect that many schools—particularly the sectarian ones—don’t really want to teach logical thinking to children at all, fearing perhaps that it could undermine the teaching of the major dogmas and beliefs they want to implant unchallenged in young minds.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Thus, by the time our young people enter college and take Logic 101, they could only look at the strange new discipline with great suspicion and distaste. Their mental armor of unthinking habit, religion, superstition, and wishful thinking is already well in place, so what’s the point of replacing it with a new one? Fortunately, some survive the unrelenting assaults on their rational thinking and get to understand how things in our world and in the known universe really work. They are the precious endangered few that keep our country’s tiny fires of rational thinking burning. But most of the children in our country, like most of our generation before them, develop mindsets with little capacity for critical thinking at all.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That our educational system is unable to teach us to think logically early enough is very much in evidence around us, resulting in too many fallacious behaviors among the populace. And based on some history readings that I have done lately, the situation in our country seems to be very much like what Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician and schoolteacher, saw in England toward the end of the 19th century—a situation that prompted him to write a book introducing elementary logic to children.</span></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="286" height="733" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkD2vf36a7T-S-z5aVyMlkoocxdwQAm6AzFs-AmIUL7bov6AXZitzyvH68mExrlIFwU_ldyNW1QkUs9IQ8BMoQA5ulT0L3YPmqgS8nTJ7WVQp34mmckGNqOLFAhbwz4amlkDmpqZ8Z8cdqgedq6FGn8f51ES3d4Pof4JhJiM5bGznWiOB_XSzLoPc691w/w559-h733/symbolic-logic_cover-1A.jpg" width="559" /></div><br /><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="273" height="876" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrXOFt3r61_M6LnfQU3ubPPxEMveyWRK2v2J5loTrSo0w7Ebs_9TP6KYU2m7kcF0qCbdkAmqAcODwkYhwp_JpsZa3QBh57BjvFC487yXYF2Ddvis5NQL-0g7PgihphNqvprtuPAxysgdSybKN0goVYXWotCU3QfyOxvT4r-6yIRuxu4_3a-AbI0SlEL2Q/w598-h876/LewisCarroll_completeworks-1.jpg" width="598" /></div><br /><span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Dodgson, who taught at Christ Church, Oxford, is, of course, better known as Lewis Carroll, the pen name he used for two enduring children’s books, <i>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</i> and <i>Through the Looking-Glass</i>. Although a clergyman, he had a passion for recreational mathematics, using whimsy and satire to show the illogical ways of English society in his time. Finally, in 1896, two years before his death, he published <i>Symbolic Logic</i>, formally setting out his ideas on how children could learn to think clearly and logically.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here’s what Carroll said in his introduction to the book: “Mental recreation is a thing that we all of us need for our mental health. <i>Symbolic Logic</i> will give you clearness of thought—the ability to see your way through a puzzle—the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form—and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Carroll made classical logic easy for children by expressing it through riddles, amusing problems, and mathematical puzzles. He made his riddles perplexing but thoroughly engaging exercises in semantics, which of course is the discipline upon which the basic foundations of logical thinking are built.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">How delightfully revolutionary it would be if our educators in the Philippines will take the same tack in reforming the thrusts of our schoolchildren’s </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>education</span><span>—</span><span>and the earlier, the better for our nation</span><span>’</span><span>s future! </span></span><i style="font-size: large;">(2008)</i></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">-------------------</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A.</i> <i>Carillo circa 2008 in</i> The Manila Times <i>and later appeared as Chapter 147 of the author’s book </i>Give Your English the Winning Edge, <i>© 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.</i></span></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-26950953918522230372024-02-04T16:00:00.000-08:002024-02-04T16:09:40.548-08:00DEMOCRACY'S VULNERABILITY TO ORGANIZED DECEPTION<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Caution in times of reasonable doubt</span></b><br /><b><span style="font-size: medium;">By Jose A. Carillo</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>T</b>here was a time when the spread of false information took a much slower and largely linear path. A jealous or enraged person concocts a lie against a perceived enemy, whispers the lie to a neighbor’s ear ostensibly in the strictest of confidence but certain that in no time at all, that neighbor will break that confidence and whisper the same lie to another neighbor, who, in turn, can be expected to ensure that the process gets repeated ad infinitum. The lie then acquires an attractive reality of its own. Still, there was a downside to the process. Word of mouth was relatively slow, so even the most resourceful prevaricator needed at least a few days or weeks to fan the tiny flame of a lie to a major conflagration.<br /><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="290" data-original-width="764" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEismb2LZ7FSXn8qc-tXqxK83QhEMAzZdYQt_1XS6PD-gWKen99RlkgEKJ_JqrCKbmwtZIma2ssG4lEjXKTM3kHo46y7Cnt75L8qCghVNtgLvQweU6Gy28w2VS_vBKyOySVYoeQRx86zT3qwTq9gKHeJytOeeK2VfyD0xT8zvoK9lIP4ySPFWUBjlfEuZhQ/w641-h242/disinformation_composite-1D.png" width="641" /></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Modern communications technology has changed all that. These days, radio and TV, the daily papers, landline and mobile telephony, e-mail, and now even the mechanisms of the law itself make disinformation as fast as blabbering a sound-bite over the broadcast networks, punching the “Send” key of a cellular phone or computer keyboard, or filing fabricated charges against one’s target in a fiscal’s office. Organized deception has become a thriving industry, ruthlessly exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of the very same mechanisms that make democracy possible.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This is clearly manifest in contemporary national election campaigns. Every seeker of public office is a prime target. Both the good and the bad are fair game for political demolition. Each of them—whether a true leader, visionary, zealot, crackpot, or nincompoop—is prey to the dangerous phenomenon described by the British psychologist Robert H. Thouless in his “Law of Certainty” (1953): <i>“If statements are made again and again in a confident manner, then their hearers will tend to believe them quite independently of their soundness and of the presence or absence of evidence for their truth.”</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Thouless has pinned down one fundamental flaw of the human psyche: its profound tendency to believe statements based on repetition instead of actual evidence. Of course, few would take pleasure in the notion that even the intelligent and more discerning among us can be so gullible, but other investigators have validated the “Law of Certainty” and have come up with even more disturbing corollaries: (1) The exposure effect, demonstrated by Borstein in 1989, which states that repeated exposure of people to a stimulus results in the enhancement of their attitude toward it; (2) The twin repetition-validity effect and the frequency-validity effect, established by Brown and Nix in 1996, the first confirming that belief in a supposed truth increases with repeated exposure to it, and the second, that the rated truth of a stimulus is determined by how often it is repeated; and (3) The truth effect, demonstrated by Schwartz in 1982, which states that when messages of questionable truth value are repeated, their repetition tends to move their truth-value ratings toward the truer end of the scale.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The “Law of Certainty” and its corollaries are, of course, the principal tools of ideologues, religious extremists, and political propagandists in foisting untruths in the minds of their targets. They know that by sheer repetition, the feeble resistance of rationality soon caves in and crumbles. This is why in this election campaign season, practically all of the communication channels in our midst are bristling with deceptive messages. Their financiers and practitioners have no time to lose and everything to gain, and can take comfort in the fact that the effort costs so little and that the laws against it are so weak and inutile.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now, the big question we have to ask ourselves is this: Shall we be sitting ducks to these blatant deceptions? What is our defense against the syndicated lie and half-truth? Thouless gave us what I think is a sound course of action: be thoughtful and skeptical, and adopt a position of caution when there’s reasonable cause for doubt about a particular assertion. In plainer terms, we should never, ever make a fool of ourselves by taking scurrilous political messages at their face value.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So the next time we see a derogatory blind item in the papers, a slanderous e-mail in our electronic mailbox, or a poison text message on our cellular phone, we should not honor it even with a single thought. We should resist the temptation to pass it on. We should stop it on its tracks by skipping it or by zapping it with the “Delete” button. That’s the only way we can run the character assassins out of business. If we don’t, who knows, they just might succeed in getting us to elect people who will send this country further down the road to perdition.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in </i>The Manila Times<i>, March 27, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-22987781535972553622024-01-24T19:37:00.000-08:002024-01-24T19:37:09.616-08:00THE WEB AS OUR VERITABLE PASSPORT TO THE WORLD<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Waltzing on the Web: A Retrospective<br /></span></b><b><span style="font-size: medium;">By Jose A. Carillo<br /><br /></span></b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="701" height="343" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3cscrDGuy-flbbYTvr2C-K3sGEDHn7oSNPekaCAcmdHigQbNEU4jjQpANPe4KswshA32_owPDlfCdYmwGbCVTDnEnAo3VWOkX4xaF1343sk_WyzmaW7cPOEaJ1TxrKJmP3QvyOOazizybjob-UyuhpRf5zd7vDI3Alwyf6E5cDHTQ9zVjN91O9BDe4kk/w718-h343/myfairlady_webstylistic-1M.png" width="718" /></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">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 <i>My Fair Lady</i>, waltzing all by herself and wondering what brought her so much joy:</span><p></p><p><i><span style="font-size: large;">I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night<br />And still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings<br />And done a thousand things I’ve never done before.<br />I’ll never know what made it so exciting<br />Why all at once my heart took flight…</span></i></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcql3gMwp6VN1YH0ygr9MWnJbZtQT9KUmBoYk_zkZRxmK2L4KNUawrlxVBrxnA2-17UK4lyhT1ghCvuRNhRlRVsJN1-VT7xNODOHZGNTCRgk-v1UcGup1a_qA26qbH4xy8_tGjsvt_QTuruavE5XPrDhk54LOEmdHGv5ySm1HwzEW0D3W-smJBZGxG0po/s637/myfairlady_images-1B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="289" data-original-width="637" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcql3gMwp6VN1YH0ygr9MWnJbZtQT9KUmBoYk_zkZRxmK2L4KNUawrlxVBrxnA2-17UK4lyhT1ghCvuRNhRlRVsJN1-VT7xNODOHZGNTCRgk-v1UcGup1a_qA26qbH4xy8_tGjsvt_QTuruavE5XPrDhk54LOEmdHGv5ySm1HwzEW0D3W-smJBZGxG0po/w659-h298/myfairlady_images-1B.jpg" width="659" /></a></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">I used to snicker at Microsoft’s slogan, <i>“Where do you want to go today?”</i>, 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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)<br />--------------------</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><i>This essay first appeared in the English-usage column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in </i>The Manila Times <i>sometime in 2003, © 2003 by Manila Times Publishing. It subsequently appeared as Chapter 1 in Part IV, Section 1 of the author's book</i> English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language<i>, © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved</i>.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgu_l5JkekTgvDcN5ItQf5iYRhTyiR3GLGI8A2IZnMSWuet6DFzFqwSUBCSJqQyoOpuZZqGCwmRZlKUc0mpM2GO-TBw4clWX9NaA5Rcqr8FOmCvN5suid3wUx6iZgRGkC7_OkoW970Jt_6eUBjQG3n5Fits8b-zzDHQV7OSnHmxpPYefu49KxfQkyG0swU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="160" data-original-width="162" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgu_l5JkekTgvDcN5ItQf5iYRhTyiR3GLGI8A2IZnMSWuet6DFzFqwSUBCSJqQyoOpuZZqGCwmRZlKUc0mpM2GO-TBw4clWX9NaA5Rcqr8FOmCvN5suid3wUx6iZgRGkC7_OkoW970Jt_6eUBjQG3n5Fits8b-zzDHQV7OSnHmxpPYefu49KxfQkyG0swU" width="243" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">My Fair Lady </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">“</span><span style="font-size: medium;">I Could Have</span></b></div></span></b><span style="font-size: large; font-weight: bold;"><div style="text-align: center;">Danced All Night<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>”</b></span></span></div></span><span style="font-size: large;"><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Music Video)</i></div></span><span style="font-size: large;"><div style="text-align: center;">As sung by Marni Nixon, dubbing the singing</div></span><span style="font-size: large;"><div style="text-align: center;">voice of Audrey Hepburn, in the 1964 film</div></span><span style="font-size: large;"><div style="text-align: center;">adaptation of the musical</div></span><p></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-71080666407328086312024-01-19T20:59:00.000-08:002024-01-19T21:06:11.855-08:00WHEN RHETORIC GOES BEYOND BOUNDS<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span>Retrospective on the Dangers of Overstatement</span><br /></span><span><span style="font-size: large;">By Jose A. Carillo</span><br /><br /></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span>As a largely self-taught student of rhetoric, I watched and listened attentively to the homily that Sunday afternoon </span><span>in an in-house chapel of a Metro Manila mall.</span><span> 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.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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 <i>ethos</i>, or the appeal of a speaker’s character (<i>“Yes, I am a teacher, make no mistake about that.”</i>). Then, for <i>pathos</i>, 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 <i>logos</i> or appeal to reason as well.<br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVW8WrW2WWGVJ_0bt59xiVQWnB_gtKf1CV7znzj3mXqaZ5oEd7StWraFAlSONSHgAozuX2vmxfXfr3L11gJkm4Y3BQGCAqfPwkvDQO1DbPemxeniqIRvQoNpYKK0HmIhPTMZ9JhWtqXDtghAbH72hvSU9AF7epNhJgvPvwCO5c-rTh1eEN7aXx4giS3KY/s631/Filipino-priests_saying-mass-1B.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="435" data-original-width="631" height="435" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVW8WrW2WWGVJ_0bt59xiVQWnB_gtKf1CV7znzj3mXqaZ5oEd7StWraFAlSONSHgAozuX2vmxfXfr3L11gJkm4Y3BQGCAqfPwkvDQO1DbPemxeniqIRvQoNpYKK0HmIhPTMZ9JhWtqXDtghAbH72hvSU9AF7epNhJgvPvwCO5c-rTh1eEN7aXx4giS3KY/w631-h435/Filipino-priests_saying-mass-1B.png" width="631" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">THIS GENERIC HOLY MASS CELEBRATION PHOTO IS USED IN THIS ARTICLE <br />FOR REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT TO IDENTIFY </span></b><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">THE PRIEST</span></b><b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /> OR ANY OF HIS ASSISTANTS MENTIONED IN THE NARRATIVE</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br />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 <i>“pinakamatalik kong kaibigan”</i> (“my closest friend”)—then playfully asked everybody what each letter of the first word (<i>“</i><i>pinakamatalik</i></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>”</i><span>) 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: </span><i>“Give me the names of all the persons who perished in the Titanic.”</i><span> 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 </span><i>“Doe, a deer, a female deer/Ray, a drop of golden sun…”</i><span> in that delightful song of the Von Trapps in </span><i>The Sound of Music</i><span> movie. But the priest did it in the manner that people with nothing else to do will ask: </span></span><i style="font-size: x-large;">‘</i><i style="font-size: x-large;">Ano ang kahulugan ng bawat letra sa katagang ‘<b>San Miguel</b>’? Sirit na? Ang hina mo naman! E, di ‘(<b>S</b>)a (<b>a</b>)ming (<b>n</b>)ayon (<b>m</b>)ay </i><span style="font-size: large;"><i>(<b>i</b>)sang (<b>g</b>)inoo (<b>u</b>)minom (<b>e</b>)h (<b>l</b>)asing.”</i><span> (“In our village a gentleman got drunk.”)</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The rhetorical device he used certainly was not a <i>hyperbole</i>, or an extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis or effect, as in <i>“I ate so much that I must now be heavier than an elephant.”</i> It could not have been a <i>simile</i> or <i>metaphor</i> either, because no word was really compared or substituted with another. I had a fleeting feeling—soon gone—that it was some form of <i>synecdoche</i>, a variant of the metaphor that mentions the part to signify a whole, as in <i>“I need six hands”</i> to mean <i>“I need six people</i>.” In hindsight, I can see now that it was a weak fusion of <i>metonymy</i> and <i>prosopopoeia</i>, the first being a figure of speech that substitutes some suggestive word for what is actually meant, and the latter—also called <i>personification</i>—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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The words he assigned to each of the letters of the word <i>“pinakamatalik”</i> were so convoluted and are no longer relevant, so I will not dwell on them here. They formed the core of his <i>logos</i>, 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. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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</span><span style="font-size: large;"> this to his or her seatmate </span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>“Ikaw ang pinakamatalik kong kaibigan”</i> (“You are my closest friend”). He sternly badgered the listeners until he was satisfied that their collective voice was loud enough.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">That was where, I think, the logic of his <i>logos</i> snapped; the liberties he took with the language simply became too embarrassing. Perhaps <i>“Ikaw ay aking kaibigan”</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In his classic book,<i> Rhetoric</i>, 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: <b>“The links in the chain must be few.”</b> 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.</span></p><p><span><span style="font-size: medium;">*At that time he looked like he was somewhere between his mid-30s or early-40s.</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">-------------</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in </i>The Manila Times<i> circa 2003 and subsequently appeared in his book </i>English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language<i>, ©2004 by Jose A. Carillo. © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-85528957505309992202024-01-11T03:03:00.000-08:002024-01-11T03:06:10.620-08:00GIVE DEPTH AND MORE LIFE TO YOUR WRITING<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Playing Boldly with English Sentences</span></b><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;">A Personal Critique by Jose A. Carillo<br />of Lucille Vaughhan Payne's <i>The Lively Art of Writing</i></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />One of the most lucid and delightful books I’ve read about writing is Lucille Vaughan Payne’s <i>The Lively Art of Writing</i>. 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: <i><b>it’s all a matter of developing a basic idea</b></i>. 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>“I’m in love and I don’t know what to do.”</i> The righteous anger that a manager feels when a subordinate violates a time-honored corporate rule usually culminates in two words: <i>“You’re fired!”</i> And the feeling of certainty of a religious convert usually gets affirmed in these words: <i>“I believe.”</i> They are all that simple.<br /><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNkuwxnsD0nPwLTfo-VRhzVniHopvZRV8tndVI4RmjXTnpS9PF1S7krHxMaxnx31BiX-cMmUucCkw12C_JKzoE_krTTJ8gsG5hbXzdQDEAAwCsC7fmsSXdjEHNA2fUkNQ8HZ1r7e8fsB1JoNe-c166BO5P7QGN24d4JzjpIJRXEkhK6UH3vo_y4XgIJdw/s790/lively-art-of-writing_three%20covers-1C1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="418" data-original-width="790" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNkuwxnsD0nPwLTfo-VRhzVniHopvZRV8tndVI4RmjXTnpS9PF1S7krHxMaxnx31BiX-cMmUucCkw12C_JKzoE_krTTJ8gsG5hbXzdQDEAAwCsC7fmsSXdjEHNA2fUkNQ8HZ1r7e8fsB1JoNe-c166BO5P7QGN24d4JzjpIJRXEkhK6UH3vo_y4XgIJdw/w651-h344/lively-art-of-writing_three%20covers-1C1.jpg" width="651" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">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. <i>Who are involved?</i> <i>Why? Where? When? How? And so what?</i> 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.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Building those sentences can actually get much easier once we understand clearly that any sentence falls under either of three patterns: <i>loose sentence</i>, <i>periodic sentence</i>, or <i>combination sentence</i>. As delightfully discussed by Ms. Vaughan Payne in her book, every sentence begins with a basic idea or statement: <i>“The doves flew.”</i> <i>“Ana lost her temper.”</i> <i>“The manager burst into laughter.”</i> It is how we build structures upon these basic ideas that determines how good a writer or speaker we are.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We come up with a <i>loose sentence</i> every time we add a string of details to the tail end of a basic statement: “The doves flew, <i>flapping their wings in the still air</i>, <i>breaking the morning stillness with their shrill cries</i>, <i>warning their kindred of the approach of the deadly hawks</i>.” On the other hand, we produce a <i>periodic sentence</i> when we place additional details before or inside the basic statement: “The imperturbable Ana, <i>ever the patient one</i>, <i>the girl who never got angry even with the worst provocation</i>, 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: “<i>The morose and demanding</i> manager, <i>with an ax to grind against anything and everything</i>, was so pleased with the quarterly sales <i>that he burst into laughter</i>, <i>the first time in so many years in his beleaguered company</i>.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">You must have already noticed that <i>periodic sentence structures usually expand the subject or verb</i>, while <i>loose structures expand the verb or object</i>. 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is, she says, the same kind of pause that occurs in conversations every day, as in these sentences: “My friend <i>[pause]</i> a Political Science graduate <i>[pause]</i> wants to run for town mayor.” “That volcano <i>[pause]</i> sheer and high as it is <i>[pause]</i> is not really that hard to climb.” “The school <i>[pause]</i> in keeping with tradition <i>[pause]</i> required graduates to wear togas and gowns.” “Annabelle <i>[pause]</i> grown tired of her boyfriend <i>[pause]</i> broke off with him last night.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">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 <i>listened</i>, <i>attentively at first</i>, <i>but distractedly and impatiently towards the end</i>.” “The soldiers <i>paused at the road junction</i>, <i>wearily scanning the horizon for jet bombers</i>, <i>fearfully spying the buildings for snipers</i>.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">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, <i>the human resources manager</i>.” “The newlyweds took the bus, <i>a rickety affair that perilously transported the mountainfolk and their produce to the nearest lowland town</i>.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">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. <i>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</i>.<br />----------------</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This personal essay first appeared in Jose Carillo's English-usage column in </i><b>The Manila Times</b> <i>and subsequently as Chapter 80 of his book </i><b>Give Your English the Winning Edge</b>,<i>© 2009 by <b>Manila Times Publishing Corp.</b> All rights reserved</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><b>The Lively Art of Writing</b> by <b>Lucille Vaughan Payne</b>, a 192-page paperback published by </span><span><b>Berkley</b> in</span><span> 1969, is sold by <b>Amazon.com</b> (https://www.amazon.com/Lively-Writing-Lucile-Vaughan-Payne/dp/0451627121).</span></span></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-39899955817443858062024-01-03T10:11:00.000-08:002024-01-03T10:11:34.128-08:00COMMUNICATING BETTER WITH OUR ENGLISH<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Getting rid of wordy beginnings for our writing</span><br /><br /></b></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="223" data-original-width="661" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKI0BjDMV4SlfEdA2G7tO8gXlMFjjWU6I19m6K6G_LWfZQlqazjj7NY2caX5AxGXVAHrti7eMDm-WGtX3YeHteDzGKgjWXg20Efpv1blu_PF3Jo6baMnQPTfUdydfGjWs5kG0KSajkcW7rT3M0_EpWanniJQnvh0CCa8pHHia91c2chYBAqObtvtqWY6w/w630-h213/no-clutter_composite-image-1A.jpg" width="630" /></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">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:</span><p></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“as regards,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“as to,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in view of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“the fact that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“due to the fact that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“what I believe is,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in my opinion,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“the reason is,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“along the lines of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“at this point in time,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“for the purpose of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“cognizant of the fact that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in order to,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in spite of the fact that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“despite the fact that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in such a manner that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in the event that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“with respect to,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“on the basis of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“by means of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“on the part of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“relative to,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“such that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in connection with,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in the nature of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in relation to,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in case of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in terms of,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“to the extent that,”</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in the course of,” and</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“in acknowledgment of the fact that.”<br /><br /></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Let’s engage right now some of these roundabout phrases to show how we can jettison them right after with more sensible, concise equivalents. <b>Awkward:</b> “<i>As regards your request,</i> please be advised that it has been approved.” <b>Forthright:</b> “Your request has been approved.” <b>Awkward:</b> “<i>For the purpose of paying off your loan,</i> we recommend selling your townhouse.” <b>Forthright:</b> “We recommend selling your townhouse to pay off your loan.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Awkward:</b> “<i>At this point in time,</i> it is not appropriate to debate old issues.” <b>Forthright:</b> “It is not appropriate now to debate old issues.” <b>Awkward:</b> “<i>In the course</i> of the trip, we encountered major delays.” <b>Forthright:</b> “We encountered major delays during the trip.” <b>Awkward:</b> “<i>In acknowledgement of the fact that</i> you returned the defective goods, we are sending you this refund check.” <b>Forthright:</b> “We are sending you this refund check for the defective goods that you returned.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Now let us deal with <b>the expletives</b>, 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Here are the expletive forms that we should consciously avoid in beginning our sentences:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>(1) “There” when used with any form of “be” as the main verb.</b> The expletive “there” moves the subject to a position after the verb, which as we know creates a weak, passive sentence. <b>Example:</b> “<i>There were five airborne squadrons that engaged the enemy troops.”</i> <b>Shorn of the expletive:</b> “<i>Five airborne squadrons engaged the enemy troops.”</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>(2) “That” and “whether” when they introduce noun clauses.</b> “That” does not do work within a noun clause; and when it begins a sentence, it often just creates a convoluted sentence structure. <b>Example:</b> <i>“That she closed the windows last night</i> is what Alicia said.” <b>Shorn of the expletive:</b> <i>“Alicia said she closed the windows last night.”</i> 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.” <b>Example:</b> <i>“Whether his battalion had surrendered is something the soldier wanted to know.”</i> <b>Shorn of the expletive:</b> <i>“The soldier wanted to know if his battalion had surrendered.”</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>(3) “As” when used in certain transitive verb sentence patterns to connect an object and objective complement.</b> Beginning with the expletive “as” forces the construction of a convoluted sentence. <b>Example:</b> <i>“</i><i>As a role model is what we think of her.”</i> <b>Shorn of the expletive:</b> <i>“We think of her as a role model.</i></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoE7wFA4HydB5DyRKG8pP7uqWwe3DcYjF2xvbwOgELk_UW5CzfzWox67wWkmwgnlD-hr4tzdFv1eh7L14BR3j2l_zsRy-9N-3gCRJ86xEEsNRut5o_DV-8MYJDROywdbp8SNDNWIEaKhWtvWlBrGM7P9eROzuhY9kGxleQtgV7uU0UbOBSTWQJAd1tPgM/s409/concise-sentence_alerts-1B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="277" data-original-width="409" height="383" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoE7wFA4HydB5DyRKG8pP7uqWwe3DcYjF2xvbwOgELk_UW5CzfzWox67wWkmwgnlD-hr4tzdFv1eh7L14BR3j2l_zsRy-9N-3gCRJ86xEEsNRut5o_DV-8MYJDROywdbp8SNDNWIEaKhWtvWlBrGM7P9eROzuhY9kGxleQtgV7uU0UbOBSTWQJAd1tPgM/w565-h383/concise-sentence_alerts-1B.jpg" width="565" /></span></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">T<i>his 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 </i>The Manila Times<i>, © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">-------------</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>*</b>Recall that <b>“fanboy”</b> is the acronym for <b>the seven basic coordinating conjunctions</b>, using the first letters of <b>“for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so.”</b></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-38436406540684970172023-12-27T05:48:00.000-08:002023-12-27T07:02:21.300-08:00GUIDEPOSTS FOR CHOOSING BETWEEN THE FULL INFINITIVE, BARE OR ZERO INFINITIVE, AND GERUND IN CONSTRUCTING SENTENCES<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part I - When to use full infinitives, bare infinitives, or gerunds<br /></span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">A</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;">n Iran-based English teacher asked me by e-mail sometime in 2019 how to answer this multiple-choice test question: “Peter, you have been working so hard this year. I am sure you must be tired. My suggestion for you is <b>(take, to take, taking)</b> some time off.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXsPKxvluYz_Dnb9jAYGSHoDcMY0XNRuZ1j-e5nPi0V3Adu1TwBTgkon-sHO5IP1zYFVjJ6ogezxmzX7sbLWZdV6cbP1bXToCXbfd_9obOmrQ4a6Jvhb5PufwXtOFPVtdOUjkOZr9mSCUegSVxe6jYdYH9TWdQPXGXu-EcgXFbYgIbwpx9ZIZlR1U-86U/s374/gerund-or-infinitive_circular-images-1A4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="269" data-original-width="374" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXsPKxvluYz_Dnb9jAYGSHoDcMY0XNRuZ1j-e5nPi0V3Adu1TwBTgkon-sHO5IP1zYFVjJ6ogezxmzX7sbLWZdV6cbP1bXToCXbfd_9obOmrQ4a6Jvhb5PufwXtOFPVtdOUjkOZr9mSCUegSVxe6jYdYH9TWdQPXGXu-EcgXFbYgIbwpx9ZIZlR1U-86U/w604-h434/gerund-or-infinitive_circular-images-1A4.png" width="604" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="text-align: center;"> IMAGE CREDIT: CALLANSCHOOL.INFO</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />The three answer choices she provided are the <b>bare or zero infinitive “take,”</b> <b>the full infinitive “to take,”</b> and <b>the gerund “taking.”</b> I thus replied to Ms. Farhad H. that with a fair knowledge of these grammar forms and based on how the third sentence sounds, the correct answer is the full infinitive </span><b style="font-size: large;">“</b><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>to take</b></span><b style="font-size: large;">”</b><span style="font-size: medium;">: “My suggestion for you is <b>to take</b> some time off.”<br /></span><span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">The much tougher question though is why the answer should be <b>“to take”</b> and not <b>“take”</b> or <b>“taking.”</b> To answer it correctly, we need to review the infinitives and gerunds as <b>verbals</b>, which are words that combine the characteristics of a verb and a noun.</span></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="464" data-original-width="391" height="636" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV_PdkGY_uXN2fI_4pcet0zTMTUXHJGW8nEWtA0A8xJdc7q8OWzDaC5JAI4DpPPCUahyphenhyphenWQ74waRR_BsH9TRLQ2o26fwqYwz_Us6ycD93uwhgcan_eEAK0QGBpVrEr1iQXx_fyvG98cpIt2-TMsBZhZw-ZXlciY9Emuie6i8i8mZqIfHEkuzv487LcT65Q/w536-h636/full-infinitive_usage-1A2.png" width="536" /></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">IMAGE CREDIT: ENGLISHSTUDYPAGE.COM</p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Recall that <b>a full infinitive has the form “to + base form of the verb,”</b> as in <b>the full infinitive “to rest”</b> in the sentence “The tired watchman decided <b>to rest</b>,”; where <b>“to rest” is the direct object (the receiver of the action)</b> of t<b>he operative verb “decided.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgum6-_PGbSuPOfaBO3jVLH5Y8bBWM23y21naZM2biuvAbK4PTstlLuO_8AuYf7KggqoDtgqoXKrKGDOnPiFv1DgiZw7udxJjCejU8auPscMd-HUX02mhHnoX7-jsjkzEvfSMzHvEhN91ZsfaHl845yL4UFYJc2Ni3EH9894WcdmUeLUUkW6SgMfi2Rwlo/s493/zero-or-bare-infinitive_image-1A1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="493" data-original-width="431" height="638" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgum6-_PGbSuPOfaBO3jVLH5Y8bBWM23y21naZM2biuvAbK4PTstlLuO_8AuYf7KggqoDtgqoXKrKGDOnPiFv1DgiZw7udxJjCejU8auPscMd-HUX02mhHnoX7-jsjkzEvfSMzHvEhN91ZsfaHl845yL4UFYJc2Ni3EH9894WcdmUeLUUkW6SgMfi2Rwlo/w558-h638/zero-or-bare-infinitive_image-1A1.png" width="558" /></a></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">IMAGE CREDIT: 7ESL.COM</p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">On the other hand, <b>a bare or zero infinitive</b> is an infinitive that, to work properly (or at the very least smoothly), <b>needs to drop the function word “to” and use only the verb’s base form, as in “rest”</b> in “We saw the watchman <b>rest</b> for a while.” In this sentence, t<b>he bare infinitive “rest” is the direct object of the verb “saw.”</b> (Using the full infinitive “to rest” here sounds awkward and iffy, “We saw the watchman <b>to rest</b> for a while ” so it's obviously couldn't be a corect answer).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">As to <b>a gerund</b>, recall that<b> it’s a form of the verb that ends in “-ing” to become a noun, as in the gerund “resting”</b> in “<b>Resting</b> recharged the watchman for the rest of his shift.” In that sentence, <b>the gerund “resting” is the subject</b>, a role that its full infinitive equivalent—although also a noun form—plays very awkwardly in this particular instance: “<b>To rest</b> recharged the watchman for the rest of his shift.”<br /><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="485" height="442" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIjq4K8KplspJnz9lahEf_WoKAr5a4-Rhs06wZYOEguc_dhXI_ls_58oFNHWlYQhQ8It451VZJAZGiSAryXPAVTUxsxpMFvc4grzOq6VO6k0dn-Gh6_nJeHeaZmjcsEA9cdiX_TJBvXylzrYZ5HnviNoBoI07Q89iAMvdYHmgBy5bqeOwre8tKxVumWoE/w589-h442/gerunds-as-verbals_examples-1A4.png" width="589" /></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDESHARE.COM</p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This grammar complication in choosing the correct verbal brings us to <b>the four general ground rules for using an infinitive or gerund</b> in particular sentence constructions:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>1. Use the infinitive as subject to denote potential</b>, as in “<b>To forgive</b> is a good thing.” On the other hand, <b>use the gerund to denote actuality or fact</b>, as in “<b>Forgiving</b> made her feel better.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>2. Use the full infinitive as a complement or object to denote future ideas and plans</b>, as in “His life-goal is <b>to teach</b>.” On the other hand, <b>use the gerund when denoting acts done or ended</b>, as in “She chose <b>teaching</b>.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>3. Use the full infinitive as a complement for single action</b>, as in “He took a leave <b>to travel</b>,” and <b>likewise for repeated action</b>, as in “Evenings we come here <b>to rest</b>.” On the other hand, <b>use the gerund for ongoing action</b>, as in “The fashion model finds <b>resting</b> necessary after every shoot.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>4. Use the full infinitive as object for a request</b>, as in “He asked me <b>to wait</b>,” <b>for instruction</b>, as in “She instructed me <b>to rehearse</b>,” and <b>causation</b>, as in “He was forced <b>to resign</b>.” <b>On the other hand, use the gerund for attitude</b>, as in “She thinks <b>teaching</b> is a noble profession,” and <b>for unplanned action</b>, as in “She found <b>jogging</b> to her liking.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">On top of these ground rules, <b>we must firmly keep in mind that the primary basis for choosing an infinitive or gerund is the specific operative verb of the sentence</b>. We also need to recognize that some operative verbs can take full or bare infinitives, others can take gerunds, and the rest can take both. </span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In Part II, we’ll focus on the choice between full infinitives and bare infinitives. </span><i style="font-size: large;">(June 27, 2019)<br /><br /></i></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part II - When to use full infinitives, bare infinitives, or gerunds</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In Part I, to answer a question from an Iran-based English teacher, I started laying out the basis for why the full infinitive “to take” is the correct answer in this multiple-choice statement: “Peter, you have been working so hard this year. I am sure you must be tired. My suggestion for you is <b>(take, to take, taking)</b> some time off.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">After a quick review of <b>full infinitives, bare (zero) infinitives, and gerunds—they are the so-called verbals, or words that combine the characteristics of verb and noun</b>—I presented four general rules for choosing between infinitives and gerunds for particular sentence constructions. This time I’ll focus on the choice between full infinitives and bare infinitives when used as subject, object, or complement of a sentence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There are really no hard-and-fast rules for choosing the full infinitive or the bare infinitive. <b>While </b></span><b style="font-size: large;">the primary determinant for the choice is the operative verb and syntax of the sentence</b><span><b><span style="font-size: large;">, </span><span style="font-size: medium;">we’ll only find out which of the two infinitive forms works—or at least works better—by first using the full infinitive as default</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;">. When it doesn’t work, simply use the bare infinitive.</span><br /><br /></span></p><p><span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span><a href="http://josecarilloforum.com/imgs/full-infinitive-versus-bare-infinitive_composite-image-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="401" data-original-width="685" height="401" src="http://josecarilloforum.com/imgs/full-infinitive-versus-bare-infinitive_composite-image-1A.png" width="685" /></a></span></div><span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (LEFT IMAGE)</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">: ENGLISHSTUDYPAGE.COM </span><span style="font-size: small;">(RIGHT IMAGE) </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">PINTEREST.COM </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>CHOOSING BETWEEN THE FULL INFINITIVE AND THE BARE OR ZERO INFINITIVE</b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>The full infinitive is, of course, the only choice when it’s the subject of the sentence</b>, as in “<b>To give up</b> isn’t an option at this time.” The bare infinitive form won’t work as it reduces the full infinitive to a verb phrase: “<b>Give up</b> isn’t an option at this time.” (Take note tthough that <b>the gerund form, “giving up,” works just fine for that sentence</b>: “<b>Giving up</b> iisn’t an option at this time.”)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Now let’s look at particular grammatical and syntax situations when using the bare infinitive becomes a must:</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>1. Use a bare infinitive or bare infinitive phrase when it’s preceded by the adverbs “rather,” “better,” and “had better” or by the prepositions “except,” “but,” “save” (in the sense of “except”), and “than.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Examples: “She would rather <b>stay single</b> than marry that obnoxious suitor.” “With her deceitful ways, you <b>had better reject her overtures</b> to team up with you.” “They did everything <b>except beg</b>.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The two sentences become faulty-sounding when the full infinitive is used:</b> “She would rather <b>to stay single than to marry</b> that obnoxious suitor.” “With her deceitful ways, you <b>had better to reject her overtures</b> to team up with you.” “They did everything <b>except to beg</b>.”)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>2. The verb auxiliaries “shall,” “should,” “will,” “would,” “may,” “might,” “can,” “could,” and “must” should always be followed by a bare infinitive:</b> “I shall <b>fire</b> those scalawags.” “We might <b>visit</b> next week.” “You must <b>investigate</b> right away.” (Faulty with the full infinitive: “I shall <b>to fire</b> those scalawags.” “We might <b>to visit</b> next week.” “You must <b>to investigate</b> right away.”)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>3. The object complement should be a bare infinitive when the operative verb followed by an object is a perception verb such as “see,” “feel,” “hear,” or “watch”:</b> “She <b>watched him do the job</b> and <b>saw him do it</b> well.” “We <b>heard him castigate</b> an erring general.” (Faulty with the full infinitive: “She <b>watched him to do the job</b> and s<b>aw him to do it well</b>.” “We <b>heard him to castigate</b> an erring general.”)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>4. The object complement should be a bare infinitive when the operative verb is the helping verb “make” or “let”:</b> “She always <b>makes me feel loved</b>.” (Faulty with the full infinitive: “She always <b>makes me to feel loved</b>.”) However, t<b>he helping verb “help” itself can take either a full infinitive or a bare infinitive as object complement.</b> Formal-sounding with the full infinitive: “She <b>helped them to mount the rebellion</b>.” Relaxed, informal-sounding with the bare infinitive: “She <b>helped them mount the rebellion</b>.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Again, as a rule, use the full infinitive as default to see if the sentence will work properly and sound right. Otherwise, use the bare infinitive.</b></span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This two-part essay appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the June 27, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><i style="font-size: large;"><br /></i></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-30231447686942260292023-12-21T17:57:00.000-08:002023-12-21T18:11:32.606-08:00A TIMELY READING FOR THIS HOLIDAY SEASON<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">The need to equate things solely on comparable attributes</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">For this year’s
Christmas Season, I couldn’t think of a better, more instructive, more
wide-ranging, and more intellectually stimulating article for Jose Carillo’s
Blogspot on the English language than “The need to equate things solely on
comparable attributes,” an essay that I wrote for my </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";">Manila Times<i> column way back on March 2, 2004. I trust
that you’ll find the subject as enlightening and as fascinating as when I was
researching and composing it 19 years and almost 9 months ago.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">I wish you and your loved ones a Truly Joyous Christmas and a Prosperous
and Safe New Year in 2024 and in the years beyond!</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><b style="font-size: xx-large;">I</b><span style="font-size: large;">n the business of language, the easiest thing to do is to either affirm the uniqueness of things or to highlight their differences. </span><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“Yes, he’s a magnificent brawler in the ring”</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"> or </span><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“True, he’s hopelessly incompetent as a public speaker”</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"> are such quick affirmations, and so are </span><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“Oh, my God, she’s beautiful!”</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"> and this timeworn metaphor on beauty, </span><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“It was the face that launched a thousand ships</span></b><span style="font-size: large;">.” The logic in contrasting things is likewise easy to grasp. For instance, the extreme comparatives in </span><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“The villain was uglier than the Devil himself”</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"> or </span><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“The aureole of the nuclear blast was brighter than a thousand suns”</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"> are immediately understandable because both of their referents—“the Devil” and our “sun”—are all-too-familiar symbols in our psyche.</span><br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVNEnG1nXsLbQ8VUcIt5gtZrDYZZ8D5fk_vzRR53wnt5_pEJxOsRzlcR_smiDJZlEwFI5qg-1STbEzPsSLazT-AKANgMC1oeaLDz3EAwUaaCl91hHdp0dPKepFnociild5lDvsNQpLk0VaasFgxKwwMRoTA1dlT7RubR3Ulr5LanVR7s0SB5iFnaqO7U4/s512/human-brain_incredible-equivalences-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="467" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVNEnG1nXsLbQ8VUcIt5gtZrDYZZ8D5fk_vzRR53wnt5_pEJxOsRzlcR_smiDJZlEwFI5qg-1STbEzPsSLazT-AKANgMC1oeaLDz3EAwUaaCl91hHdp0dPKepFnociild5lDvsNQpLk0VaasFgxKwwMRoTA1dlT7RubR3Ulr5LanVR7s0SB5iFnaqO7U4/w622-h467/human-brain_incredible-equivalences-1A.png" width="622" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Is the equation of comparable things in the statement above based </b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>solely on comparable attributes?*</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;">When it comes to declaring the equality of things, however, we stand on shakier ground. There simply are no hard-and-fast rules to stating perfect equivalence, particularly among intrinsically different things. For instance, even if we believed it to be true based on personal taste and experience, to say <b>“The mango is as delicious as the apple”</b> or <b>“Summers in Cebu are as restful as those in New Orleans”</b> is bound to make our readers or listeners scratch their heads in wonder. As the linguists will say, the <i>semantic polarities</i> of the two statements are suspect, perhaps altogether anomalous. This is because equating different things, as opposed to directly measuring, say, length with a meter stick or popularity with a Pulse Asia or Social Weather Stations survey, needs more discernment, a greater capacity for rational judgment, and a deeper knowledge of what the audience—our readers or listeners—know about things in general and about us.</span></div></div></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg1RvUyjbMnk3X-NVuNL8_wa4bXWPkhWr_-ra6qqlBtPy1J6DDNp5v71WtpBDjTppOXiuWTmdyFWIDrTsptNl1f3ZG7l1ZXmOpGgDw9UPKbo26Ihcj71-PrcBFxaWShQCxezmVaZ25dJALp__aPZuAMKqZtDh2lW9sM5L75P-vnlCPbCZyZhK4pJ__hr4/s331/three-apples-1B.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="331" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg1RvUyjbMnk3X-NVuNL8_wa4bXWPkhWr_-ra6qqlBtPy1J6DDNp5v71WtpBDjTppOXiuWTmdyFWIDrTsptNl1f3ZG7l1ZXmOpGgDw9UPKbo26Ihcj71-PrcBFxaWShQCxezmVaZ25dJALp__aPZuAMKqZtDh2lW9sM5L75P-vnlCPbCZyZhK4pJ__hr4/w391-h243/three-apples-1B.png" width="391" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">We are therefore well-advised to avoid the lure of what the linguists call <i>cross-polar anomalies </i>in prose, whether ours or those of others, and no matter how deceptively elegant and tempting they may look, sound, and feel. Cross-polar anomalies are those semantic constructions that seem logical on first blush, but often border on the meaningless and absurd, like these sentences: <b>“An economist is safer for the presidency than a corporate lawyer is dangerous.”</b> <b>“A former military officer is abler for public governance than an actor is unfit.”</b> <b>“Our patience for religious charlatans is longer than our tolerance for incompetent public officials is short.”</b> Somewhere in the deep recesses of such failed comparisons, or <i>faulty equatives </i>as the linguists call them, the truth that we thought we saw has been hopelessly lost in construction.<br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="247" data-original-width="427" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPWy20hKw0FjidoliR9lqHvTy5jlwsljhT18ori4qPWW6egsdWyGcI-VB-HUXIsB1BUD5bjTYJ_CmfsdJlsrntHCuzJ408gqOJ7SgdvcwR8W7lgx-rbmN0veGBFD06MauCo3AkdRelrN7ycXO9039zzPIrjJ6Cb1_ugYVjG4UbqQNYFU9A943u98eGgks/w595-h345/fruits_equivalence-1A.png" width="595" /></span></div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;">The general rule in equatives is that comparisons formed out of the so-called “positive” and “negative” pairs of adjectives are semantically anomalous. In the cross-polar constructions given in the preceding paragraph, for instance, these pairs of adjectives or noun phrases betray that anomaly: “safer”/“dangerous,” “abler”/“unfit,” and “longer patience”/“short tolerance.” All three are as absurd as the proverbial wrong equatives about the taste, texture, and nutritive value of apples and pears.</span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">How do we avoid such <i>conundrums</i>, which is the term linguists use for such intricate and difficult semantic problems that, from the layman’s standpoint, actually amount to vexing riddles? For practical purposes—and never mind what the metaphysicians and the political and religious spinmasters say—we should only go for equatives that respect the norms of logic and reason. This means that <i>we should only equate comparable things</i>, with the equation based solely on comparable attributes. The more useful equatives from our standpoint as laymen, in fact, are those that equate the absolute projections of two subjects on the same scale.</span><br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="257" data-original-width="568" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9LSCn8wUo4L9ZY5QzclHECGtJ-3F8FOfY7JwZYBqSs_1K6pCCXBfcZ3Ths432xhyQA2QM1kmqLqk1VPndTIXJQV35GRkoejrfP_S1S83lFC518M4tSV8txEQA9oHjP676rSWC4TyYp64HBE0esFMldIxQ0GYZTg703_EThvVYy3fahWdSXyDBqSaGUqA/w617-h279/singapore-waste_equivalences-1A.png" width="617" /></span></div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Here’s one sentence that meets that criterion: <b>“The depth of the ravine into which the wayward bus fell is as great as the height of a three-story building.”</b> Here, the two subjects being equated are “the depth of the ravine” and “the height of a three-story building,” and the common scale they are being measured against is length; the equation can be easily understood and accepted based on common sense and, for the cynic, verified by actual measurement with a meter stick. The same thing can be said of this other sentence, which focuses this time on area as a common scale: <b>“The land area of Egypt is practically as big as that of Bolivia, but the productivity of their soil is markedly different.”</b> (To the cynics, Egypt has 1,001,450 sq. km. to Bolivia’s 1,098,581.)</span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Once this concept of scalarity becomes second nature to us, we can be more ambitious in our equatives without fear of bungling them, as in this sentence: <b>“The meteor formed a huge and deep hole upon impact, a perfectly circular crevice as big as the small town of San Juan in Manila and as deep as the height of the Sears Tower in New York.”</b> That horrifying statement is fictitious, of course, but there can be no doubt about the authenticity and scalarity of its equatives. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the March 2, 2004 issue of </i>The Manila Times</span><i><span style="font-size: large;">, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</span><br /></i><span style="font-size: medium;">---------</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">*Although this illustration and its accompanying comparative statement are widely used in various references on the web, their original source has not been identified and found.</span></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-39872565514025107832023-12-11T23:20:00.000-08:002023-12-15T01:52:26.105-08:00STRATEGIES FOR WRITING AND SPEAKING BETTER ENGLISH<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">To write and speak better English, avoid over-repeating the<br />same key words or their equivalent officious stock phrases<br /></span></b><span style="font-size: large;"><br />A Tanzania-based member of Jose Carillo's English Forum thanked me sometime in 2013 for writing on the need to avoid officious stock phrases when writing or speaking. He said: </span><span style="font-size: large;">“</span><span style="font-size: large;">I agree that the best way to effectively get our ideas across is by making our sentences as precise as possible. But as a beginning writer, I sometimes feel reluctant to use one word more than two times in the same writing. That</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;">s why I</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;">m sometimes tempted to alternate, say, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">‘</span><span style="font-size: large;">about</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;"> with suc</span><span style="font-size: large;">h unpleasant bureaucratic phrases like </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘</span><span style="font-size: large;">with regard to,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘</span><span style="font-size: large;">with reference to,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;"> and </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">‘</span><span style="font-size: large;">as regards.' Admittedly, they sound standoffish and tend to get in the way of clear communication, but I think they help in many ways eradicate repetition in the prose. Is there any better tactic of getting rid of repetition?</span><span style="font-size: large;">”</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="323" data-original-width="775" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZbS4DFo5NwWsqSBNk9FIiABpKbasSH-AECfJUMgbB4OOZ9Oyfy2sppZkV23S2RBc5rMUil6Kjy-lSSm8DeBJBqz4atimBRvEC9kpopR9-OuEAi-kOqrNyoNzDk_jvcHHMk7G5MRjDECY5oCit1wI3RyafrW73IbzTfGHPUXBwn0Dxr392d-roITyOhiM/w612-h255/avoiding-overrepetition-of-words-1P1.jpg" width="612" /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=5958.0">In my reply</a>, I wrote Mwita Chacha that the repeated use of a particular word in writing is not bad per se; it’s the dysfunctional overuse of that word that has to be studiously avoided. And I wouldn’t use the word “tactic” to describe such studious avoidance, because a tactic seems too fleeting and too short-term an approach for dealing with unpleasant over-repetition. Instead, I would go for the word “strategy” to describe the more methodical and wide-ranging way for achieving that objective. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">To come up with such a viable strategy in English, we need to distinguish between its two general types of words and to understand the matter of language register and tonality.</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">The two general types of words in English</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The two general types of words in English, you will recall, are the <b>content words</b> and the <b>function words</b>. The <b>content words</b> are the carriers of meaning of the language, and they consist of the <i>nouns</i>, <i>pronouns</i>, <i>verbs</i>, <i>adjectives</i>, <i>adverbs</i>, and <i>interjections</i>. <a href="https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=86.0">The <b>function words</b> are the logical operators of the language</a>, and they consist of the <i>prepositions</i>, <i>conjunctions</i> (the <i>coordinating conjunctions</i> and <i>subordinating conjunctions</i>), and <i>conjunctive adverbs</i>. In a class of their own are <b>the articles</b> “a,” “an,” and “the,” which many grammarians consider as neither content words nor function words (we won’t take up the articles here to keep this discussion manageable).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCR8s3FiLBm0zC7JYrGpg9uS6Dsp0fALONn5mtuKvH9xMDsQqm-mhrrrZHheUS9alFYc7fv9xOm_WHhqVSjaKpTEeDPzFOuHvkvuz4bUGRUQbFiEPOpns-3o9mQTiU6W2mFZ7CPMXhvNmfgMebqBC4TmDkqyNNik7kCT-qhmMjJ_u8q241igFQPd2qp60/s505/content-and-function-words_distinctions-1P1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="340" data-original-width="505" height="367" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCR8s3FiLBm0zC7JYrGpg9uS6Dsp0fALONn5mtuKvH9xMDsQqm-mhrrrZHheUS9alFYc7fv9xOm_WHhqVSjaKpTEeDPzFOuHvkvuz4bUGRUQbFiEPOpns-3o9mQTiU6W2mFZ7CPMXhvNmfgMebqBC4TmDkqyNNik7kCT-qhmMjJ_u8q241igFQPd2qp60/w546-h367/content-and-function-words_distinctions-1P1.jpg" width="546" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Among the content words, </span><b><span style="font-size: large;">nouns</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"> are the most amenable to substitution with other words as a strategy for avoiding tedious repetition. For this purpose, of course, we routinely use </span><b><span style="font-size: large;">pronouns</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"> for subsequent mentions of subjects identified by name—“he” or “she” for singular proper names and “they” for one or more of them, and “it” for singular things and concepts and also “they” for one or more of them. <a href="https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=2452.0">In feature writing and in the more creative forms of expression, we can use </a></span><b><a href="https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=2452.0"><span style="font-size: large;">synonyms</span></a></b><span><a href="https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=2452.0"><span style="font-size: large;"> or similar words for subsequent mentions of particular nouns</span></a><span style="font-size: large;">. Those synonyms can focus on particular or specific attributes of the subject or key word, thus giving the reader or listener more information about them without going into digressions that might just unnecessarily impede the flow of the exposition. </span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">For example, the <b>subject or key word</b> “John Updike” might be later referred to in an exposition generically as “the writer” or more specifically as “a writer of sex-suffused fiction,” “a notable literary realist,” “the prolific American novelist and short-story writer,” “the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist,” and “America’s last true man of letters.” Indeed, by using a synonym or brief descriptive detail, each subsequent mention of the subject becomes an opportunity for throwing new light on it for the reader’s or listener’s benefit.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="438" data-original-width="464" height="492" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoOBXrrkQRAPwlZSBMZcP9_ZnbfkRooDQ0kvuMsTbs_b2bigi2OikOIQq_XQHTISsFm8xkX3qNjxAH1jQZXfv9LNXco6bTTo8Q9HoxYWlNgVVGG1F3rgcNWcYn8xrpTHost2OXilhhft34FGmsSYmiuPzDSzEgAX_imr9c536q8rwfxkBxOZNNYAtld68/w521-h492/english-parts-of-speech-enumeration-1D1.jpg" width="521" /></span></div><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE CREDIT: WOODWARDENGLISH</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">As parts of speech in English, <b>verbs</b>, <b>adjectives</b>, and <b>adverbs</b> each have a unique and distinctive meaning or sense. In the case of verbs, there’s a specific verb for every kind of action; for instance, while there are close similarities between “walk,” “stroll,” “saunter,” “amble,” and “jog,” they are not by any means perfectly synonymous. Thus, once you have used the verb “walk” the first time around for the action you are describing, it won’t be appropriate or advisable—just for the sake of avoiding repetition—to refer to that action as “stroll” the second time around, “saunter” the third time around, “amble” the fourth time around, and so on and so forth. For accuracy and authenticity’s sake, you’ve got to stick to “walk” in all subsequent mentions of that action you described as “walk” at the start.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">This strategy should also be applicable to <b>adjectives</b> and <b>adverbs</b>. For instance, you’d be out of line describing a woman as “beautiful” the first time around, then describing her as “pretty,” “comely,” or “fair” in subsequent mentions; you’ve got to stick to “beautiful” or else not use that adjective again in the exposition. The same strategy would also apply to adverbs; once you have described the manner an action is done as “cruelly,” you can’t refer to that same manner as “fiercely” in a subsequent mention. <a href="https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=1782.0">In fact, it would be good language policy to avoid repeat usage of adverbs (particularly those than end in “-ly”) or use their synonyms later in an exposition</a>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Now let’s take up what you describe as your reluctance to use one word more than two times in the same writing and, in particular, your being tempted to sometimes alternate the preposition “about” with such unpleasant <b>bureaucratic phrases</b> as “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards.” Of course it’s a good general approach to avoid using the same word or phrase more than two times in the same exposition, but strategically, I think you’d be ill-advised to alternate “about” with such phrases as “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards” in subsequent parts of the same exposition. As you yourself have pointed out, although these phrases can eradicate repetition in your prose, they will definitely make your prose sound standoffish and thus just get in the way of clear communication. It will be like jumping from the frying pan to the fire, so to speak.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Along with the preposition “about,” its synonymous phrases “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards” belong to the class of words known as the <b>function words</b>. As I mentioned at the outset, function words are the logical operators of the language, and as such they have very specific purposes and roles to play in the creation of meaning in language. <a href="https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=1782.0">In the particular case of <b>prepositions</b>, there’s a unique word for combining a word or phrase with another noun phrase to express a particular modification or predication; as a rule, for instance, “on,” “in,” “at,” “to,” “toward,” and “after” can’t be substituted with or interchanged with one another</a>. Most preposition usage is essentially conventional rather than logical, but it’s a fact that specific prepositions have become so well-established for evoking particular relationships in space, time, and logic that it would be foolhardy to misuse them, to trifle with them, or to tinker with them. The good writer knows that a healthy respect for the conventional usage of prepositions greatly paves the way for good communication.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Now, the preposition “about” belongs to what I would call the normal, day-to-day language register of English. A <b>language register</b> is, of course, simply a variety of a language that’s used in a particular social, occupational, or professional context. <i>In general, in terms of degree of formality, we can classify the language of register of English in six categories</i>: <b>very formal</b>, which is characterized by very rigid, bureaucratic language; <b>formal</b>, characterized by ceremonious, carefully precise language; <b>neutral</b>, characterized by objective, <b>indifferent</b>, uncaring language; <b>informal</b>, characterized by casual or familiar language; <b>very informal</b>, characterized by very casual and familiar language; and <b>intimate</b>, characterized by personal and private language. (Note here that I didn’t hesitate to used the verb “characterized” five times, for to have alternately used the verb phrase “distinguished by” would have been a needless distraction.)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">It so happens though that over the centuries, the legal profession developed a variety of English that’s pejoratively called <b>legalese</b>, an officious, legal-sounding language that can be roughly classified between very formal and formal language. This is the language used by lawyers in making contracts, affidavits, depositions, and pleadings before a court of law. A common feature of legalese is the substitution of the day-to-day, vanilla-type preposition “about” with the longish and ponderous phrases “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards” along with the substitution of such day-to-day, vanilla-type conjunctions “because,” “so,” and “later” with their longish equivalents “whereas,” “therefore,” and “hereinafter,” respectively. When legalese stays within the confines of the legal profession or community, however, all’s well with English as we know it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">It's unfortunate, though, that legalese has continually leached into both written and spoken business English over the years, such that a typical memo or business report these days sounds very much like a legal brief meant for lawyers and court magistrates. When peppered with such legalese as “attached herewith,” “aforesaid,” “heretofore,” and “for your perusal,” the English of such memos and business reports becomes very rigid and bureaucratic and extremely formal or harsh in tone. This is the language register and tonality that your English would acquire if, for the purpose of avoiding repetition of the preposition “about,” you fall into the habit of routinely alternating it with such legalese as “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards.” What’s even worse, your use of these forms of legalese will force you to make unwieldy, complicated sentence constructions to match their ponderousness and severity. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">My advice to you then is to fiercely resist the temptation to alternate common prepositions and the function words in general with their legalistic counterparts. You’ll be much better off as a writer and as a communicator by using the plain-and-simple English prepositions and conjunctions instead—even repeatedly. You can be sure that your readers or listeners will like it much better that way.</span></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-14438900241297337622023-11-28T21:34:00.000-08:002023-11-28T21:41:48.991-08:00NO-NONSENSE WAYS TO LEARN TODAY'S GLOBAL LANGUAGE<p><span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>The Genesis of Corporatese</b></span><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;">By Jose A. Carillo</span></b></span></p><p><br /><b><span style="font-size: medium;">THE</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;"> habit of writing or speaking English corporatese begins harmlessly enough. It starts with snappy little jargon like “concretize,” “prioritize,” “optimize,” “energize,” “synergize,” and “operationalize.” Then it becomes a mild neurosis of talking and writing in euphemisms and fancy diminutives on one hand, such as describing a particularly big company loss as a “tactical setback” or a “strategic retreat,” and, on the other hand, using equally fancy superlatives such as ‘back-to-basics strategy,” “best-in-class initiatives,” “interactive multidimensional feedback loop,” and the classic ENRON bluster that says “laser-sharp focus on earnings per share.” Then the neurosis quickly grows into an overwhelming compulsion, an inner voice that incessantly whispers to one’s ear that to stay on the clear path to success in the corporate world, one should never catch himself being too honest or too forthright with his English.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZnuYGd3n_pJ6jDKnhqvGC2pLCiyAlSvJ3todOaDdcmrOxud51KK3bouTCSWqtgJTJiR40rb1SWVoMVWdIwCjg-IMfHGBz9WGaCfXsYmAhXk8tvuvDBqo1UXK9YxSKbCISSRlxDvZOwJdLbFxhQTceREA3Dm7BnGb6lTv4bA1yDQbZ0GYprPyiNbbkSc/s631/to-jargon-or-not-to-jargon-1D1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="631" height="467" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZnuYGd3n_pJ6jDKnhqvGC2pLCiyAlSvJ3todOaDdcmrOxud51KK3bouTCSWqtgJTJiR40rb1SWVoMVWdIwCjg-IMfHGBz9WGaCfXsYmAhXk8tvuvDBqo1UXK9YxSKbCISSRlxDvZOwJdLbFxhQTceREA3Dm7BnGb6lTv4bA1yDQbZ0GYprPyiNbbkSc/w634-h467/to-jargon-or-not-to-jargon-1D1.png" width="634" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><div style="text-align: center;">IMAGE CREDIT: LINKEDIN.COM</div></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">After all, the corporatese spinners would say, it’s only words, English words. Like little sticks and stones they are only words and they couldn’t hurt you. But what the corporate types conveniently forget or put under the rug is that there’s such a thing as executive ethics and responsible corporate governance. You are supposed to be honest and truthful to your colleagues and subordinates. You are supposed to be faithful and true to all the stakeholders of the company who put you on the executive suite: the stockholders, the investors, the customers, the employees and their families, the financial community, the government, and the scores of contractuals who wipe the dust off company desks or turn on the lights in the silent morning and take out the trash and finally turn off the lights in the dead of night.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the few years that I was a passive observer in the corporate boardroom, I would sometimes see a CEO forget his corporatese in a fit of rage or pique. He would revert to speaking like a human when a new product had failed to get market share or when a much-ballyhooed sales or human resources program had fouled up. “What do I care about those greedy, good-for-nothing yokels?” the CEO would rant. “After all, I do all the work here. Them, they do not move their butts and they own only 30% of the stock cumulatively. My family and friends own the remaining 70%, so I can do as I wish for all I care. After us, the deluge.” But after a minute or two of venting spleen, he would be back to form and spouting corporatese again, obviously hard put and too embarrassed to explain a particularly bad year for his company in plainer terms than this:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“The Corporation reported a loss from continuing operations before income taxes of Php46.2 billion and an income tax provision of Php132 million for the year ended December 31, 1992, compared with income from continuing operations before income taxes of Php33.6 billion and an income tax provision of Php242 million for the year ended December 31, 1991. The effective rate in 1992 was different from the statutory rate primarily because of nondeductible goodwill amortization expense associated with business acquisitions and because of nondeductible goodwill applicable to assets sold. The effective tax rate in 1992 was different from the statutory rate due to the utilization of state tax credits and foreign sales corporation tax benefits that more than offset nondeductible goodwill amortization expense associated with business combinations.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="540" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOO3erepMrhSjcuctKFaqzEvnFrz4tQukFM5vkiuyc_oAhvtrY3DY8htkYXlJV43hQjB4KHOkC5Q-hckmX7fkaILoqlnjGz8VSGY2VW3VFUQKCVZZmFvpFComSGPz4FMRHY1SVChzyKOvvZ2O_hwiSIxD3oFTgxbQEj6iTVrjy-GGwzkaZBpuvzFkmm-w/w548-h364/corporate-jargon_samples-1D1.png" width="548" /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> IMAGE CREDIT: ENGLISHEVOLUTIONLEARNING.COM</span></div></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Strange, strange, the English and the logic that I see in vastly convoluted statements like these. Their otherworldly quality never fails to overwhelm me. There simply is no way for anyone with less than superhuman intelligence to get a handle of what they are saying in all this gobbledygook. In fact, statements like these give me the nagging suspicion that they are actually inverse fairy tales or, as one chief accountant had blurted out to me in a rare moment of candor, “little masterpieces of corporate fiction.” You can almost be sure that the use of corporatese in these reports is part of a massive and deliberate effort not to make things clear or understood by laymen like us. They want to keep you and me in the dark. Indeed, their glossing over of spectacular failures and the trumpeting of inconsequential or imaginary triumphs are not communication at all but plain and possibly felonious obfuscation.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This obfuscation is more pronounced in the so-called publicly owned companies, which are actually misnomers because only in very rare cases does the public own more than 30% or 40% of them. The bulk and weight of ownership effectively remains in the private hands of the majority owners, who can continue to call the shots in the company no matter how strident some minority stockholders become in their protestations against corporate malpractice. But that is a long, long story and certainly beyond the pale of this discussion of plain and simple English, so I will now stop.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>I will simply add that one way out of this Catch-22 situation is to foster a new generation of enlightened and activist minority stockholders. We must, as a matter of right, demand full corporate transparency. Chairs, CEOs, and boards of directors of public corporations must be compelled by law to be open, candid, and honest in their corporate reporting. By fiat they must be forbidden to speak in corporatese ever again in public, just plain and simple English, perhaps even the vernacular. Their English must be bright and luminous as on that clear day, when the king thought he was in regal dress but was actually parading himself about town with not a stitch on.<br /></span><span>-----------</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_1scBzTNOjJcd_nUfAb6d0h2TDVhBXCYJRTztEtoVsDv0v8wSH1EQVgZ1G7_S5x4ZcuyOd8R2FSn6bd_c-hJPBT7_whC6wHp1JEvt3JRRaPD6IkMLl9W0XvxqCtogOBLrN-e1fU4p1GsySSgoD_wjZOP79YvOpR3gvaaCbka4gYPYm09P9ioBNhUmliE/s279/cover_s.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="196" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_1scBzTNOjJcd_nUfAb6d0h2TDVhBXCYJRTztEtoVsDv0v8wSH1EQVgZ1G7_S5x4ZcuyOd8R2FSn6bd_c-hJPBT7_whC6wHp1JEvt3JRRaPD6IkMLl9W0XvxqCtogOBLrN-e1fU4p1GsySSgoD_wjZOP79YvOpR3gvaaCbka4gYPYm09P9ioBNhUmliE/s1600/cover_s.jpg" width="196" /></a></span></div><br />The essay above, "The Genesis of Corporatese" appears in Part I - "Our Uses and Misuses of English" of Jose Carillo's book <b>English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language</b> <i>(Third Updated Edition, 2023; 500 pages)</i>, copyright 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. The book is available at National Book Store and Facebook branches in key Philippine cities. For volume orders and overseas deliveries, send e-mail inquiring about pricing and bulk discounts to Manila Times Publishing Corp. at circulation@manilatimes.net, or call Tel. +63285245664 to 67 locals 117 and 222.<p></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-32273810640667457772023-11-21T08:55:00.000-08:002023-11-21T09:59:38.960-08:00MISUSE OF “LIE” AND “LAY” CAN PUNCTURE YOUR COMMAND OF ENGLISH<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">I - Troublesome English verbs that trip even professional writers</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In English, there are two sound-alike and spelled-alike verbs that often cause a lot of confusion--the verb-pair “lie” and “lay.” Indeed, who hasn’t been tripped yet by these two verbs? Over the years, I would often come across writing even by professionals—essays, business reports, position papers, news and feature stories—where “lie” is mistaken for “lay,” and vice versa. The semantic damage to the sentence might be slight, but the misuse of either word nevertheless shows a glaring hole in the writer’s command of English.<br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgquaLTlN1RTM45g3ifF46fOUhY2EIAe3MwxLBLRrg9lGc4i2O6INHSL8MrBbkAs_nIYWDwHUYA-Ny9MZ9s6mI0J6N1svHHC-06Pp2mkiWEbETqsGFc7tMD9Md-S3e7REu85oYCinMPE4H8ynUZhG8w4IN3S53a_-tl-iYlLgry-ZUE7-SXqpFhMYqEbKs/s596/confusing-verbs_lie-lie-lay-1P6.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="596" height="414" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgquaLTlN1RTM45g3ifF46fOUhY2EIAe3MwxLBLRrg9lGc4i2O6INHSL8MrBbkAs_nIYWDwHUYA-Ny9MZ9s6mI0J6N1svHHC-06Pp2mkiWEbETqsGFc7tMD9Md-S3e7REu85oYCinMPE4H8ynUZhG8w4IN3S53a_-tl-iYlLgry-ZUE7-SXqpFhMYqEbKs/w611-h414/confusing-verbs_lie-lie-lay-1P6.png" width="611" /></a><b style="font-size: small; text-align: left;"> IMAGE CREDIT: GENLISH.COM</b></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">II - Why we get into trouble using the verbs “lie” and “lay”</span></b></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The verbs <b>“lie” and “lay”</b> often get annoyingly misused because (1) they both consist of three letters and are pronounced almost identically, and (2) it isn't easy to figure out whether they are being used intransitively or transitively. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Most troublesome is the first </span><b><span style="font-size: large;">“</span><span style="font-size: medium;">lie,</span><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;"> an intransitive verb which means </span><span style="font-size: large;">“</span><span style="font-size: medium;">to stay at rest horizontally,</span><span style="font-size: large;">”</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> followed in troublesomeness by the transitive verb <b>“lay,”</b> which means </span><span style="font-size: large;">“</span><span style="font-size: medium;">to put or set something down.</span><span style="font-size: large;">”</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Of course there's another intransitive verb that's also spelled </span><b><span>“</span><span>lie.</span><span>”</span></b><span> It means </span><span>“</span><span>to assert something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive.</span><span>”</span><span> As it causes trouble altogether different from that wrought by </span><b><span>“</span><span>lie</span><span>”</span><span> and </span><span>“</span><span>lay,</span><span>”</span></b><span> we won't take it up here.<br /><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="791" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGLrfU4B4yEHGHwO_kXCoelvq702fxTh5p1OMPIQkDSBUAiBAxu8cBYxK_n52OWGvztkKRyziZeZ_7qjdEyzlZgQVCIbcJelDHkGgAeqv_NjxXsIGdzsGN19CXhQIxrBGHVtnHvhUeK78xr7PBqTjWKZ8-5f1Mmd3VlvUxWCG92omCG4r04qvCOXvIgmI/w648-h174/to-lie-lay_chart-1P1.png" width="648" /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />The <b>intransitive “lie”</b> is most commonly misused when wrongly forced by the writer or speaker to function as a transitive verb in sentences like this one: “The ousted manager went to his office and <b>laid on the couch</b>.” The correct usage here is, of course, <b>the intransitive past tense “lay”</b>: “The ousted manager went to his office and <b>lay on the couch</b>.” </span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">On the other hand, the <b>intransitive, past tense “lay down”</b> is often mistakenly used in sentences like this: “The rebels surrendered and <b>lay down their arms</b>.” This time, the correct usage is the <b>transitive, past-tense “laid down”</b>: “The rebels surrendered and <b>laid down their arms</b>.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Often, too, the <b>intransitive present tense verb “lay”</b> is misused in sentences like this one: “The geographers are checking precisely where the islands detected recently by satellite <b>lay in the Pacific Ocean</b>.” The correct usage here is the <b>transitive, plural present tense “lie”</b>: “The geographers are checking precisely where the islands detected recently by satellite <b>lie in the Pacific Ocean</b>.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Why are <b>“lie” and “lay”</b> such problematic verbs? To find out, let’s once again clearly distinguish between intransitive and transitive verbs.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">A <b>verb is intransitive</b> when it doesn’t need a direct object to work properly in a sentence, as is the case with <b>“yawned”</b>: “During his trial, the unrepentant criminal often <b>yawned</b>.” Here, <b>“yawned” is clearly intransitive</b>. It doesn’t need a direct object, and the sentence is complete without one.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">On the other hand, a <b>verb is transitive</b> when it absolutely needs a direct object to receive its action, as is the case with <b>“grip”</b> in this sentence: “He <b>gripped my arm</b>.” Drop the direct object of such verbs and the sentence no longer makes sense: “He <b>gripped</b>.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now, the problem with <b>“lie” and “lay”</b> is that apart from the fact that they have somewhat overlapping meanings, <b>they are also highly irregular verbs that inflect or change forms in such unpredictable, confusing ways</b>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The <b>intransitive “lie,”</b> in the sense of staying at rest horizontally, inflects as follows: <b>“lies” for the singular present tense</b>, as in “She chokes when she <b>lies down</b>”; <b>“lie” for the plural present tense</b>, as in “They choke when they <b>lie down</b>”; <b>“lay” for the past tense, whether singular or plural</b>, as in “She got tired and <b>lay down</b>”; and the <b>past participle “lain” in the perfect tenses</b>, as in “She <b>has lain all day</b> while her husband is away.” Take note that <b>none of the usages of “lie” above has a direct object</b>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now here’s <b>how the transitive “lay,”</b> in the sense of setting something down, <b>inflects:</b> <b>“lays” for the singular present tense</b>, as in “She meticulously <b>lays breakfast for us</b>”; <b>“lay” for the plural present tense</b>, as in “They meticulously <b>lay breakfast for us</b>”; <b>“laid” for the past tense</b>, as in “We <b>laid our laptops</b> on the table”; and the <b>past participle “laid” for the perfect tenses</b>, as in “They had <b>laid their laptops</b> aside by the time their manager arrived.” <b>Here, every usage of “lie” has a direct object.</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>REVIEW ONE MORE TIME:</b></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="543" data-original-width="381" height="755" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJM0uIPLwO-fBTwY0ydGMQvIqsmaf2gMdO-N4nEmR7bKl1RJpl00deO7-DcoPlt1mFGf_hsg63Mn58utXZyLo8nDIDg_o2PtBMzQqTdtnTpgqFK7i_E5c1KEdyNpmtRpto0wCW_Mt4Weka1a3R2hP8wpzKX_2vwUCT_pUa9CwJgbLuB7gnQ001bpY4zsg/w529-h755/review-of-to-lie_to-lay-1P1.png" width="529" /></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><b style="font-size: large;">Take note that among these inflections, the past tense form of the intransitive “lie”—“lay”—is exactly the same as that of the present tense plural of the transitive “lay”—also “lay.” It is this quirk of the language that makes it difficult for us to see whether “lie” or “lay” is being used transitively or intransitively, so we must be very careful indeed when using these two highly irregular verbs.</b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">-------------------</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>The discussions above first appeared in a two-part series in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in </i>The Manila Times in September 2007<i>, © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved</i>.</span></p><div><br /></div>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-4704618327866392112023-11-16T18:43:00.000-08:002023-11-16T21:26:52.113-08:00DEALING WITH QUESTIONABLE OR DOWNRIGHT WRONG LEGALESE<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part I - Proofreading questionable or downright wrong legalese</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Sometime in 2015 I received a very well-meaning, constructive letter from a Philippine Supreme Court staffer asking if he could consult me once in a while when he’s in doubt about his work. Part of his job is to proofread court decisions and resolutions drafted by a <i>ponente</i> or the designated writer from among the justices.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The letter-writer, whose name I won’t disclose for obvious reasons, says he’s neither a lawyer nor an English major, so his proofreading is confined to just typos and grammar. “I used to be very strict,” he says. “I’d correct ‘back wages’ or ‘in so far’ into one word, and put a comma or period where I think it’s needed. This is because my idea of proofreading is that it’s for publication purposes, [because once] the document gets printed, you can no longer correct it.”</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="702" height="385" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyEeXI1K_a-yFxKAmFmrVXn4XT65KXOrq5yfdEzm4bBLlzVXuYOk3RoNM0TxmxLcpE2L9uNoMYA5zpoAhkukoAji1n8k96ZT7KNjNrV24syEsGO-MeWjjJhNb61dX5GBrytsfhkEy9KgMxUjiN2H2qTVLfrtNB7UCDDtKOYoeX4NxL-kw5RMP1ezFRoD8/w608-h385/supreme-court_session-1A.png" width="608" /></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span> <b>PHILIPPINE SUPREME COURT IN SESSION, 2016</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The letter-writer cited two very arresting examples (all italicizations mine): “Once, I came across the phrase <b>‘without authority so to do’</b> in a quoted Rule of Court. My immediate impulse was to correct it to <b>‘without authority to do so’</b> but when I checked with the Rules of Court, I found that it’s how it is written in Rule 27. In another instance, the decision in Diamonon v. DOLE has this phrase, <b>‘to serve the interests of a justice.’</b> The <b>‘a’</b> is certainly not needed there but you can’t change it because it’s as good as law. This is a very good example of how even the article <b>‘a’</b> can change meaning if used improperly.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>My comments as Forum moderator:</b> I checked those dubious usages and found that <b>“so to do”</b> and an even more curious variant, <b>“to so do,”</b> have precedents in British English and in American jurisprudence. Here’s a <b>“so to do”</b> usage by the University of Oxford: “The Green College Development Office will only issue information about Old Members when those Old Members give written permission <b>so to do</b>.” And here’s a <b>“to so do”</b> usage by a law of the State of Arizona: “Intentionally intercepts the deliberations of a jury or aids, authorizes, employs, procures or permits another <b>to so do</b>.” No matter how awful-sounding they are then, let’s allow both usages to pass unchallenged. <br /><br />But as to the extraneous <b>“a”</b> in the Diamonon v. DOLE decision, it’s a very serious proofreading error that gives a derogatory sense to an appellate court’s broad discretionary powers in considering matters not assigned as errors on appeal, in effect allowing it to arrive “at a just decision and complete resolution of the case or <b>to serve the interests of a justice</b> or to avoid dispensing piecemeal justice.” The mere thought of a justice making a decision for his or her own self-interest is too subversive to contemplate, so even if that offending <b>“a”</b> now forms part of the Rules of Court, it ought to be knocked off in the interest of justice, semantics, and good sense.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The letter-writer continues:</b> “I began to be more lax when I noticed resentment in my being strict as evidenced by my simple corrections not being implemented, especially when it comes to subject-predicate agreement. This may just be a feeling, but it’s possible that because of their higher educational attainment, lawyers feel bad about being corrected by a nonlawyer.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“To illustrate, when I changed the verb <b>‘were’</b> to <b>‘was’</b> in the phrase <b>‘the alluded delay in the completion of the subject project <u>were</u> traceable to…,’</b> the correction was returned to me marked by an <b>‘x’</b> and with ‘the series’ added to <b>‘traceable’</b> to justify the use of the verb <i>‘were.’</i> (Your opinion, please.) So I just confine myself now to correcting very obvious mistakes, such as ‘the property can only be <b>assessed</b> through a narrow road’ (<b>accessed</b>), ‘<b>hinge of doubt</b>’ (<b>tinge of doubt</b>), and <b>‘the country’s national resources’</b> (<b>natural</b>).” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In Part II, we’ll take up more of his very instructive proofreading predicaments.<br /><br /></span></p><p><b style="font-size: x-large;">Part II - Proofreading questionable or downright wrong legalese</b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For starters in Part I, I presented a couple of proofreading errors in two Supreme Court rulings that were brought to my attention by one of its staff, part of whose job is to proofread court decisions and resolutions drafted by a <i>ponente</i> or the designated writer from among the justices.* The first glitch is the needless, wickedly subversive presence of the article <b>“a”</b> in a labor dispute ruling, and the second, a rather jolting subject-verb disagreement arising from misuse of the plural <b>“were”</b> in a demand-for-payment ruling.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="249" data-original-width="734" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQKvs7xiddakXZ-5rFKd_g8O3Sp3R9yP-qVRysr6fV1NWmtu5DuHYmH3chVhq-E6bRkYIozVxGnuGk4dm2c7YlBw5cUKRPxCJG-_CnQpii6TqrzF_VS7vpU0CcHcL2x6p1WIrXn7bkCFDkUoEJvTgVm18ryG-HlQIu9QiH9yXEOzWzRpO98k7axVDDk3k/w614-h209/sc-wormhole_composite-1A1.png" width="614" /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><b>PROOFREAD BUT UNCORRECTED ERRORS IN JUDICIAL DECISIONS ARE NOT “INFALLIBLE INADVERTENT ERRORS” BUT MAY BE MORE FITTINGLY CALLED “SEMANTIC WORMHOLES”</b></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Right off, a reader who goes by the username zyggy asked me online if those <b>“infallible inadvertent errors”</b>—his words, not mine—could be called <b>“loopholes.”</b> I told him I didn’t think so, for a <b>“loophole”</b> is defined as “<b>an ambiguity or omission in the text</b> through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Since those proofreading errors don’t really constitute a legally or logically defensible ground for such evasion, I suggested that both can be more fittingly called a <b>“semantic wormhole.”</b> That’s a more innocuous term that the <i>Urban Dictionary</i> pejoratively defines—only the “wormhole” part, I must admit—as <b>“a phenomenon that has a way of completely absorbing the attention of its user.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now let’s go back to the Supreme Court staffer’s letter and take up the rest of his very instructive proofreading predicaments. Before I forget, though, I still owe the Supreme Court staffer my opinion about his rebuffed proofreading correction of the verb <b>“were”</b> to <b>“was”</b> in the draft of that demand-for-payment ruling, as follows (italicization mine): “As stated in its original decision, it held that the evidence on record categorically showed that the alluded delay in the completion of the subject project <b>were traceable</b> to additional works and change order works required by respondent which were not part of the original agreement.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">His correction, he said in the letter, was returned to him marked by an <b>“x”</b> and with <b>“the series”</b> added to <b>“traceable”</b> to justify the use of the verb <b>“were.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>So here’s my opinion:</b> You were right, and the <i>ponente</i> who refused your proofreading correction from <b>“were”</b> to <b>“was”</b> in that sentence either doesn’t know or forgot how English subject-verb agreement works.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The Supreme Court staffer continues:</b> “In the last decision I proofread, I marked these errata: <b>‘did not mention of the testimonies’</b> (delete <b>‘of’</b>), <b>‘in the contrary’</b> (<b>‘in’</b> to <b>‘on’</b>) and <b>‘while it maybe true’</b> (<b>may be</b>). Happily, the concerned justice’s office adopted my corrections, but as always, I remained uncomfortable until I confirmed these… As you can see, these corrections are those which you would normally miss when you spell-check a document. But since I’m not an English major, sometimes I too am not really sure about the corrections I’ve made. And this is where I seek your help.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">He then presented this third proofreading dilemma: “The minutes I review every week starts with this: <b>‘The minutes of the preceeding session.’</b> I had noted that there’s no such word as <b>‘preceeding’</b>; it should be <b>‘preceding’</b> or <b>‘minutes of the proceedings.’</b> My correction went unheeded so I just let it be. Am I right or wrong?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>My answer:</b> You’re absolutely right, and the Supreme Court needs to recognize it once and for all for the sake of good English.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And then the letter-writer asked this grammar question, evidently in general and not regarding a particular Supreme Court decision: <b>“What should the verb be in this sentence: ‘He insisted that she (stay, stays, or stayed) in the house’?”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now I told him that it’s a really, really tough and devilishly equivocal grammar question! Offhand I’ll say that the answer could be <b>the subjunctive “stay,”</b> <b>the indicative present-tense “stays,”</b> or <b>the indicative past-tense “stayed,”</b> but the explanation is so complicated that it needs another column to give it justice.</span></p><div><br /></div><div><div><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part III - A devilishly equivocal grammar question</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In Parts I and II, I analyzed a couple of proofreading errors in two Supreme Court rulings that were brought to my attention by one of its staff, part of whose job is to proofread court decisions and resolutions drafted by a ponente or the designated writer from among the justices. Recall that the first glitch he called my attention to was the needless, wickedly subversive presence of the article <b>“a”</b> in a labor dispute ruling, and the second, a rather jolting subject-verb disagreement arising from misuse of the plural <b>“were”</b> in a demand-for-payment ruling.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="249" data-original-width="734" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnt0orQhMRvkB_NQzLcAx_n8ybxV09qMOHuiIl0-3FlYUuE0bVQ9wqztMo_h3_uHZC4ngK1w2SL40dmCGBTEsAKEAblwZf5wmgcbnmtdjDKTbgeBOEInme2_lJ9vfDa_8Osi1Tqq05gDOthHIHVxIrTYDmHy1EbftRMQD6E5LTlkiWhAuauNtvD7ubcT4/w600-h204/sc-wormhole_composite-1A1.png" width="600" /></div></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span><b>PROOFREAD BUT UNCORRECTED ERRORS IN JUDICIAL DECISIONS ARE NOT “INFALLIBLE INADVERTENT ERRORS” BUT MAY BE MORE FITTINGLY CALLED “SEMANTIC WORMHOLES”</b></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Right off, a reader who goes by the username zyggy asked me online if those “infallible inadvertent errors”—his words, not mine—could be called “loopholes.” I told him I didn’t think so, for a “loophole” is defined as “an ambiguity or omission in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Recall that in Part II, I observed that since those proofreading errors don’t really constitute a legally or logically defensible ground for such evasion, I suggested that both can be more fittingly called a “semantic wormhole.” That, I said, is a more innocuous term that the <i>Urban Dictionary</i> pejoratively defines—only the “wormhole” part, I must admit—as “a phenomenon that has a way of completely absorbing the attention of its user.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Now let’s go back to the Supreme Court staffer’s letter and take up the rest of his very instructive proofreading predicaments.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Before I forget, though, I still owe him my opinion about his rebuffed proofreading correction of the verb <b>“were”</b> to <b>“was”</b> in the draft of that demand-for-payment ruling, as follows <i>(boldfacing mine)</i>: “As stated in its original decision, it held that the evidence on record categorically showed that the alluded delay in the completion of the subject project <b>were</b> traceable to additional works and change order works required by respondent which <b>were</b> not part of the original agreement.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Recall that his correction, as he said in the letter, was returned to him marked by an <b>“x”</b> and with <b>“the series”</b> added to “traceable” to justify the use of the verb “were.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>So here’s my opinion:</b> You were right, and the <i>ponente</i> who refused your proofreading correction from <b>“were”</b> to <b>“was”</b> in that sentence either doesn’t know or forgot how English subject-verb agreement works.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The Supreme Court staffer continues:</b> “In the last decision I proofread, I marked these errata: <b>‘did not mention of the testimonies’</b> (delete <b>‘of’</b>), <b>‘in the contrary’</b> (<b>‘in’</b> to <b>‘on’</b>) and ‘<b>while it maybe true’</b> (<b>may be</b>). Happily, the concerned justice’s office adopted my corrections, but as always, I remained uncomfortable until I confirmed these… As you can see, these corrections are those which you would normally miss when you spell-check a document. But since I’m not an English major, sometimes I too am not really sure about the corrections I’ve made. And this is where I seek your help.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">He then presented this third proofreading dilemma: “The minutes I review every week starts with this: ‘The minutes of the preceeding session.’ I had noted that there’s no such word as <b>‘preceeding’</b>; it should be <b>‘preceding’</b> or ‘<b>minutes of the proceedings.’</b> My correction went unheeded so I just let it be. Am I right or wrong?”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>My answer:</b> You’re absolutely right, and the Supreme Court needs to recognize it once and for all for the sake of good English.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">And then for last, the letter-writer asked this grammar question, evidently in general and not regarding a particular Supreme Court decision: <b>“What should the verb be in this sentence: ‘He insisted that she (stay, stays or stayed) in the house’?”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Now that’s a really, really tough and devilishly equivocal grammar question! Offhand I’ll say that the answer could be <b>the subjunctive “stay,”</b> t<b>he indicative present-tense “stays,”</b> or t<b>he indicative past-tense “stayed,”</b> but the explanation is so complicated that it needs another column to give it justice.<br /><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part IV - A devilishly equivocal English grammar question</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In Part III, towards the end of my discussion of wormholes in certain Supreme Court rulings and correspondence, I said that the unnamed SC letter-writer who brought them to my attention posed this devilishly equivocal grammar question: “What should the verb be in this sentence: <b>‘He insisted that she (stay, stays or stayed) in the house’</b>?”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I replied that the answer could be <b>the subjunctive “stay,”</b> <b>the indicative present-tense “stays,”</b> or <b>the indicative past-tense “stayed.”</b> Since the explanation would involve some grammatical complexities, however, I decided to devote this separate grammatical analysis of this grammar puzzler.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Let me start by rearranging the answer choices for that sentence: <b>“He insisted that she (stays or stayed, stay) in the house.”</b> This will allow us to discuss the more familiar grammar concepts first and work our way to the more complicated ones.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Recall now that t<b>here are three moods of verbs in English</b>, mood being that aspect of the verb that expresses the speaker’s state of mind or attitude toward what he or she is saying. <b>These moods are the indicative mood, the imperative mode, and the subjunctive mood.</b> The indicative and imperative both deal with actions or states in factual or real-world situations; in contrast, the subjunctive deals with actions or states as possible, contingent, or conditional outcomes of a want, wish, preference, or uncertainty expressed by the speaker.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OMug4T4fzj2trisGTmtMIG3b6CIrKMfpIrlH4JkHjUK59-uBSJA05IPVWQtIl52736ymOhqkPlZYaKoowTF1AP8GXS9jfOvsFI69LvfWtNeF0wGEby3_ov4WIKOQteSibm4Xx4XKG3_Y5M2l76H3LISEXP-B6AoqnkhFjjUd0DmXrV_6luMqu1HwbD0/s575/three-moods-in-english-1D5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="575" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OMug4T4fzj2trisGTmtMIG3b6CIrKMfpIrlH4JkHjUK59-uBSJA05IPVWQtIl52736ymOhqkPlZYaKoowTF1AP8GXS9jfOvsFI69LvfWtNeF0wGEby3_ov4WIKOQteSibm4Xx4XKG3_Y5M2l76H3LISEXP-B6AoqnkhFjjUd0DmXrV_6luMqu1HwbD0/w534-h294/three-moods-in-english-1D5.png" width="534" /></a></div><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>The most common and familiar of the three moods is, as we know, t</span><b>he indicative</b><span>. </span><span>It</span><b> conveys the idea that an act or condition is (1) an objective fact, (2) an opinion, or (3) the subject of a question.</b><span> Indicative statements seek to give the impression that the speaker is talking about real-world situations in a straightforward, truthful manner; their operative verbs take their normal inflections in all the tenses and they follow the subject-verb agreement rule religiously.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Now let’s closely examine the sentence in question when it uses the first answer choice: <b>“He insisted that <u>she stays</u> in the house.”</b> This sentence is perfectly grammatical when it is said or understood as an indicative statement, where the speaker declares in a persistent but straightforward and truthful manner what he believes is an objective fact: that the female referred to currently stays—that’s the verb “stay” taking its normal present-tense inflection—in that particular house.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">That sentence is also perfectly grammatical when said or understood as an indicative statement when the verb in the “that”-clause is in the past tense: <b>“He insisted that <u>she stayed</u> in the house.”</b> Here, the speaker declares in a persistent but straightforward and truthful manner what he believes is an objective fact--that the female being referred to stayed for sometime—that’s the verb “stay” taking its normal past-tense inflection—in that particular house.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Finally, let’s now closely examine the sentence in question when it uses the third answer choice: <b>“He insisted <u>that she stay</u> in the house.”</b> There’s now an apparent subject-verb disagreement in the “that”-clause between the singular “she” and the plural-form “stay.” However, if that sentence is said or understood to be subjunctive, it would be grammatically and semantically correct. Indeed, one of the uses of the subjunctive is to denote a speaker’s insistence that a particular action be taken, not that it’s true or factual. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">So then, always keep in mind this rule for subjunctive sentences with a “demand,” “require,” or “insist” main clause followed by a “that”-clause indicating the action to be taken--<b>The operative verb of that clause always takes the subjunctive plural present tense (without the suffix “-s”) whether the doer of the action is singular or plural:</b> “<b>I demand that all of you leave</b> right now.” “<b>The company requires tha</b>t<b> all job applicants take</b> an IQ test.” And, in the same token, “<b>He insisted that she stay</b> in the house.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I trust that I have adequately clarified this particular and very unique form of the subjunctive.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">----------------</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>These discussions first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in</i> The Manila Times <i>in several issues from March-April 2015, © 2015 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></div></div>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-74894093411061393532023-11-08T06:29:00.012-08:002023-11-08T07:10:53.278-08:00Write Powerful Expositions By Using Both Basic and Advanced Paragraph Transition Techniques<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><b><span style="font-size: large;">BASIC AND ADVANCED
PARAGRAPH TRANSITION TECHNIQUES</span></b></span><b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">By this time many of us should already be familiar with the English paragraph and could whip up one or several of them with great ease. The general concept for the paragraph that we normally follow is, of course, that it’s a collection of sentences that all relate to one main idea or topic and that have unity, coherence, and adequate development. This particularly applies to the typical expository paragraph, which starts with a topic sentence or controlling idea that the exposition then explains, develops, or supports with evidence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">As we all know, however, not all paragraphs need a topic sentence; some paragraphs could simply be indicators of breathing or structural pauses in narratives, dialogues, and explanatory statements that are marked for the purpose by a new, usually indented line (digital word processing, of course, now provides a stylistic device to even get rid of indentions, as in this very exposition that you’re reading now). Either way, paragraphs no doubt serve as functional transitions from one set of thoughts to another, and this is where many people—whether beginning writers or professionals who just want to set their thoughts down clearly and logically—get confused as to precisely how transitions between paragraphs should be done.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In “Making Effective Paragraph Transitions,” a four-part series that I wrote for my English-usage column in <i>The Manila Times</i> in early 2006, I extensively discussed the various techniques that a writer can use to effectively bridge a succeeding paragraph to the one preceding it—a process that I explained works in much the same way as logically bridging adjoining sentences in an exposition. In this week’s blogspot, I am presenting in retrospect all four parts of that series for the benefit of new Forum members and those who missed reading it the first time around. I hope that the discussions will help them gain much greater competence and confidence in the paragraphing craft. <i>(November 9, 2013)</i></span></p><p><br /><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><b><span style="font-size: large;">MAKING EFFECTIVE
PARAGRAPH TRANSITIONS</span></b></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part I – Basic forms of paragraph transitions</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Contrary to what some people think, making effective paragraph transitions is really not that difficult. This is because most of the familiar devices we use for linking sentences can serve as transitional devices for paragraphs as well. For instance, such linking words as “besides,” “similarly,” “above all,” and “as a consequence” can effectively bridge a succeeding paragraph to the one preceding it in much the same way that they can bridge adjoining sentences. It’s true that some experienced writers make it part of their craft to minimize the use of these highly visible paragraph “hooks,” but to the beginning writer, they are indispensable for interlocking paragraphs into logical, cohesive, and meaningful compositions.</span></p><p><img border="0" data-original-height="457" data-original-width="567" height="452" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_y0P85PdPyW4TSmmaASjMfQSGFDiADl2eYdRq3o0wUDMu1EbvF-fce41h0f8cmI2ynwhXNmHBaTRtZgRSDMpmfMAPJx7G3lonKVOSo8Rk5t3uAeuxo9XS7anLZ7Ol1wdYTwOqFuP0OUUJlMASSe-GFTFFr9kPKvCPTHw92OTncszaQi66lOk0Gqq1cV8/w561-h452/english-transition-words_list-1A1.png" width="561" /><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE CREDIT: PINTEREST.COM<br /></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span><b style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">Highly visible paragraph transition “hooks” for beginning writers</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Choosing a paragraph transition is largely determined by which of the following major development tasks the new paragraph is intended to do: (1) amplify a point or add to it, (2) establish a causal relationship, (3) establish a temporal relationship, (4) present an example, (5) make an analogy, (6) provide an alternative, or (7) to concede a point. Once a choice is made, it becomes a simple matter to find a suitable paragraph transition from the very large body of conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases in the English language.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Before discussing the major types of task-oriented paragraph transitions, however, let us put things in better perspective by first looking into two of the most basic forms of paragraph transitions. One way is to simply repeat in the first sentence of a succeeding paragraph the same operative word used in the last sentence of its preceding paragraph, as the word “process” does in this excerpt from William Zinsser’s <i>On Writing Well</i>:</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>“</span><span>Ideally the relationship between a writer and an editor should be one of negotiation and trust…The </span><i>process</i><span> (underscoring mine), in short, is one in which the writer and the editor proceed through the manuscript together, finding for every problem the solution that best serves the finished article.</span></span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>“</span><span>It’s a </span><i>process</i><span> (underscoring mine) that can be done just as well over the phone as in person…</span><span>”</span></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The other basic paragraph transition form is substituting a synonym or similar words for the chosen operative word. For instance, in the passage above, we can use the similar phrase <b>“this kind of review”</b> instead to begin the second paragraph: “<b>This kind of review</b> can be done just as well over the phone as in person…” This transition may not necessarily be better than the first one, but it has the advantage of giving more variety to the prose.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now we are ready to discuss the task-oriented paragraph transitions.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Amplifying a point or adding to it.</b> If we need to elaborate on an idea at some length, we can effect the transition to a succeeding paragraph by using whichever of the following transitional words and phrases is appropriate: <b>“also,”</b> <b>“moreover,”</b> <b>“furthermore,”</b> <b>“in addition,”</b> <b>“similarly,”</b> <b>“another reason,”</b> and <b>“likewise.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Establishing a causal relationship.</b> When we want to discuss the result of something described in a preceding paragraph, we can achieve a logical transition by introducing the succeeding paragraph with any of the following transitional words or phrases: <b>“so,”</b> <b>“as a result,”</b> <b>“therefore,”</b> <b>“consequently,”</b> <b>“then,”</b> and <b>“thus.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Establishing a temporal relationship.</b> This is the easiest paragraph transition to make. We can make the desired chronological order by simply using the following adverbs or adverbial phrases to introduce the succeeding paragraph: <b>“as soon as,”</b> <b>“before,”</b> <b>“afterward,”</b> <b>“after,”</b> <b>“since,”</b> <b>“recently,”</b> <b>“eventually,”</b> <b>“subsequently,”</b> <b>“at the same time,”</b> <b>“next,”</b> <b>“then,”</b> <b>“until,”</b> <b>“last,”</b> <b>“later,”</b> <b>“earlier,”</b> and <b>“thereafter.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Presenting an example.</b> For this purpose, we can achieve a quick transition by using the following words or phrases to begin the succeeding paragraph: <b>“for instance,”</b> “<b>for example,”</b> <b>“in particular,”</b> <b>“particularly,”</b> <b>“specifically,”</b> and <b>“to illustrate.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Making an analogy.</b> By using such words as <b>“also,”</b> <b>“likewise,”</b> <b>“similarly,”</b> <b>“in the same manner,”</b> and <b>“analogously,”</b> we can make an effective transition to a succeeding paragraph that intends to make a comparison with what has been taken up in a preceding paragraph.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Providing an alternative.</b> When alternatives to an idea presented in a preceding paragraph need to be discussed, we can introduce them in a succeeding paragraph by using the following transitional words: <b>“however,”</b> <b>“in contrast,”</b> <b>“although,”</b> <b>“though,”</b> <b>“nevertheless,”</b> <b>“but,”</b> <b>“still,”</b> <b>“yet,”</b> <b>“alternatively,”</b> and <b>“on the other hand.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Conceding a point.</b> An effective strategy to demolish a contrary view is to quickly concede it in a paragraph introduced by such transitional words as <b>“to be sure,”</b> <b>“no doubt,”</b> <b>“granted that,”</b> <b>“although,”</b> and <b>“it is true.”</b> The rest of the paragraph can then present arguments to discredit the wisdom of that contrary view.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For more complex compositions such as essays and dissertations, however, we will usually need more sophisticated paragraph transitions than the conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases we have already taken up above. We will discuss them in detail in Part II of this essay.</span></p><p><span><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part II – Extrinsic and intrinsic paragraph transitions</span></b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Because of its nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject, Part I of this essay must have given the impression that making paragraph transitions is simply a mechanical procedure, a matter of just tacking on a familiar conjunctive adverb or transitional phrase between adjoining paragraphs. This, as we shall soon see, is not the case at all. It just so happens that conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases are the best starting point for discussing the subject, for they have a built-in and overt logic in them that can apply to a very wide range of situations. As we progress to the more complex types of compositions, however, we will need much less obtrusive and more elegant ways of bridging paragraphs into cohesive and meaningful compositions.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There are two general categories of transitions for bridging paragraphs: <b>extrinsic or explicit transitions</b>, and <b>intrinsic or implicit transitions</b>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Extrinsic or explicit transitions.</b> They primarily rely on such familiar introductory words as <b>“however,”</b> <b>“therefore,”</b> and <b>“moreover”</b> to show how an idea that will follow is related to the one preceding it. The various conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases that we already took up in the previous essay belong to this category.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Transitions of this type are very handy and give paragraphs very strong logical interlocks, but when overused, as in legal documents that employ long strings of <b>“whereases,”</b> <b>“provided thats,”</b> <b>“therefores,”</b> and <b>“henceforths”</b> to drive home a point, their prefabricated logic can become very distracting, annoying, and unsightly. This is why it is advisable to minimize their use in formal compositions. For academic essays and dissertations, in particular, the usual suggested limit is no more than one extrinsic transition for every paragraph and no more than three for every page.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Intrinsic or implicit transitions.</b> This category of transitions, on the other hand, makes use of the natural progression or “flow” of the ideas themselves to link paragraphs logically. Instead of using the usual conjunctive adverbs or transitional phrases, they effect paragraph transitions through a semantic play on key words or ideas in the body of the exposition itself. A sentence that performs an intrinsic paragraph transition usually:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">(1) repeats a key word or phrase used in the preceding paragraph and makes it the takeoff point for the succeeding paragraph, or else</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">(2) uses a synonym or words similar to that key word or phrase to do the transitional job. Part I of this essay already gave examples of this type of paragraph transition.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">At this point, we will now complete the picture by adding the pronouns <b>“this,”</b> <b>“that,”</b> <b>“these,”</b> <b>“those,”</b> and <b>“it”</b> to the list of basic implicit transitional devices, for these pronouns can often bridge adjoining paragraphs as effectively while minimizing the distracting overuse of the same nouns in the composition.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">To better understand how intrinsic paragraph transitions work, let’s assume that we have already written the following first paragraph for an essay:</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>“</span><span>As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span><span>”</span></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now how do we make an intrinsic transition to the next paragraph of this essay?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The task, of course, basically involves constructing an introductory sentence for that next paragraph. We will now look into the various intrinsic transition strategies for doing this, from the simplest to the more complex ones.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Strategy 1: Use a summary word for an operative idea used in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph.</b></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>“</span><span>As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“The <u>idea</u> was at first totally out of the question to me. I was such in a hurry to get back to Manila because of an important prior engagement…”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>Strategy 2: Use the pronoun “this” for an operative idea in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph.</b></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">“</span><span style="font-size: medium;">As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>“</span><span><u>This</u> was actually not a very easy decision to make. I had to be in Manila later that week for a business meeting…</span><span>”</span></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>Strategy 3: Use the pronoun “that” for an operative idea in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph.</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><br /><b>“</b></span><span><b>As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</b></span></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>“</span><span><u>That</u> proved to be the most memorable part of our tour. Despite my misgivings…</span><span>”</span></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>Strategy 4: Use a more emphatic transition by using “that” to intensify an operative word or idea used in the preceding paragraph.</b></span></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</b></span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“<u>That decision</u> had very serious and far-reaching consequences for me. I missed an important meeting in Manila and lost a major account…”</b></span></p><div><br /></div><div><div><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part III – “It,” “such,” and “there” as paragraph transitions</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">We have already looked into several extrinsic or implicit strategies for making a transition to a new paragraph from the one preceding it. All of these strategies begin the new paragraph with a sentence that either repeats a key word or phrase used in the preceding paragraph, or else substitutes a summary word or pronoun such as “this” or “that” for that key word or phrase. This time we will look into the use of the words “it,” “such,” and “there” as devices for similarly making such paragraph transitions. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">To illustrate how these words work as transitional devices, we will use the same prototype first paragraph that we used in the previous column, as follows:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.”</b> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>Strategy 5: Use the anticipatory pronoun “it,” otherwise known as the expletive “it,” to begin the new paragraph.</b> We know, of course, that many teachers of writing frown on this usage, claiming that it seriously robs sentences of their vigor. As the two examples below will show, however, this device can be very efficient as a paragraph transition:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“<u>It</u> was past midnight at our Boracay cottage when my friend suddenly sprung the Palawan idea on me…”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">or:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“<u>It</u> was farthest from my mind that my friend would even think of a Palawan trip just when we were ready to fly to Manila…”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s true, however, that too many expletives in a composition can be very distracting, so we must use this paragraph transition device very sparingly.<br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Strategy 6: Use the pronoun “such” in the first sentence of the new paragraph to echo an operative idea in the preceding paragraph.</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”<u>Such</u> was what happened to my best-laid plans after my friend chanced upon a Palawan tour brochure…”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">We must take note, though, that some grammarians find this use of “such” as a noun semantically objectionable. They would rather use “such” as an adjective or adverb to make such transitions:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”<u>Such</u> a radical departure from our travel plans was very unpalatable, but my friend was so headstrong about it…”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">or:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”<u>Such</u> was my consternation about the Palawan idea that I actually considered going back to Manila without my friend…”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>Strategy 7: Use the pronoun “there” in the first sentence of the new paragraph to introduce the new idea that will be developed.</b> See how effective this transitional device can be in effecting shifts in time, place, scene, or subject:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>”As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</b></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”<u>There</u> was a time when I would summarily reject unplanned trips like that…”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">or:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">”<u>There</u> was a very compelling reason why I didn’t want to make that Palawan trip, but my friend would hear nothing of it…”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">For the same reasons that they shun the expletive “it,” however, many teachers of writing strongly caution against this usage, arguing that it encourages lazy writing. Thus, as a rule for short compositions, more than one paragraph beginning with “there” would probably be too much.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>We will now go to another type of paragraph transition, one that exhibits both extrinsic and intrinsic properties.</b> The most common transitional devices of this type are the prepositional phrases used to begin the first sentence of paragraphs that set off events by order of occurrence, or to indicate changes in position, location, or point of view. Typically, these prepositional phrases are introduced by a preposition, but unlike such usual stock transitional words or phrases as “before,” “after,” and “as a result,” they carry specific information about the subject being discussed.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Some examples:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Prepositional phrases serving as paragraph transitions marking the sequence of events:</i> “<b>At 8:00 in the morning…”</b>, <b>“By noon…”</b>, <b>“At 6:00 in the evening…”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Prepositional phrases serving as paragraph transitions marking changes in position:</i> <b>“At sea level…”</b>, <b>“Below sea level…”</b>, <b>“Above sea level…”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Prepositional phrases serving as paragraph transitions marking changes in location:</i> <b>“In Manila…”</b>, <b>“In Rome…”</b>, <b>“In London…”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Prepositional phrases serving as paragraph transitions marking changes of point of view in the same composition:</i> <b>“As a private citizen…”</b>, <b>“As a professional…”</b>, <b>“As a public official…”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">To conclude our discussions on paragraph transitions, we will take up in Part IV the so-called “deep-hook” paragraph transitions—the type that blends so effortlessly and so unobtrusively with the developing prose that we hardly notice that the transition is there at all.<br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: large;">Part IV – Deep-hook paragraph transitions</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">We will now discuss “deep-hook” paragraph transitions—the type that subtly works out its bridging logic by making itself an intrinsic part of the idea being developed. Unlike the usual conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases such as “but,” “however,” and “as a result,” deep-hook paragraph transitions don’t call attention to themselves. They do their job so unobtrusively that readers hardly notice they are there at all.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">To show what they are and how they work, we will use the same prototype first paragraph that we used to illustrate the other types of paragraph transitions:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><br />Strategy 8: Use the last word or phrase of the preceding paragraph as the first word or phrase of the next paragraph, then make it the takeoff point for developing another idea.</b> This is the simplest of the deep-hook paragraph transitions and is most effective when limited to two or three words, such as “unplanned trip to Palawan” in this example:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an <u>unplanned trip to Palawan</u>. </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“An <u>unplanned trip to Palawan</u> was farthest from my mind at the time because I was so in a hurry to get back to Manila...”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />When it uses too many words, this type of paragraph transition may still work but it tends to be repetitive and clunky.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Strategy 9: Use an earlier word or phrase in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph as the first word or phrase of the next paragraph, then make it the takeoff point for developing another idea.</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“</b><b>As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by <u>our tour guide</u>, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</b></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“</b><b><u>Our tour guide</u> had apparently spared no effort in foisting the outrageous idea on my friend’s impressionable mind...”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>Strategy 10: As the next paragraph’s takeoff point for developing another idea, use a word or phrase in a sentence other than the last sentence of the preceding paragraph.</b> To establish its logic, however, this type of paragraph transition usually needs a <i>multiple hook</i>—perhaps two or more operative words or phrases from the preceding paragraph:<br /><br /></span></div><div><b style="font-size: large;">“</b><b style="font-size: large;">As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a long</b><b style="font-size: large;">e <u>friend</u> from Paris on a five-day visit to <u>several vacation resorts</u> in Luzon and to the </b><b style="font-size: large;"><u>Visayas</u>, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to <u>Palawan</u>.</b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“</b><b>That my <u>friend</u> should specifically insist on <u>Palawan</u> after already visiting <u>several vacation resorts</u> in the Visayas was terribly upsetting to me...”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Here, the multiple hooks are <i>“friend,”</i> <i>“several vacation resorts,”</i> and <i>“Visayas”</i> from the second sentence of our prototype first paragraph, and <i>“Palawan”</i> from its last sentence.<br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Strategy 11: Use an “idea hook,” one that distills into a single phrase an idea expressed in the preceding paragraph, then use it as takeoff point for developing the next paragraph.</b> This is the subtlest and most sophisticated form of paragraph transition of all, and its skillful use in compositions often indicates how good a writer has become in the writing craft.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Here are two idea hooks for a paragraph that will follow our prototype first paragraph:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“</b><b>As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</b></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“</b><b><u>Giving in to my friend’s utterly capricious idea</u> upset all of my well-laid plans for the remainder of that month...”</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">or:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“As a traveler, I am a stickler for schedules and will adamantly resist any change in my itinerary, no matter how attractive that change might be. This was my cardinal rule until I accompanied a longtime friend from Paris on a five-day visit to several vacation resorts in Luzon and the Visayas, and for which Boracay Island was to be our final stop. At the last minute, however, on her insistence and egged on by our tour guide, I reluctantly broke my own rule and agreed to join her on an unplanned trip to Palawan.</span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“<u>That spur-of-the-moment decision</u> led to an experience so delightful that I vowed never again to so doggedly take the well-beaten path in my travels...”</span></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In practice, however, deep-hook paragraph transitions should not be used to the total exclusion of the conventional conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases. In fact, compositions that use a wide variety of paragraph transitions flow better and are generally more readable than those that use only one type.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">This ends the four-part retrospective on “Making Effective Paragraph Transitions.” I hope that the discussion has clarified whatever lingering doubts you might have had about how to properly bridge paragraphs in your expositions.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><div><br />********** <br /><i>This four-part exposition first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in four weekly installments from September-October 2013 in the Internet edition of </i>The Manila Times<i>,©2013 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></div></span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-12413825586420893732023-11-01T18:32:00.005-07:002023-11-02T06:38:34.324-07:00When English gets laced with legalese and other forms of jargon<p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span>Part I:<br /></span></b><b><span>Taken aback by an English professor's legal writing lecture<br /></span></b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br />A Forum member—I’ll identify him here only as Justine to protect him from possible brickbats—related to me sometime in 2021 that owing to his current work, he had obligated himself to attend a recent lecture on legal writing by an English professor from a prestigious law school.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I was admittedly taken aback when Justine asked me if I would agree with that legal English lecturer’s very contentious rules on the construction and length of sentences and her downright dismissal of the interjection as a legitimate part of speech.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That lecturer’s stern prescriptions are these:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">1. “Yes” can’t be considered as a sentence because a sentence should at least contain three words and should follow an S-V-O pattern;</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">2. A sentence must have as much as possible 20 words to be clear, simple and direct; and</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">3. The interjection shouldn’t be considered as part of speech because, according to a certain F.J.Rahtz, it is just “a noisy utterance like the cry of an animal.”</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">My reply to Justine:</span></b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii8HVFD2Ciz9zPE60HmSH9zMTE7iMa9SO8ln4M492t_oFwLNIFAnREngBKQtY7ghH_VksiwKuyEYgPxjbzTfcUFRA7keTvMB-M8G_2i9mBnvE3MxLZkTpsTRe9q8cw2D0sNVvS_88STeEL2cyjS2YyE9CsiD_BLFD6e_2yISDims9rGpILo5jM7Mlzfd8/s705/plain-english_vs_legalese_image-1A1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="705" height="368" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii8HVFD2Ciz9zPE60HmSH9zMTE7iMa9SO8ln4M492t_oFwLNIFAnREngBKQtY7ghH_VksiwKuyEYgPxjbzTfcUFRA7keTvMB-M8G_2i9mBnvE3MxLZkTpsTRe9q8cw2D0sNVvS_88STeEL2cyjS2YyE9CsiD_BLFD6e_2yISDims9rGpILo5jM7Mlzfd8/w661-h368/plain-english_vs_legalese_image-1A1.png" width="661" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">1. My answer to the first question is a categorical “No!” Definitely, “Yes” qualifies as a sentence. The argument that a sentence “should at least contain three words and... should follow an S-V-O pattern” is so old school and so persnickety. I can only presume that that lecturer is way, way over her senior citizen year—not that I’m not anywhere in or beyond that age bracket myself—or that if she’s a fresh AB English graduate, she must have learned English from a professor way past retirement age to even think of that nonsense definition.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That English lecturer’s overly fastidious pronouncement goes against the grain of the very definition of the term “sentence.” My <i>Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary</i> defines it as “a word, clause, or phrase or a group of clauses or phrases forming a syntactic unit which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That definition’s very first two words—“a word”—already qualifies “Yes” as a sentence because even if it’s just one word, it’s naturally written or uttered by someone in response to an understood subject and verb associated with it. The implied “I agree with that” already satisfies the demand of that legal English lecturer that it “follow an S-V-O pattern.” In fact, it even exceeds that basic pattern by an extra word.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">2. Regarding your second question, I totally disagree that “a sentence must contain as much as possible 20 words to be clear, simple and direct.” For saying that, I seriously think she should be reported to her school’s law dean to be chastised for grossly wrongheaded teaching on how long or short sentences should be—whether the English is plain, simple English or abstruse legalese. (You may want to send her a link to my Forum posting on “How long should a sentence be to effectively deliver an idea?” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">3. As to your third question, Justine, I won't be drawn into an argument with anyone who thinks that interjections don’t qualify as a part of speech for being just “a noisy utterance like the cry of an animal.” I’m content and won’t quibble with my <i>Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate</i> definition that an interjection is “an ejaculatory utterance usually lacking grammatical connection, as a word or phrase used in exclamation (as <i>‘Heavens!’</i> <i>‘Dear me!’</i>).”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That definition has served me well and had never failed me in all the years that I’ve been using interjections to express shock or delight over the many unexpected things that most everyone encounters in life.</span></p><p><br /><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Part II: <br />A personal working definition of “plain and simple English”<br /></span></b><span style="font-size: large;"><br />This continues my response to the very staid and draconian English writing rules prescribed by that lady English professor in her legal writing lecture attended by Forum member Justine A. in 2021.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I’ll proceed by giving my personal views but with this caveat: I’m not a lawyer and haven’t dreamed nor aimed to be one. There just may be aspects of English legalese that that professor knows so intimately but that I as a layman really have neither need nor immediate use for.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">To avoid misunderstandings, I’m presenting my personal working definition of <b>“plain and simple English”</b> along with authoritative definitions of the terms that will figure in these discussions, namely <b>(1) legalese</b>, <b>(2) jargon</b>, and <b>(3) gobbledygook</b>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For <b>plain and simple English</b>, here’s my definition: It’s the human way of speaking and writing in English—simple, clear, sincere, courteous and with absolutely no artifice, pretense, and pomposity. It’s the same everyday English we use when talking face-to-face with people honestly and with mutual respect and trust.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Legalese”</b> is formally defined by my <i>Merriam Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary</i> as “the specialized language of the legal profession.” Informally, the reference book <i>Oxford Languages</i> defines the term as “the formal and technical language of legal documents that is often hard to understand.”</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0th_MEAr4tNifJ7Vr5ZouKP9GCEGG3yvzHttVu6xZd8E9-phHLxTp3tpcysiCQDofEI-Dw0-YymY8nP4AApYaxYzk4FlLZfwX8h1pzAfUUSdwRGyM3UbpoXjLZb5G8K88PeqW4pLV0wuOrV7yBFNSVYosNp4Wbb7gFPUf1g6MAU0yGKMhaXHikd_CULU/s600/doing-legalese_image-1A1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="600" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0th_MEAr4tNifJ7Vr5ZouKP9GCEGG3yvzHttVu6xZd8E9-phHLxTp3tpcysiCQDofEI-Dw0-YymY8nP4AApYaxYzk4FlLZfwX8h1pzAfUUSdwRGyM3UbpoXjLZb5G8K88PeqW4pLV0wuOrV7yBFNSVYosNp4Wbb7gFPUf1g6MAU0yGKMhaXHikd_CULU/w529-h265/doing-legalese_image-1A1.png" width="529" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR_HQ6YqjWsn8Cq7Se8HVjsYRhKYe0P9UkLwIgLDqBwB_iUJvPgiqKqZv2UtOJ85MnDVBmiEe1DFvEeJeFAetUtHuGSbLrfNDwW12Z-mzJ-jgeh4Faeo5QTAq_koscSyENEMvTfn7UN67vkHzaT8mYdbJGrdNufvOQXDihGWvDFGwp6cB8enkY6KDaP_k/s547/twas-night-before-xmas_legal-version-1A1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="463" data-original-width="547" height="441" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR_HQ6YqjWsn8Cq7Se8HVjsYRhKYe0P9UkLwIgLDqBwB_iUJvPgiqKqZv2UtOJ85MnDVBmiEe1DFvEeJeFAetUtHuGSbLrfNDwW12Z-mzJ-jgeh4Faeo5QTAq_koscSyENEMvTfn7UN67vkHzaT8mYdbJGrdNufvOQXDihGWvDFGwp6cB8enkY6KDaP_k/w521-h441/twas-night-before-xmas_legal-version-1A1.png" width="521" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Jargon”</b> is formally defined by my <i>Merriam Webster’s 11th Collegiate</i> in four ways: “<b>1 a:</b> confused unintelligible language <b>b:</b> a strange, outlandish, or barbarous language or dialect <b>c:</b> a hybrid language or dialect simplified in vocabulary and grammar and used for communication between peoples of different speech; <b>2 :</b> the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group; <b> 3 :</b> obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words.”</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipXQe5ZcKlnIE43MiRgyymETWQpWdO5W6BJy1u99THc7VPkBKIlPdoFzVO6A3mUCumfH1i-Kc5bJxVbc3WriAzYv4kzclJLf6M7JLI9y79_7NGpfRGyiDEWISGJOxx3FQqv_JARXDFP1KjpANfkwmJuHHvdNFnQ8iCAX0dZgnxaLQFacnY_lcRX-x6d2A/s538/jargon-examples_image-1A1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="538" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipXQe5ZcKlnIE43MiRgyymETWQpWdO5W6BJy1u99THc7VPkBKIlPdoFzVO6A3mUCumfH1i-Kc5bJxVbc3WriAzYv4kzclJLf6M7JLI9y79_7NGpfRGyiDEWISGJOxx3FQqv_JARXDFP1KjpANfkwmJuHHvdNFnQ8iCAX0dZgnxaLQFacnY_lcRX-x6d2A/w583-h328/jargon-examples_image-1A1.png" width="583" /></a></div> <span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE CREDIT: EXAMPLES.YOURDICTIONARY.COM</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Gobbledygook”</b> is formally defined by my same dictionary simply as “wordy and generally unintelligible jargon.” More extensively, <i>Oxford Languages</i> defines it as “language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms; nonsense.”</span><br /><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV2cORRv8NPHP5m03sH0_I5bl9UWIzNZEcoB6DW09zPmjkpBbvZRFLj6ENcZGTpdWpzNQUw6KnFi2qx8AAsqxCASwKWTDhhHJZ4mcX1K2G_0fktHTKOM3eLoIefIZAVPVXD_7yhBwscZPl5iWm-2EjgdayQS2G0Wz8wQRhF1FZb6lPJdkQyg2M9AUxb6w/s574/gobbledygook_example-1A1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="574" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV2cORRv8NPHP5m03sH0_I5bl9UWIzNZEcoB6DW09zPmjkpBbvZRFLj6ENcZGTpdWpzNQUw6KnFi2qx8AAsqxCASwKWTDhhHJZ4mcX1K2G_0fktHTKOM3eLoIefIZAVPVXD_7yhBwscZPl5iWm-2EjgdayQS2G0Wz8wQRhF1FZb6lPJdkQyg2M9AUxb6w/w579-h311/gobbledygook_example-1A1.png" width="579" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p> <span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDEPLAYER.COM</span></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">From the above definitions, we can safely say that “legalese” is the jargon of lawyers for communicating with fellow lawyers and related practitioners. When using legalese, the lawyer presumes that the reader or listener is adequately knowledgeable with legal concepts that laypeople like you and me would find too wordy for comfort and beyond comprehension.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s tempting to say that lawyers use legalese so only they themselves can interpret legal documents or their court pleadings, but that thought would be a patently unfair. More levelheaded is this justification for legalese by an anonymous lawyer-blogger: “In law, words have very specific and clearly defined meanings, and lawyers are careful when drafting legal documents to say precisely what they mean, even if the meaning is only apparent to other lawyers. Some of the word use may appear unusual to people who aren’t familiar with the law, as ordinary words can have a different meaning in a legal context.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Among Filipino lawyers, I don’t think it’s standard practice to deliberately make contracts and documents wordy, roundabout, and confusing. If they engage in legalese, it could only be the outcome of decades of overzealous, overprecise, and overbearing formulation, interpretation, and application of the law. In fact, there has been a very strong trend in North America and the United Kingdom—they are now huge movements spearheaded by both lawyers and nonpayers—to promote the use of plain and simple English not only in contracts and legal documents but also in court litigation and legislation—the better for laypeople to understand, appreciate, and follow the law.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So I find it truly puzzling why in the recent lecture attended by Justine A., that English professor appears to be headed in the opposite direction by complexifying legal writing with her very staid and draconian prescriptions.</span></p><div><br /></div><p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Part III: <br />When English cum jargon veers toward gibberish or gobbledygook</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />For nearly two decades now since I started writing this column, I would encounter much too often not only legalese and jargon—the abstruse English of the law and jurisprudence—but also their kindred baffling specimens that I pejoratively label as academese, bureaucratese, and corporatese. At their most incomprehensible extremes, of course, they veer toward the gibberish or nonsense known as gobbledygook.<br /><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="833" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu-sftVc0wajvzOYCKIum3hYm9_wE-Op7NMhlsdep-l0fg5jIXCY25XdwrtU-0zggIrGOeNDJ61f67PCiIZXo5PAIw4k5hGe3xNzt94I7q31XyQwM3ZeV-4O1iQIDJ73DKrGzALssb4sLPvTSAwN5a_ND7UFuG708nn5mk9QtHzg0L1HG_9Al-Vp6g3WU/w607-h201/pair-of-phl-jurisprudence-1A2.png" width="607" /></div> <span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE CREDIT: FACEBOOK.COM/PHIJURISOFFICIAL/PHOTOS<br /><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b>FORMS OF LEGALESE IN PHILIPPINE JURISPRUDENCE</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> (Above, left photo)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b>CLEAR, UNDERSTANDABLE LEGALESE:</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <i>Jurisprudence on social justice</i> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b>"The policy of social justice is not intended to </b></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> countenance wrongdoing simply because </span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b> it is committed by the underprivileged."</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> [G.R. No. 184011, September 18, 2013] </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> (Above, right photo) </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b>TOUGH LEGALESE BORDERING ON JARGON:</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <i>Jurisprudence on marital incapacity</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b>"Emotional immaturity and irresponsibility could </b></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> not be equated with psychological Incapacity."</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> [G.R. No. 171557, February 12, 2014]</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />I recall that back in 2003, my son Carlo who was then a high school junior brought to my attention this English sentence that he thought was “very impressive” but couldn’t seem to understand: <b>“Basically, globalization indicates a qualitative deepening of the internationalization process, strengthening the functional and weakening the territorial dimension of development.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">After quickly going over the sentence, I told him that the educator who wrote that convoluted academese—it was in a scholarly article in a major national newspaper’s op-ed page—probably meant to say this: <b>“Globalization is a deeper form of internationalization, one where a nation’s drive for development becomes more important than its territorial size,”</b> or, in even simpler English, that <b>“A nation can be small but it can become a major world economic power.”<br /><br /></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="213" data-original-width="490" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisavrwoXY-ZgWbQSLOvXpWIvFXkI2CwdSAQJiQRpANf26egGRMf_4k3QCxV3MHZZiUtLQzjYDRVAzbyoaQ31E-BuY6q8Fgfki_-KE31f7uWbx_-lNLT7mGhJotuGFeTDq_m3WFtCPsiAS0UdWCOA6MZ-ES_Q02oHiuua8iUL9asRtgzWiccu3e6k42QT0/w548-h238/globalization-vs-internationalization-1A1.png" width="548" /></div></div><p></p><p> <span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE CREDIT: EDUCBA.COM<br /><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“That certainly makes sense,” my son said, “but why do these educators say it the way they do? They are writing not only for English experts but also for people like me, aren’t they? Why then use such fuzzy words as <b>‘qualitative deepening’</b> and <b>‘territorial dimension of development’</b>?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Son, this article was not written for you,” I replied. “It was probably written with the best intentions for their fellow educators and higher-ups, but somehow it landed on this newspaper without being adapted and edited for readers like us.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">At least until about 20 years ago—that was before the plain and simple English movement started in the United States—bureaucratese like the sentence that follows below lorded it over in federal trade communication: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Purification of unliquidated obligations is essential for the early identification and correction of invalid obligation amounts to ensure full and effective fund utilization.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In plain and simple English, that statement is probably saying this: </span><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“To make sure that our funds are fully and effectively utilized, unliquidated expenses and invalid claims must be identified and rectified right away.”</span><br /><br /></b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="494" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1N0u97PEpkNXG19eo0AsW1CZMM1cfCbUgMz2o3WGn41uBheqLaweURVaxWPT_BbM2r8qq-NBaiqqs27ydTq_457wFIQgIeMMDYrN6DxoC9WPiXI7fUYxoxfXbvnEU3sj4MY0YCTm8demjxuIxveBsHwDYyB_iVvfsRt2kNrmKm2ogl83NVeluEXtI40E/w530-h422/bureaucratese_sample-1A1.png" width="530" /></div><p></p><p> <span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDESERVE.COM</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Worse yet is this bureaucratic reply—it almost borders on gobbledygook—by an American military general to a subordinate’s request way back in the 1980s: </span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“Because of your predisposition to your position’s productive capacity, it would momentarily be injudicious, as per government standards, to advocate an increment.”</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What the military general probably meant to say was simply this: </span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“You don’t deserve a pay increase now because of your poor performance in your position.”</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But are we in the Philippines any better in our law and jurisprudence by using—if not plain and simple English—at least clear and fathomable legalese? I was hoping that we have made great progress on this aspect until a Forum member brought to my attention this Supreme Court jurisprudence about “consignation” (GR L-8496, April 25, 1956): </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“(T)he disagreement between a lessor and a lessee as to the amount of rent to be paid by a lessee cannot be decided in an action of consignation but in that of forcible entry and unlawful detainer that the lessor institutes when the lessee refuses to pay the lessor the rents that he has fixed for the property.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Honestly, I thought the grammar and syntax of that piece of jurisprudence were scrupulously correct and beyond reproach, so I actually made every effort to make its sense clearer. Until this time, though, I’m still scratching my head over the complicated, mind-bending justification for how our very own Supreme Court had ruled in such cases.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">********** </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This three-part exposition first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the September 9, 2021 Internet edition of</i> The Manila Times,<i>© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span> </p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-66209085990872284452023-10-17T22:20:00.009-07:002023-10-17T22:36:48.727-07:00In Defense of the Serial Comma<p><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>ESSAYS
BY JOSE CARILLO RETROSPECTIVE:</i></span></span></b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Using the serial comma is no</span></b><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">t</span></b><b><span style="font-size: x-large;"> just a matter of stylistic preference</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It might seem like it’s just a matter of personal stylistic preference, but unlike most journalists and writers, I am a consistent user of the serial comma in both my private correspondence and published work. The serial comma, for those who happen not to have heard of it, is the comma placed immediately before the conjunctions “and,” “or,” or “nor” that precedes the final item in a serial list of three or more items, as in this sentence: <b>“The European tourist visited Manila, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok last summer.”</b> Most newspaper writers and editors routinely do away with serial commas, though, and would write that sentence this way: <b>“The European tourist visited Manila, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok last summer.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now the question is: Am I just being dense or bullheaded in using the serial comma when most everybody else routinely gets rid of it? I had the occasion to defend my preference when it was challenged by a foreign reader of my English-usage column in <i>The Manila Times</i> in 2019, and I thought of posting that defense in that week’s edition of the Forum for the appreciation of those who still have an open mind about the matter. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaHKmxbz9LystGWm21L9Jv5h3X1caHSp_b8rjSNqaH_hSGJnf8SrpLn9Vln4CyJhDna2C0jNXWpFwDWtFOxxJDjL-zUAxCg_1mfYdZQQJvG-rFOiPH73DTC7Hy_MYmZ_COIeSH0ivO917JI6_rxQtsJAkuGu8dzxlH-E_DiAbaU2XBK-NXrniwWYMv1eI/s560/usage-of-the-oxford-comma-1D1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="560" data-original-width="551" height="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaHKmxbz9LystGWm21L9Jv5h3X1caHSp_b8rjSNqaH_hSGJnf8SrpLn9Vln4CyJhDna2C0jNXWpFwDWtFOxxJDjL-zUAxCg_1mfYdZQQJvG-rFOiPH73DTC7Hy_MYmZ_COIeSH0ivO917JI6_rxQtsJAkuGu8dzxlH-E_DiAbaU2XBK-NXrniwWYMv1eI/w590-h600/usage-of-the-oxford-comma-1D1.png" width="590" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"> INFOGRAPHIC CREDIT: KAUFERDMC.COM</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Here's that column of mine on the serial comma:</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Sometime ago, a foreign reader of my column in <i>The Manila Times</i> raised an eyebrow over my use of the comma before the conjunction “and” in this sentence: <b>“The (author) unravels the various mechanisms and tools of English for combining words and ideas into clear, logical, and engaging writing.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The foreign reader commented: “There is a comma after the second to the last adjective, and I noted that you do this all the time. Has some authority changed convention?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That comma that made him uncomfortable is, of course, the <b>serial comma</b>, which is also called the <b>Oxford comma</b> and the <b>Harvard</b> <b>comma</b>. It’s the comma placed by some writers like me—but avoided by most editors and writers of Philippine newspapers and magazines—immediately before the conjunction “and,” “or,” or “nor” that precedes the final item in a list of three or more items. Admittedly, its use has remained debatable up to this day among writers and editors in various parts of the world.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here’s how I justified my consistent use of the serial comma to that foreign reader: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Yes, I use the serial comma all the time as a matter of stylistic choice. I just happen to have imbibed the serial-comma tradition from Strunk and White’s <i>The Elements of Style</i>, the <i>Chicago Manual of Style</i>, and H.W. Fowler’s <i>Modern English Usage</i>. However, during my early days as a campus journalist and later as a general assignments reporter for a daily newspaper (<i>The Philippines Herald</i>, 1972), I would routinely knock off my serial commas because that newspaper I was working with had adopted the no-serial-comma preference of American print media, particularly <i>The New York Times</i> and the <i>Associated Press</i>. If I didn’t knock off those serial commas myself, my editors would do so anyway and sullenly admonish me not to foist my personal preference over the house rule. </span></p><p><span><span style="font-size: medium;">But no, the convention on whether or not to use the serial comma hasn’t changed at all. I’m aware that the no-serial-comma tradition remains a widespread stylistic practice of the mass media in the United Kingdom as well as in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. But personally, I just want to be consistent after making a personal choice based on my own experience in dealing with problems of punctuation over the years.</span><br /><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="462" data-original-width="654" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigwVoUC9fKVI8YNIpygS4XFBwEtvK1GN46-2450Wj5Obl5LxyAd-TWAHboNv-3TKKiJhWHEI8g7GUqcJpAR4kIwqOtz5M0YzGj585m1RmY6846BJ30wHcpDSfZ48fakYXcd4VAlD4_poXfEnUlCm1uykt2Nwa9xCi3j_XSf2TnIkP3zOhhKuOijSXwRgA/w601-h424/oxford-comma_irony-alert-1D1.png" width="601" /></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b> The Oxford comma: Decried, defended, and debated</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Of course, the usefulness of the serial comma might not be readily apparent and appreciated when the items in a sentence with a serial list consist only of a single word or two, as in the following sentences:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“She bought some apples, oranges and pears.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“For the role of Hamlet, the choices are Fred Santos, Tony Cruz, Jimmy Reyes and George Perez.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But see what happens when the listed items consist of long phrases with more than four or five words:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“The major businesses in the domestic pet services industry are traditional veterinary services, fancy pet grooming and makeover shops, a wide assortment of animal and bird food, freshwater and marine fish of various kinds and aquarium equipment and supplies for industrial and home use.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now, try to figure out where each enumerative item ends and begins in the phrase <b>“freshwater and marine fish of various kinds and aquarium equipment and supplies for industrial and home use.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In contrast, see how clear and unequivocal the last two items in the list become when we deploy a serial comma between <b>“various kinds”</b> and <b>“aquarium equipment</b>,<b>”</b> as follows:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“The major businesses in the domestic pet services industry are traditional veterinary services, fancy pet grooming and makeover shops, a wide assortment of animal and bird food, freshwater and marine fish of various kinds, and aquarium equipment and supplies for industrial and home use.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I therefore think it’s better to use a serial comma by default in such situations regardless of how long the phrase for each item is in the enumerative sequence. This way, we can consistently avoid confusing readers and avoid violating their sense of rhythm and balance. <i>(July 4, 2009)</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">-------------------</span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This article first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in </i>The Manila Times, <i>June 4, 2009 © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-48760204176896697332023-10-11T05:47:00.010-07:002023-10-13T00:12:28.419-07:00Retrospective on Notable Works in English by Our Very Own<p><b style="font-size: xx-large;">Overlooked for Months, </b><i style="font-size: xx-large;"><b>Connecting Flights</b></i><b style="font-size: xx-large;"> Finally Connects With Me</b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">(First posted in Jose Carillo's English Forum, November 19, 2010)<br /><br /></span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">L</span></b><span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>est</b> I be accused of insensitivity or indifference to notable writing by some of the finest contemporary Filipino writers in English, I am writing this much belated introduction to <i><b>Connecting Flights: Filipinos Write from Elsewhere</b></i> (Anvil Publishing, 182 pages), an anthology of essays, fiction, and verse edited by Filipino journalist and writer <b>Ruel S. de Vera</b>. I must admit that I had completely overlooked the book all through the past 10 months or so, my nose having been so close to the grindstone minding my own writing and editing jobs and seminar engagements and, of course, putting together this Forum’s weekly updates. In fact, although I visit my favorite Metro Manila bookstores often enough, it was only after my wife and I took connecting flights of our own—from Honolulu and back for a five-day stay in the United States for our only daughter’s wedding in Monterey, California, in early October of 2010—that <i><b>Connecting Flights</b></i> finally connected and caught my eye from the shelves of one of the local bookstores. (This, perhaps, is as much a measure of the extent of my personal distractedness as of the dearth of marketing efforts and media exposure for locally produced literary works in the Philippines in contrast to those for foreign titles.)</span><br /><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi885ImHRGNp_ASx0qwnvMlmpAD8ZsWWK6hdjQAfQwx9AqjreNf7JyZpEqYEqd6BwgxqO4szHM4skkK55xOcqr-nuesX1vCzr91mTBr9E6YZzkSo4jiMCWkKsJo4RTIRB9pfb-cftH6qjhauZjDi2RL4-YtofygWdd2qAsg4z7KHMmZbH32H87QG2cud74/s520/connecting-flights-bookcover-1D5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="320" height="708" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi885ImHRGNp_ASx0qwnvMlmpAD8ZsWWK6hdjQAfQwx9AqjreNf7JyZpEqYEqd6BwgxqO4szHM4skkK55xOcqr-nuesX1vCzr91mTBr9E6YZzkSo4jiMCWkKsJo4RTIRB9pfb-cftH6qjhauZjDi2RL4-YtofygWdd2qAsg4z7KHMmZbH32H87QG2cud74/w436-h708/connecting-flights-bookcover-1D5.png" width="436" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Says de Vera in his introduction to the anthology: “I am honored to be able to invite passengers whom I admire and hold genuine affection for. <i><b>Connecting Flights</b></i> boasts of a manifest with some of my favorite writer friends, each checking in with poem, fiction or essay carried forward with the greatest velocity. These are the passengers I want to be with when embarking on a trip that is to change everything, regardless of destination and duration.”</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Three of the contributors to <i><b>Connecting Flights</b></i> are friends or acquaintances of mine, namely Butch Dalisay Jr. and Krip Yuson, both of whom are Hall of Famers of the Palanca Awards for Literature, and Manolo Quezon, previously with the <i>Philippine Daily Inquirer</i> but now working in the Communications Office of the Office of the Philippine President. Thus, specific words of praise for their featured essays coming from me might sound biased, and those for the works of the 17 other contributors might unjustifiably pale or shine more brightly in comparison.* Either way might just get me into a tight fix with any of these highly talented writers. I have therefore decided to just provide a link to a well-thought-out review of <i><b>Connecting Flights</b></i> by the blogger Sumthinblue who, in a web posting last January 7, 2010, rated the collection “excellent” and “a great book for people who love travel, whether they’re jetting off in planes or in their imagination.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">I wholeheartedly agree with her ratings for <i><b>Connecting Flights</b></i> on both counts.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The 20 contributors to <i><b>Connecting Flights</b></i> are as follows <i>(in alphabetical order)</i>: <b>Dean Francis Alfar</b>, <b>Jose Dalisay Jr.</b>, <b>Lourd De Veyra</b>, <b>Karla P. Delgado</b>, <b>Rosario A. Garcellano</b>, <b>Ramil Digal Gulle</b>, <b>Christina Pantoja-Hidalgo</b>, <b>Alya B. Honasan</b>, <b>Marne L. Kilates</b>, <b>Angelo R. Lacuesta</b>, <b>Ambeth R. Ocampo</b>, <b>Charlson Ong</b>, <b>Manuel L. Quezon III</b>, <b>D.M. Reyes</b>, <b>Sev Sarmenta</b>, <b>Alice M. Sun-Cua</b>, <b>Yvette Tan</b>, <b>Joel M. Toledo</b>, <b>Alfred A. Yuson</b>, and <b>Jessica Zafra</b>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Read <a href="https://sumthinblue.com/connecting-flights/#more-3193">Sumthinblue’s review of <i><b>Connecting Flights</b></i> in the Bookmarked! website</a> now!<br /><br /></span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">ABOUT THE BOOK’S EDITOR:</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Ruel S. de Vera</b> writes for the <i>Philippine Daily Inquirer</i> and is associate editor of the <i>Sunday Inquirer Magazine</i>. He holds a Master’s in Journalism from the Ateneo de Manila University and teaches at its department of communication. A literary writer and book editor, he has received the Palanca Award for Literature, the <i>Philippines Free Press</i> Literary Award, and the Catholic Mass Media Award.</span></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-17263171788156389282023-10-04T05:51:00.006-07:002023-10-04T06:00:16.166-07:00Distinguishing direct speech from indirect or reported speech<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">What constitutes a dependent clause in reported speech - 1 </span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br />A Masteral student in Myanmar doing comparative research on the four types of sentences in English—namely simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex—asked for help in early December [2020] on how to distinguish direct speech from indirect or reported speech, and how to explain what constitutes a dependent clause in reported speech.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Paraphrasing what AungMyo said: “Our teacher said that the direct-speech statement ‘I was hungry’ becomes the dependent clause in reported speech, but in my research I need to explain precisely why and how ‘I was hungry’ becomes that dependent clause.”<br /><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Let me begin by saying that direct statements like “I was hungry” are simple and straightforward, but it gets more complicated when we report that someone else has uttered that statement. Perhaps we can’t remember the exact words said or just want to summarize them, just focus on the salient points, or perhaps improve the grammar of what was said. When we do these things, we enter the realm of what’s called reported speech or indirect speech.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="313" data-original-width="520" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI6HK2SCd5FN8bmMvSFze-T1Lkg3oZnjisJ1SXsgzEUxO0nbAI67XWvRQazXqy4KnsFsJXp0rfdwbHXoI-TzOcRUzoTOcIOKm2QnaMyHG21GmupC9I4yxbaAnFK7wk5T_Akd0zuKQSf2zCGa3aKJ9GwWePKqRspMwemdzeZDqLTb3x5U0Qjz4xs4xn6BY/w590-h356/sequence-of-tenses_reported-speech-1D1.png" width="590" /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The pivotal factor in reported speech is the tense of the reporting verb. When the reporting verb is in the simple present tense, present perfect tense, or future tense, the operative verb in the reported statement remains unchanged; often, only the subject noun or pronoun in the quoted statement need to be changed.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Consider that the directly quoted statement “I am hungry” was said by your close friend Dewi Thant Z.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the simple present tense, that statement can be rendered in reported speech as follows:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“My close friend Dewi Thant says she is hungry.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">(You say this to someone beside you just right after Dewi said “I am hungry.”)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the present perfect tense:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“My close friend Dewi Thant has said (that) she is hungry.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">(You say this to someone beside you perhaps several minutes after Dewi said it.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And in the future tense:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“My close friend Dewi Thant will say (that) she is hungry.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">(In anticipation, you can tell this to someone through your mobile phone several minutes before actually Dewi says it.)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In all three of the reporting tenses above, the only grammatically significant change in the reported statement is the replacement of the personal pronoun “I” with “My close friend Dewi Thant.” Of course, the conjunction “that” is used to introduce the reported statement, making it take the form of a dependent clause in reported speech.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In informal writing, however, the conjunction “that” can often be dropped to make the reported speech easier to articulate, as we can see in the following “that”-less constructions of the simple present tense, present perfect tense, and future tense renditions: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“My close friend Dewi Thant says she is hungry.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“My close friend Dewi Thant has said she is hungry.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“My close friend Dewi Thant will say she is hungry.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But things in reported speech become more iffy when the reporting verb is in the past tense. Take this direct quote from a Philippine official about a Somalia ship-piracy issue some years back: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“At the moment, we have not gotten any feedback as to the advisability of issuing an official ban for Filipino seamen going there (Somalia).”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Quite simply, that direct quote can be rendered in reported speech this way:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><b>“The Philippine official said (that) they had not gotten any feedback at the moment as to the advisability of issuing an official ban for Filipino seamen going to Somalia.</b></span><b>”</b></span></p><p><span><span style="font-size: medium;">When the reporting verb is in the simple past tense, the operative verb in the quoted statement—the dependent clause—generally moves one tense backwards in reported speech. However, that rule applies only when the action in the reported statement is a consummated and not a repeated or habitual one.<br /></span><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This article appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the December 17, 2020 Internet edition of</i> The Manila Times<i>,© 2020 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">What constitutes a dependent clause in reported speech - 2</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In last week’s column, I pointed out that the general rule in reported speech is to move the operative verb in the directly quoted statement one tense backwards. We also need to change the time and place signifiers in the directly quoted statement to conform to the sense of the reported statement. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Take this direct quote last week from a health official: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“This cold season, the public is advised to take even stronger measures to avoid contracting the Covid-19 virus.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In reported speech for a news report: </span></p><p><span><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“The health official said last week that during the cold season, the public should take even stronger measures to avoid contracting the Covid-19 virus.”<br /></span><br /></b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHQkl3tgsZ3t7OdYQi4GGXJ4ZwWKUkgdBqQZ9x49f4-AbI-SSWVNLvh47ugfmfLPigfqADfTeP8SipAeVi3-tcih62AaPUrpaJF4JR0oCWqdT9M6Z_ni-ZaQZ2sd-3kORpzk6jwZzYxu2WKm1p-cybwVyfChmHU65jwPdivSbJo6JQiGnvXF5N8HScKnE/s522/direct%20speech-to-reported-speech_chart-1A1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="522" data-original-width="395" height="724" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHQkl3tgsZ3t7OdYQi4GGXJ4ZwWKUkgdBqQZ9x49f4-AbI-SSWVNLvh47ugfmfLPigfqADfTeP8SipAeVi3-tcih62AaPUrpaJF4JR0oCWqdT9M6Z_ni-ZaQZ2sd-3kORpzk6jwZzYxu2WKm1p-cybwVyfChmHU65jwPdivSbJo6JQiGnvXF5N8HScKnE/w546-h724/direct%20speech-to-reported-speech_chart-1A1.png" width="546" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE CREDIT: ESL.COM AT PINTEREST.COM</span></p><p><span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">What follows are more examples of this conversion from direct speech to reported speech.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Direct quote from a bill collector to a delinquent customer two weeks ago: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“The company is giving you only until the end of the month to settle your long-overdue account.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In reported speech: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“The bill collector told the delinquent customer two weeks ago that she only had until the end of the month to settle her long-overdue account.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Direct quote from a manager to a sales supervisor yesterday: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“See me tomorrow to discuss your monthly sales.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Reported speech of what the manager told the sales supervisor today: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“My manager asked me yesterday to see him today to discuss my monthly sales.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Direct quote from an irate wife to her husband sometime ago: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Tell me what you and that woman were doing at the park yesterday.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In reported speech by the wife during a court hearing: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Your Honor, I asked my husband what he and that woman were doing at that park that day.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Direct quote from a newly married woman to a lady friend just hours ago: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Gerry and I met last year during a heavy downpour and, well, it was love at first sight.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In reported speech by the lady friend to a common acquaintance of theirs: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Cynthia told me that she and Gerry met the year before during a heavy downpour and it was love at first sight.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Apart from the time signifiers, we also need to routinely change such place and pointing signifiers as “here,” “there,” and “that” in directly quoted statements to accurately reflect the sense of the reported statement. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>Direct quote from a police officer to a car driver:<br /></span><span><br /><b>“You drove against the red light at the intersection there on Rizal Avenue corner Recto Avenue.”</b> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Reported speech by the arrested car driver at the police station: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“The arrested driver denied the traffic enforcer’s claim that he had driven against the red light in that intersection at that time.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Finally, when the operative verb in a directly quoted statement is in modal form, we need to always change the modal auxiliary to its past tense form in reported speech.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Direct quote from a friend: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“I may go to New York next month.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Reported speech: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“My friend said he might go to New York next month.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Direct quote from the general manager: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“The staff will leave only upon my instructions.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Reported speech by a supervisor to his subordinates: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><b>“The general manager made it clear that the staff should leave only upon his instructions.</b></span><b>”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Direct quote from the company’s chief operating officer: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“All projects must be finished by yearend.”</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Reported speech by the company president to division managers about the CEO’s directive: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“</b><span><b>Our CEO directed us that all projects have to be finished by yearend.”</b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">With this, we are done with our quick review of reported speech.<br /></span><i style="font-size: large;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>This article, 2,025th of the series, earlier appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the December 24, 2020 Internet edition of </i><span>The Manila Times</span><i>,© 2020 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-63353739175212355612023-09-27T20:41:00.027-07:002023-09-28T16:40:51.955-07:00A unified approach to the use of punctuation in English<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Part II:<br />THE PARENTHETICALS AND THEIR USES</span><br /><br /></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="311" data-original-width="528" height="365" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh01CqboPLwYkekLE88lttbhS8rVUc1RGWtH__gMVNOHS1ZAPrRNbuPLf_4_r4ANw50_byTruguEMoR2AdwqBWs7K45UkO8mj1KsDtgUyeEhijF6lo0DsjEWAbbTIa5Mi0vBDZ3J9Ve45MptIwAt48ho1EynL3Zeu_fQCkFlLcH7a7wFDnB3-8FIwKyRxI/w622-h365/punctuationmarks_english-1M.png" width="622" /><br /><br /></span></span><b><br /></b><div><span style="font-size: large;"><b>A. The parenthesis and its uses </b></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We are all familiar with the two curved marks that we know as <b>the parenthesis ( )</b>, but what some of us may not know is that in English grammar, the parenthesis is actually any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence or passage by some form of punctuation. That punctuation can be those two curved marks, of course, but depending on the importance of the inserted information and the writer’s intention, it can also be a pair of enclosing commas or a pair of enclosing dashes.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Let’s take a look at the following forms of the parenthesis along with examples of each</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>(1) Parenthesis by comma:</b> (a) “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” (b) “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>(2) Parenthesis by dashes:</b> “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>(3) Parenthesis by parentheses:</b> “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.”</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="359" data-original-width="479" height="359" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwSDiFme3Yj0ZRJumx26LewOjHTqcXjC9-WkURdyrwg4vwNPXOJEKwAC0pLWZNTbEPPv8G8ErTG7lcc7L81CnUtVOfqrQcM48MJedYWCevXhNni9Toy2ex8-2OHbxQOinYalgbPmMyIECHAjgUp6sziHLPPc_KEf-9Sbzj0-bv31fyzY9QdSH66NT0CHE/w478-h359/dashes-parenthesis-comma_punctuation-1A.png" width="478" /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />In each of the three examples above, the information set off by the punctuation marks—whether by commas, dashes, or parentheses—is called a <b>parenthetical</b>, and its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. A parenthetical is basically added information; however, it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. It may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, to establish the logic of the sentence, or to convey a particular tone or mood for the statement. In fact, the punctuation chosen for a parenthetical largely determines its optionality or importance to the statement.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So the big question about parentheticals is really this: Under what circumstances do we use commas, dashes, or parentheses to punctuate or set off a parenthetical from a sentence?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">THE PARENTHESIS BY
COMMA</span></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">In Example 1(a) above, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” is what’s known as a <i>nonrestrictive relative clause</i>. A nonrestrictive relative clause is a parenthetical that provides information that’s not absolutely needed to understand the sentence; in other words, <i>it is nondefining information</i>. The sentence will thus remain grammatically and semantically intact without it: “Ferdinand Magellan was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Without the nonrestrictive relative clause, however, the sentence loses a lot of valuable information about its subject, “Ferdinand Magellan”; in fact, the intended context for the statement disappears completely.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">For such type of parenthetical, the most appropriate choice of punctuation is a pair of enclosing commas, as was used in the original sentence. It won’t do to punctuate a nonrestrictive relative clause with dashes or parentheses, for either of them would render the information optional, as we can see in these two versions of that sentence:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">“Ferdinand Magellan—who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521—was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">“Ferdinand Magellan (who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521) was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Both of these sentence constructions run counter to the writer’s original intention.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">We must keep in mind, though, that the same parenthetical—“who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521”—would have become a restrictive relative clause had the subject been a generic noun like, say, “the explorer,” in which case the pair of enclosing commas would have been rendered unnecessary: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The absence of the enclosing commas indicates that the nonrestrictive relative clause has become a restrictive one.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Obviously, the following questions will come to mind when that happens: Why not leave those enclosing commas alone? What difference does it make if we let those commas stay even after changing “Ferdinand Magellan” to “the explorer”?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">The reason lies in the basic grammatical difference between a proper noun and a generic noun. We will recall that a <i>proper noun</i> is one that designates a particular being or thing, and that as a rule in English, a proper noun is capitalized to indicate this fact. A proper noun, moreover, has this important characteristic: it generally won’t accept a limiting or restrictive relative modifier to define it. By its very name, a proper noun is supposed to have already defined itself, making it one of a kind.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Now, we need to recall at this point that a relative clause or a “who”-parenthetical that comes after a proper noun—“Ferdinand Magellan” in this case—becomes a restrictive clause or limiting modifier when it’s not enclosed by a pair of commas. It is therefore grammatically incorrect for the subject “Ferdinand Magellan” to be followed by a relative clause that’s not enclosed by commas, as in this erroneous construction: “Ferdinand Magellan who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Indeed, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” will always need the pair of enclosing commas in such cases.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">It’s an altogether different thing when we replace a proper noun with a generic noun in such sentence constructions. We will then have two grammatical choices. If our intention is to, say, make “the explorer” specifically refer to “Ferdinand Magellan” and to no other person, then we need to modify it with a restrictive relative clause—one without the enclosing commas, as was done previously: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">On the other hand, if by “the explorer” we mean any explorer at all who had claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown, we would need to modify that generic noun with a nonrestrictive clause or nonlimiting modifier instead: “The explorer, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was not the same Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The enclosing commas—along with the mandatory conversion of the predicate of the sentence into a negative form—indicate that the person referred to isn’t unique but one of a number who made the claim; he could not have been the same Ferdinand Magellan referred to in the sentence with the restrictive relative clause.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Now let’s evaluate the second sentence that I gave earlier as an example of parenthesis by comma: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” Here, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” is what is known as the <i>appositive phrase</i>. It is a statement that serves to explain or identify the noun or pronoun that comes before or after it.</span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">The appositive phrase is an extremely useful grammatical device for giving context and texture to what otherwise might be very bland or uninformative sentences.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><b>THE APPOSITIVE PHRASE</b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">We will now discuss the appositive phrase found in the following sentence that I presented for evaluation earlier towards the end of Part I: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” The appositive phrase here is, of course, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” It’s an added statement that gives context and texture to this vague, bare-bones sentence: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”<br /><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="366" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj59YbQxyO9dUrzk4mzBimvpdj3DCc0zOZTLAZaR79APzx_lwxxPNqsLkdsa2hy4JboNB4knlciFlpPniGCnxXfaFOqSVuVqNyIhGXDCJw9zxnA0KSJQh7VKzW7ZyqeOlg_u9uD-6UUfvMQzJuVHxcQEeiLJaIdrSudYO0x8GUCHmfEZ9ebFPKXkuU6L38/w476-h361/appositive-phrases_artwork-1M.png" width="476" /></span></p><p><span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">On closer scrutiny, we will find that the appositive phrase is actually a simplified form of the nonrestrictive relative clause in this sentence: “Cleopatra, who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” It is, in fact, originally the relative clause “who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” but with both the relative pronoun “who” and the linking verb “was” taken out.</span></span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">That grammatical streamlining process produces a modifier in noun form—“the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later”—that is <i>in apposition</i> or equivalent to the noun form it modifies—“Cleopatra.” Indeed, appositive phrases are a compact and concise way of describing people, places, and things or of qualifying ideas within the same sentence. They allow us to provide more details about a subject without having to start another sentence—a process that sometimes undesirably slows down the pace of an unfolding exposition or narrative.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">The use of appositive phrases, we now will probably recall, is also one of the most efficient ways of combining sentences. It allows a related statement from another sentence to be folded into the sentence that precedes it. The sentence that we are evaluating now, for instance, has combined these two sentences: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire. She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” By making the statement in the second sentence an appositive in the first, we get a sentence that’s richer in texture and more interesting to read: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Such constructions also have the added virtue of allowing us to develop the basic statement of a sentence unimpeded. Assume that we have already written this basic statement: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” If we use the appositive phrase “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” to form a new sentence after it, that new sentence would often become a stumbling block to developing the basic statement. Indeed, with a powerful statement like “She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” getting in the way, it won’t be an easy task to go back to the thread of our basic statement and develop it. In contrast, folding that powerful statement into an appositive phrase in the first sentence neatly sidesteps the potential continuity problem while making that first sentence much more readable and interesting.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">The appositive phrase we have discussed above is of <i>the nonrestrictive type</i>, which means that it isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence even if it adds important additional information to it. Nonrestrictive appositive phrases are parentheticals that, like nonrestrictive relative clauses, need a pair of enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">But some appositive phrases are of the restrictive type and they don’t need those commas. An example of the restrictive appositive phrase is the phrase “Pliny the Elder” in this sentence: “The Roman scholar and encyclopedist Pliny the Elder distinguished himself as a cavalry commander in Germany and later served as a well-respected procurator in Gaul, Africa, and Spain.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">We must keep in mind, though, that restrictive appositive phrases rarely get much longer than the three-word example—“Pliny the Elder”—that's given above. This is because long, extended phrases generally don’t function well as restrictive appositives; without the enclosing commas that set off nonrestrictive appositive phrases from a sentence, extended phrases used as restrictive appositives tend to make sentences convoluted and difficult to grasp.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Try reading this sentence, for instance: “The 1965 film <i>Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines</i> is about a wacky cross-channel air race that dangled £10,000 in prize money to bring flyers from all over the world.” The restrictive appositive phrase here is the seven-word movie title “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines,” which, if it weren’t italicized or placed within quotes in the sentence, would have made that sentence so difficult to grasp. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Indeed, what we will encounter more often is <i>the restrictive appositive</i>, which identifies a person, place, or thing more closely by name in just, say, one to three words, like “Regina” and “Jennifer” in this sentence: “My brother-in-law’s sister Regina gave birth to a boy as their sister Jennifer was driving her to the hospital.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Here, the appositives “Regina” and “Jennifer” aren’t set off by commas because both are restrictive—they can’t be omitted from the sentence without affecting its basic meaning. They serve to make it clear that the speaker’s brother-in-law has at least two sisters—the one who gave birth and the other who drove her to the hospital. Without those restrictive appositives, in fact, the sentence becomes incoherent: “My brother-in-law’s sister gave birth to a boy as their sister was driving her to the hospital.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">But this question will obviously linger in our minds: What if we supply the enclosing commas and make those two appositives nonrestrictive instead, as in this construction: “My brother-in-law’s sister, Regina, gave birth to a boy as their sister, Jennifer, was driving her to the hospital”? The answer, as I will now explain, is a categorical “no.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">In its nonrestrictive form (with the enclosing commas), the appositive “Regina” implies that the speaker’s brother-in-law has only one sister whose name happens to be Regina. However, the other nonrestrictive appositive, “Jennifer,” also implies that both the speaker’s brother-in-law and his sister Regina have only one sister whose name happens to be Jennifer.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">This, of course, contradicts the earlier implication that the speaker’s brother-in-law has only one sister, Regina. Indeed, he has at least two sisters, Regina and Jennifer. This is why it isn’t advisable to put what should logically be a restrictive appositive into a nonrestrictive form, for these two forms are neither grammatically and semantically equivalent nor interchangeable.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Even if there’s no possibility of an identity mix-up, the restrictive appositive form is often preferable to the nonrestrictive form if the appositive and the word it identifies are so closely related, as in this example: “Her husband Alfredo is trying his luck as an overseas foreign worker.” Here, it can be argued that commas should set off “Alfredo” because this name isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence, thus making it a nonrestrictive appositive. However, the nouns “her husband” and “Alfredo” are so closely related that they can logically be considered a single noun phrase, “her husband Alfredo.” The commas then become superfluous, making “Alfredo” a restrictive appositive.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><b>THE PARENTHESIS BY
DASHES AND THE PARENTHESIS BY PARENTHESES</b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">We already know that a parenthesis or parenthetical is basically added information whose distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. So far, however, we have taken up only its first two types—the nonrestrictive relative clause and the nonrestrictive appositive phrase, both of which require enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence. We have also taken up the restrictive relative clause and the restrictive appositive phrase, but we have seen that they aren’t really true parentheticals because they aren’t expendable—we don’t really have the option to drop them from the sentence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="547" height="355" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHuXtqqbbRbjYVkTH_UFZUTvIDTc6TPTRo_0oOl72oE0tI9R0-pf42wTQZwXFPQ-zHEwXdzyZ4k-36AOi6ufZ06MlZ9nZPPSYxFQ-Bi1dDk_5w4GvOgI78ae2y7yKJQplJyXr1njYOXZijezS2tPlSc0TCCc7PlmgNnuyj-kh1X5LKzZ2lZ4ZYlHSxwoY/w502-h355/parenthesis&dashes-1A.png" width="502" /></span></div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><br />This time we’ll take up the two other kinds of parentheticals: <i>the parenthesis by dashes</i>, and <i>the parenthesis by parentheses</i>. They differ from the parenthesis by comma in that neither of them can be punctuated properly and adequately by a pair of enclosing commas. In their case, though, the use of dashes or parentheses is generally interchangeable and is often a matter of stylistic choice. This choice largely depends on whether the parenthetical is really optional—perhaps simply an aside—or contextually necessary; in any case, however, using enclosing commas to set it off is out of the question.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><b>Parenthesis by dashes.</b> This kind of parenthetical normally folds another sentence into a sentence, as in this example: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” What sets off the parenthetical from the main sentence is a pair of double dashes, which indicates a much stronger break in the thought or structure of the sentence than what a pair of enclosing commas can provide.</span></p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">See what happens when we use commas instead to punctuate that kind of parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill, they said they didn’t know it then, but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” The pauses provided by the two commas are much too brief to indicate the sudden shift from the major developing thought to the subordinate idea.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">If the writer so chooses, however, parentheses may also be used for that same parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill (they said they didn’t know it then) but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” Note, though, that when parentheses are used, the implication is that the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he would when he uses double dashes instead.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="349" data-original-width="466" height="335" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_wujntXym-9tWm8KJqIQE5sRRzvgcLQamIQVhVq6GS7OJGsmCfTm4jZMthznCUSQa3C-l6wmKqraQeeS30YIQYwuwNnLCY2WbZb-HArR58JzpFnGhiwH6WgikVVEvX0UBhTvVhB1vrVvzgc68jeqy6wmD2DLdLfCWt-6aiGXFdlBU-uVBdgUBz22IF1M/w446-h335/parenthesis_elaboration-1A.png" width="446" /></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><b>Parenthesis by parentheses.</b> This is the preferred punctuation when the writer wants to convey to the reader that the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to his exposition, as in this example: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.” However, if the writer intends to take up the dealer’s apparently false assurance in some detail later in the exposition, the parenthesis by dashes would be a good foreshadowing device: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan—the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled—busted one of its pistons.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Parentheticals enclosed by parentheses need not be complete sentences, of course. They can be simple qualifying phrases within or at the tail end of sentences: “Many elective officials (of the dynastic kind, particularly) sometimes forget that they don’t own those positions.” “The disgruntled cashier took the day off (without even filing a leave).”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Even more commonly, parentheses are used to add a fact—maybe a name or a number—that’s subordinate or tangential to the rest of the sentence, as in this example: “Recent geologic research <i>(Alvarez, Alvarez et al, 1980)</i> indicates that the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid some 10 km in diameter smashed on present-day Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Now that I’m done discussing the parenthesis by parentheses, I would like to take this opportunity to make a clear distinction between parentheses and brackets in American English. As I’ve earlier discussed, <i>parentheses</i>—sometimes called “round brackets”—are meant to convey to the reader that (1) the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to the sentence, and that (2) the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he would when he sets them off with double dashes instead.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDbmtNULoEbjcPQCk_UQH6-i2XCcooLEYQH9-zzXljG370iaJlB_pIjw-7jdEzp0v6HkCwypd5LSl8zkHM-s5IGi53cfUXWLIvlvUrittMggjZDdEo742teVuniUCgXH6MDr4BRAJqopkOcmdbc-5cVnqlWszWf8l2a-mV7FUvE9ftQViVl-KcxDA43xA/s536/brackets_usage-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="357" data-original-width="536" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDbmtNULoEbjcPQCk_UQH6-i2XCcooLEYQH9-zzXljG370iaJlB_pIjw-7jdEzp0v6HkCwypd5LSl8zkHM-s5IGi53cfUXWLIvlvUrittMggjZDdEo742teVuniUCgXH6MDr4BRAJqopkOcmdbc-5cVnqlWszWf8l2a-mV7FUvE9ftQViVl-KcxDA43xA/w499-h332/brackets_usage-1A.png" width="499" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">In contrast, brackets—also known as “square brackets”—are for more specialized uses, particularly for (1) inserting information or authorial comment into direct quotations, (2) inserting translations of quoted statements said in another language, (3) citing errors within quoted statements, and (4) setting off a parenthetical that’s already set off by parentheses in the sentence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Precisely when is bracket Usage #1 called for? Assume that we are quoting verbatim a passage from Miguel Cervantes’ <i>Don Quijote</i> in reference to Dulcinea, his imagined Empress of La Mancha. Let’s say that the passage uses only pronouns to refer to Dulcinea, and we know that it isn’t permissible to alter exact quotes from a literary work. We then have to use brackets to insert information identifying Dulcinea for our readers: “‘If I were to show her [Dulcinea, his imagined Empress of La Mancha] to you,’ answered Don Quijote, ‘what merit would there be in acknowledging a truth so manifest to all? The important point is that you should believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend it without setting eyes on her.’”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">As for bracket Usage #2, a publication in a particular language, say English, will need brackets to insert translations of quoted statements said in another language, say Tagalog, as in the following passage from a business magazine: “‘<i>Hindi lang kulang, kapos na kapos talaga</i> [It’s been not only short but way, way below our needs],’ she says of the family’s finances.’”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Bracket Usage #3 is called for when we have to cite errors in quoted statements, as in this example: “Our confused physics teacher said, ‘While eating an apple in a bathtub, Isaac Newton [by traditional accounts it was actually Archimedes] shouted “Eureka!” when he discovered the basic principle of hydrostatics.’”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Finally, we may need to take recourse to bracket Usage #4 to set off a parenthetical that’s already set off by parentheses, as in this example: “The life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (who wrote three major philosophical studies [<i>On the Orator</i>, <i>On the Republic</i>, and <i>On the Laws</i>] at a time that he still couldn’t engage in politics) coincided with the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.” Such usage isn’t a pretty sight, but there are times when scholarly exactitude demands it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><b><i>(This wraps up my blogspot’s two-part series on the parentheticals and their uses.)</i></b></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></span></p></div>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-42034341344416843492023-09-20T18:50:00.030-07:002023-09-27T20:44:05.706-07:00A unified approach to the use of punctuation in English<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span>Part I: <br /></span><span>INTRODUCTION</span></span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">As with all the alphabet-based languages, English is primarily dependent on word choices and their combinations for the successful delivery of ideas. In written form, however, English would be so clunky and insufferably confusing without the benefit of punctuation. Whether they are short or long, in fact, what makes sentences and expositions in English eminently readable and understandable is their proper use of punctuation marks—whether the comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parenthesis, or period—to clarify meaning and set off boundaries between structural units of the sentence.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht0oHKgSnDv2fo4KwLyF5FMWGeATOgRglB6nTDUG-RGf8mYg-ZhQphHGzCDpaO7DSwfKTR2qI2Kobi5NWH3Bu-0Si7ACiax_tZGfs1IbKPlTIXydDcoubN2TBu8yNDNgL2OuH_hxB4ki5MPUXUsx5GErAkxaMHvHN7P52ANkit01aynlNeOpSdjt6xLPY/s754/punctuationmarks_english-1M.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="444" data-original-width="754" height="367" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht0oHKgSnDv2fo4KwLyF5FMWGeATOgRglB6nTDUG-RGf8mYg-ZhQphHGzCDpaO7DSwfKTR2qI2Kobi5NWH3Bu-0Si7ACiax_tZGfs1IbKPlTIXydDcoubN2TBu8yNDNgL2OuH_hxB4ki5MPUXUsx5GErAkxaMHvHN7P52ANkit01aynlNeOpSdjt6xLPY/w625-h367/punctuationmarks_english-1M.png" width="625" /></a></span></p><span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Punctuation marks, of course, usually serve the basic purpose of providing desired pauses and stops within a sentence, as in this sentence from Edward Gibbon’s <i>The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</i>: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” Here, we have the <b>commas</b> providing short pauses, the semicolons, longer pauses; and the period, a full stop. </span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Then here’s a sentence that uses a <b>colon</b> to formally and emphatically introduce something: “This is what he always watched for in his business: the bottom line.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span>And finally, from a short-story by a friend of mine, the late Palanca Awards Hall of Famer Ed Maranan </span><span>(he passed away on May 8, 2018 at the age of 71)</span><span>, here’s a sentence that uses a <b>pair of dashes</b> to set off a parenthetical remark from the main sentence: “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift—and yes, pride in his grandpa—was growing by the minute.”</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">About the matter of punctuating <b>parentheticals</b>, let me first share with you a very enlightening e-mail conversation I had with </span><span style="font-size: medium;">Ed about their uses in that sentence of his. </span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Retrospective: A grammar conversation on parenthetical usage</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What’s the proper punctuation mark to use for parentheticals? Quite often a pair of commas will do, but there are grammatical situations where commas simply prove inadequate to the task, resulting in structurally flawed sentences with a subject-verb disagreement error or a dangling or misplaced modifier.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="349" data-original-width="644" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJgfKTlKq71yaabOhKRqTNFS_sDZN7siR-lqVUNznxuxDDSikH66C8mcWtIV3fJqP-AJv7JwUwRVGcSVZ4djDqOTW5D134G8CKNEUNdNK3KMSz6tQaCg3cRFnUMqxaLtXXmi2-zINMGTMuSepP2xQY2swRdj3Q4sBYE2bGo6x-04X4h-L1vsceUw6K6vY/w464-h251/comma-dash-usage_composite-1A.png" width="464" /></div><br /><p></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">My conversation with Ed Maranan in the year 2010 went as follows:: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Ed:</b> Joe, here’s a line from one of my children’s stories:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift—and yes, pride in his grandpa—were growing by the minute.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Am I right in seeing more than one subject in the subordinate clause which calls for a plural form verb, or does the word “interest” subsume the rest of the clause and thus call for a singular verb?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Me: </b>The operative subject in the subordinate clause is definitely the singular noun “interest.” The subject “pride” in the parenthetical “and yes, pride in his grandpa” doesn’t compound the operative subject (a parenthetical being an optional grammatical element), so “interest” is the only operative subject in that subordinate clause. We therefore have a subject-verb disagreement error here because the sentence uses the plural verb “were” for the singular noun “interest.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Ed:</b> Aha, but if I were to construct the sentence in this manner:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift and yes, pride in his grandpa were growing by the minute.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">...would the sentence with the plural “were” now be correct?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Me: </b>Yes, definitely! It would greatly clarify matters, though, if the word “yes” is preceded by a comma to make it a full-fledged interruptive. Otherwise, some readers might misconstrue the whole clause “pride in his grandpa were growing by the minute” itself to be the interruptive.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Ed: </b>Just a follow-up. Look at these two constructions:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">1. “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift and, yes, pride in his grandpa were growing by the minute.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">2. “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift and yes, pride in his grandpa, were growing by the minute.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The first is your suggested placement of the comma—before “yes.” What if the comma were placed after grandpa? And here’s still another possible construction:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">3. “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift and, yes, pride in his grandpa, were growing by the minute.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Three commas in all. Would this not more fully solve the problem of ambiguity and observe the rule of agreement? You said that without the comma before “yes,” readers might misconstrue “(and yes,) pride in his grandpa were growing by the minute” as the interruptive, with a faulty agreement, but this would not be the case because “whose interest in his little birthday gift” would then be a lost, dangling paraphrase without a verb, would it not?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Me: </b>I think the use of more commas to resolve the ambiguity in that construction just adds more grammatical and structural wrinkles to the sentence. In Sentence #2, in particular, putting a comma after “grandpa” detaches the interruptive “yes, pride in his grandpa” from the main sentence and makes the plural verb form “were growing” erroneous.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Sentence #3 is better than Sentence #2 in that it provides a comma before “yes,” thus making it a full-fledged interruptive separate from the parenthetical “pride in his grandpa.” However, both sentences suffer from the same subject-verb disagreement error.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We can make that error disappear by simply using a pair of dashes instead of commas to set off the parenthetical from the rest of the sentence:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift—and, yes, pride in his grandpa—was growing by the minute.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here, the pair of dashes provides a much stronger break in the thought and structure of the sentence and this prevents the parenthetical from messing up the sentence grammatically.</span></p><p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">(This ended our conversation.)</span></i></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">So precisely what is a parenthetical?</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For those encountering the term for the first time, a parenthetical is any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence by some form of punctuation. Its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it, but it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. It may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, to establish the logic of the sentence, or to convey a particular tone or mood for the statement. Whether it’s optional or necessary largely depends on the kind of punctuation chosen for it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This brings us to the big question regarding these punctuation marks: Precisely when do we use each of them in our sentences and expositions? And in particular, which of the punctuation marks do we use to set off a parenthetical—by definition, any inserted amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence—from a main sentence?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Next: <span> </span><b>Part II - The parenthesis and its uses</b> <span> </span>September 28, 2023</span></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-66275921033665565832023-09-15T04:48:00.000-07:002023-09-15T04:48:03.587-07:00Third updated edition of “English Plain and Simple” now off the press<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>September 14, 2023</b>—Now off the press this week is the third updated edition of Jose Carillo’s best-selling book <i>English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language.</i> Hailed by leading academicians, journalists, and critics upon its release in 2005 as “a charmer of a book that delights as well as instructs,” it won the National Book Award for linguistics from the Manila Critics Circle that same year.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuiYSScu8PbM3reRdGtZflm2hCeR6CBH-j9d2c3miI4JafUGTX5Hz88rIVSzHUE-fUTFV4SxS4HWH84txgFzQ9btbkeT1LUsgPfeAXA8rKhBmo0eHWRDXxR-fEMfDWdBXixfowi9nIQax57dT60T_2E7UCUxWfsAy9Qoy_57JP3q8VjYlGSvR2aKH0kr8/s578/epsbook-and-author-behind-penname-1D1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="433" data-original-width="578" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuiYSScu8PbM3reRdGtZflm2hCeR6CBH-j9d2c3miI4JafUGTX5Hz88rIVSzHUE-fUTFV4SxS4HWH84txgFzQ9btbkeT1LUsgPfeAXA8rKhBmo0eHWRDXxR-fEMfDWdBXixfowi9nIQax57dT60T_2E7UCUxWfsAy9Qoy_57JP3q8VjYlGSvR2aKH0kr8/w567-h426/epsbook-and-author-behind-penname-1D1.png" width="567" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;">The Manila Times Publishing Corp. announced this week that the new edition of the 500-page book is now being distributed to major bookstores nationwide, with copies also made available for direct volume deliveries to institutional and corporate buyers and interested individual distributors.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>English Plain and Simple</i> brings together the author’s first collection of grammar lessons and advice that originally appeared in his long-running <i>Manila Times</i> column that started coming out six days a week in 2002. Two more volumes drawing material from his <i>Manila Times</i> columns followed, namely <i>The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors</i> (2008) and <i>Give Your English the Winning Edge</i> (2009).</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRM3H8HQ0m7-z1mZdC4KNYn8CDT9gG5z8ZTgKXkRLqRhUt5nvHoTj-pw04Jx8p_yc56LNA72AlFivlgRh_QNkcByneM9777JuUDNatJJ60lM1bvAaV83KeYaT2oKXLnDTPO07wwB7_kk8CI8Or3s2pYa2UCf1Lm2o1w_pyGpqmBi8pGaGjl3rMY5rOe8I/s576/Carillo's-3-English-usagebooks-1Z5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="576" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRM3H8HQ0m7-z1mZdC4KNYn8CDT9gG5z8ZTgKXkRLqRhUt5nvHoTj-pw04Jx8p_yc56LNA72AlFivlgRh_QNkcByneM9777JuUDNatJJ60lM1bvAaV83KeYaT2oKXLnDTPO07wwB7_kk8CI8Or3s2pYa2UCf1Lm2o1w_pyGpqmBi8pGaGjl3rMY5rOe8I/w619-h305/Carillo's-3-English-usagebooks-1Z5.png" width="619" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">The third revised edition of <i>English Plain and Simple</i> is now available this week and a new edition of <i>Give Your English the Winning Edge</i> is scheduled for release this coming October</span></b> </div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In his foreword to English Plain and Simple, Dr. Jose Y. Dalisay, Ph.D, professor emeritus of English at the University of the Philippines and Hall of Famer of the Carlos Palanca Awards for Literature, says: “There are many guides to English that the avid student can pick up, but quite a few, I think, actually do more harm than good as ponderous rulebooks meant for rote memorization. But every now and then comes a charmer of a book that delights as well as it instructs. <i>English Plain and Simple</i> is one such gem, for which we have the pseudonymous Mr. Carillo to thank. Whether he was walking me through the hierarchy of adjectives or discovering Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carillo never failed to show me something new and cause me to smile in recognition of a shared experience.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the latest edition of English Plain and Simple, the author finally reveals his identity after over 20 years of using Jose Carillo as pen name and explains why he used it. He is the veteran newspaper journalist and communications executive Carlos O. Llorin Jr., a former college newspaper editor-in-chief (the weekly <i>Dawn</i>, University of the East), marketing field researcher (Asia Research Inc.), national newspaper reporter (<i>Philippines Herald</i>), and ad agency public relations manager (J. Romero & Associates). He worked for San Miguel Corporation for 18 years as editorial services head, audio-visual group head, senior communications assistant, and product manager, then as corporate communications manager for rhe company's Magnolia Divison with the rank of assistant vice president. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">He won nine major Philippine industry awards as editor in chief of the company’s monthly magazine <i>Kaunlaran</i> and fortnightly newsletter. As executive director of San Miguel’s Magnolia Youth Achievement Awards, he won a Gold Quill Award from the U.S.-based International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) in 1989 and the Golden World Award from the U.K.-based International Public Relations Association (IPRA) in 1990.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Llorin took optional early retirement as assistant vice president for communications of San Miguel’s Magnolia Division in 1993, later running the English-language services company Asia Herald Inc. as general manager for five years until 2007. Currently, aside from writing his weekly column in The Manila Times, he is an independent writer and book editor as well as editing and communication consultant for corporate, institutional, and individual clients.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Describing the rationale for writing his three English-usage books, Carlos Llorin Jr. says: “As with my weekly columns in the <i>Manila Times</i>, they aim to help nonnative English speakers improve their written English without having to go back to the classroom and, frankly, also to make Filipinos keenly aware that if their English is bad, it’s largely due to the Philippine culture’s fervid addiction to legalese. This done, his English-usage books then gently walk the reader through the basic and practical and later the finer aspects of English grammar and semantics, revisiting all of the parts of speech and their rudiments—from nouns and pronouns to adjectives and adverbs, from the comma and period to the paragraph and double-dash.” The emphasis is to train themselves to think, speak, and write in clear and simple English. <b>(Read the related feature article below about the author's rationale for writing his English-usage books, </b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>“</b></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The problem with our English according to Jose Carillo.</b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>”</b></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>)</b></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>*******************************************</b></span></p><p><b><u>STRANGE, CONVOLUTED, STILTED LANGUAGE<br /></u></b><b><span style="font-size: large;">The problem with our English according to Jose Carillo</span></b><span style="font-size: large; white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When Jose Carillo’s English-language services company ran a want ad for editors sometime in 2003, close to 100 applicants applied by e-mail. Practically all of them had at least an AB degree in English, mass communication, or the social sciences; three were magna cum laudes and six cum laudes; and 10 even had Master’s degrees. Disconcertingly, however, most of their job application letters were worded and constructed in unbelievably strange, convoluted, stilted English like the one below that's reproduced here verbatim:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Dear Sir/Madam:<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Greetings in Peace!<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Responding with utmost immediacy to your job opportunity ad published on January 6, ____ in the __________, I wish to inform you of my fervor interest in applying for the position of Editor. I am an AB graduate of the University of ______ with distinct recognition as a leader and achiever in the field of debating and as editor-in-chief of the student publication, journals, and other newsletters of the academe.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>[The applicant then gives a glowing three-paragraph work experience description.]</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“For your evaluation, I am enclosing my résumé as an attachment as a first step in exploring the possibilities of employment in your client’s organization. I would appreciate hearing from you soon.</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Thank you for your consideration and God Bless.”</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In his book <i>English Plain and Simple</i> whose third revised edition was released this week, Jose Carillo says the English of such job application letters is obviously not the English to use when you want to present yourself in the most favorable way to a prospective employer. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">He says: “The truth is that many of us who write in English distrust our own ability to present ourselves in a good light. No matter how educated or experienced we are, we often instinctively assume the persona and voice of someone else when we sit down to write. We take refuge in some pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo that we think will impress our reader or listener. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“And once we get started in this legal-sounding language, we get snared and become addicted to it. Instead of writing as we would talk, we habitually grasp at these arcane words and phrases in the mistaken belief that like some mantra, they will miraculously make things happen for us.”<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Jose Carillo likewise observes that the English of not a few of the country's Ph.Ds with a “publish or perish” mindset often verges on gibberish—long, pompous, confused, and empty—like this hardly comprehensible official report, published verbatim in a daily newspaper, by an education official writing on Philippine education indicators: <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Teachers’ skills, training, development and welfare with __ percent of the sample attest to their importance in validating the significant effect of teachers’ welfare on the students. Skills training, welfare and development translated into further studies, seminars and benefits are the determinants of Friday sickness (in cases of teachers posted in far-flung barrios, where teachers will usually miss Friday classes, indicative of their dedication to the learning process of their ward) and the gruesome test of dedication and commitment.”</b><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Carillo’s bestselling book <i>English and Simple</i>, which won the National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle upon its publication in 2005, makes every effort to address this very serious and embarrassing communication inadequacy. It provides systematic but easy-to-follow instructions in English writing that students and teachers alike need to continually develop so they can communicate their thoughts and ideas clearly, simply, and confidently to particular audiences.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>The Third Updated Edition of </i>English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language, <i>500 pages, paperback cover and 40 lbs bookpaper inside pages, Php 699.00 per copy, was released in mid-September 2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. Copyright 2004 by Jose A. Carillo, author. Copyright 2008, 2023 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Printed in the Philippines.</i></span></p><p><br /></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-66690698797872549032023-09-06T23:12:00.000-07:002023-09-06T23:12:03.972-07:00Going Deeper Into Language - 4<p> <b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Part IV:<br />Watching out against the verbal fallacies – 1</span></b></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">We are done with our discussion of the first two broad categories of the logical fallacies, namely the <b>material fallacies</b> and <b>fallacies of relevance</b>. This time we will take up the third category: the <b>verbal fallacies</b>, or the false statements or conclusions that result when words are used improperly or ambiguously. They are the <i>fallacies of ambiguity</i>, <i>equivocation</i>, <i>amphiboly</i>, <i>composition</i>, <i>division</i>, and <i>abstraction</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The problem with verbal fallacies is not so much faulty logical thinking as the inadvertent or deliberate lack of clarity in language. This generally results from the wrong or slippery use of words, whether spoken or written, and it sometimes happens by accident, as in a slip of the tongue, an error in penmanship, or hitting the wrong word processor key. Normally, no great harm is done in such cases. When used deliberately with malice or ill intent, however, these misuses of language can trick or mislead people into making wrong decisions or choices. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Let’s now take up the first two kinds of verbal fallacies.</span><br /><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXUHEDjcDWv7kTESxReUsLtvRrdfzHFJ_HtEA7jiyEVtSae1dWv33xsgCJfqirDo00-GA1TS28zavEURNDKyu6nNQxkJMJ_tgPLlWMimf1I4LfoheYngQfZ2XN_d9K3h_hTmGb1V9ryh2UNWFygFwJmhfftwqkW3mvxKoefg6k_i8tP6xl6Pc2jXnT2vU/s411/verbal-fallacy_ambiguity-examples-1B.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="280" data-original-width="411" height="393" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXUHEDjcDWv7kTESxReUsLtvRrdfzHFJ_HtEA7jiyEVtSae1dWv33xsgCJfqirDo00-GA1TS28zavEURNDKyu6nNQxkJMJ_tgPLlWMimf1I4LfoheYngQfZ2XN_d9K3h_hTmGb1V9ryh2UNWFygFwJmhfftwqkW3mvxKoefg6k_i8tP6xl6Pc2jXnT2vU/w576-h393/verbal-fallacy_ambiguity-examples-1B.png" width="576" /></a></div><br /> <img border="0" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="402" height="407" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7j4wV2gREfObECvkyc3uEPDgasfXuiMzOSajDIX2m0WwNZujBjc9zgMwlu7KORx4OR9ouA_26_5N2dBGbP7eZCsQjQ7v0g1uHjeO59QYOcoD4wFzJ0SdFStyOdnXqYXgt0LtHMT-a663DAWwDW_grGuERAM91bfmIGbq9wEkWRYt_CiaxyVee5b-OPLs/w583-h407/verbal-fallacy_global-warming-joke-1A.png" width="583" /><p></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Fallacy of ambiguity.</b> The use of undefined words or words with a vague meaning constitutes a fallacy of ambiguity. In retrospect, let’s take a look at this campaign slogan on radio of a presidential candidate in the 2010 Philippine national elections: <b>“Candidate X: <i>Pinili ng Taong Bayan</i>”</b> (“Chosen by the People”). These obvious questions arise: What was he chosen for and in what context and in what manner? And who were those people who chose him and how many were they? And even if they chose him, so what? The answers to these questions are perplexing and unclear, thus making such slogans fallacious.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Another case of an arresting verbal ambiguity was this slogan of another presidential candidate on radio that same year: <b><i>“Panata Ko—Tapusin Ang Kahirapan!”</i></b> (“My Pledge—Put an End to Poverty!”). It’s a magnificent but vague commitment—but how plausible is it? Precisely how would the candidate end such an intractable sociological problem as poverty? What if the listener happened to be enormously rich—would that promise still apply to him or her? Pledges like this, no matter how well-intentioned, constitute a verbal fallacy by looseness of language.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmih0m1JOcanhMIuLGZtSRKCqz7-G-CDbhUiI2mog7MZR5U1qPf5flu9Ah1TFGIeGnoGjRnRTJ3IHXAd58pQHNaB3_7AF5roS4mPiG59rXYiUNSGFoAbg2wPBDGl4iwJFh_gU0nV58eT-Ab6-bls4KUGVPfmvrsTjfTn2Ld-E4g3cBnImbOh1ifYdGCzo/s516/verbal-fallacies_ambiguity-of-politician-claims-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="288" data-original-width="516" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmih0m1JOcanhMIuLGZtSRKCqz7-G-CDbhUiI2mog7MZR5U1qPf5flu9Ah1TFGIeGnoGjRnRTJ3IHXAd58pQHNaB3_7AF5roS4mPiG59rXYiUNSGFoAbg2wPBDGl4iwJFh_gU0nV58eT-Ab6-bls4KUGVPfmvrsTjfTn2Ld-E4g3cBnImbOh1ifYdGCzo/w559-h313/verbal-fallacies_ambiguity-of-politician-claims-1A.png" width="559" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">There was also this slogan in the TV commercial of a senatorial candidate during that campaign season: <b>“Gusto Ko, Happy Ka!”</b> (“I Want You to Be Happy!”). Sounds arresting and disarmingly candid, but what does it really mean? And how does the candidate’s desire to make you happy relate to his fitness for the position he’s gunning for? The problem with this slogan lies in its vague, seemingly child-like message.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">On a less political note, the fallacy of ambiguity also results when the writer’s definitions of the words he uses don’t match those of the reader’s. Take this newspaper passage about a supposedly Stone Age tribe in the Philippines: <b>“The sociologists visited the Tasadays and took photographs of their half-naked women, but they were not properly developed.”</b> (How was that again? Which or what were not properly developed? The women’s bodily features or the exposed photographic negative?)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Equivocation.</b> People commit this fallacy when they loosely use a word in more than one sense, yet give the impression that they mean only one. Since they sometimes can’t even differentiate the meanings, they may not even know they are equivocating. Here’s an example: <b>“All fair things are virtuous. My fiancée is fair; therefore, my fiancée is virtuous.”</b> <br /><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="291" data-original-width="389" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1q5_Fk8LUOQLFVt9W6ri9nxd2CKV8qWIaYMGaNByCR7lK1KN_1_T0ts12fcW8S7EgvWXwK15fq1p5kVEs6bj26u23-6PJCuMWs06oKy3uV9VCuate8NluKM82rXKPiikSSR97b8ffw-xR4se0IEI6bm0UUj5RW-sigRtBny2SZx_Wqudec-U0pTHpE_M/w531-h397/equivocation-definition_weighing-scale-1A.png" width="531" /></div><br /> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkGH0b7ceK7xDViBcRp-g1aIkYqjv6o3BOkHPKqnAXWCBzyDWqoQJUIhrnT6QyNjGFRotkhBQ5ARRs3kQNRnqVknX4a3nQXiqnUePn9ZLrhIoRDIH4lPoxpVi6Sv1cUciOovEian4BMH_oSKuSfoJFjiVmNhQubtaL8pvxFQCplX6AENv0lQECQ6VO8fQ/s349/verbal-fallacy-equivocation-stuck-on-you-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="349" data-original-width="282" height="554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkGH0b7ceK7xDViBcRp-g1aIkYqjv6o3BOkHPKqnAXWCBzyDWqoQJUIhrnT6QyNjGFRotkhBQ5ARRs3kQNRnqVknX4a3nQXiqnUePn9ZLrhIoRDIH4lPoxpVi6Sv1cUciOovEian4BMH_oSKuSfoJFjiVmNhQubtaL8pvxFQCplX6AENv0lQECQ6VO8fQ/w448-h554/verbal-fallacy-equivocation-stuck-on-you-1A.png" width="448" /></a><p></p><p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7mzsZQI4vM5it1GMDjwYIZ3xgroAycR5KZRgoReE1anYci6iwRlzhT2TuxhK5ofQnJxYgIgWlMsMyIQQjwyTjzBOutIj8KfVIYIEh8qTs0McTSoce7ujN4lBPrEcDQd8pMqIxWhofks3p5O8HheusNMxIihHN0uLxE_DGe5xyWy1GgbPerYqsoNpw7MU/s350/verbal-fallacy-equivocation-grecian-urn-1B.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="295" height="486" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7mzsZQI4vM5it1GMDjwYIZ3xgroAycR5KZRgoReE1anYci6iwRlzhT2TuxhK5ofQnJxYgIgWlMsMyIQQjwyTjzBOutIj8KfVIYIEh8qTs0McTSoce7ujN4lBPrEcDQd8pMqIxWhofks3p5O8HheusNMxIihHN0uLxE_DGe5xyWy1GgbPerYqsoNpw7MU/w410-h486/verbal-fallacy-equivocation-grecian-urn-1B.png" width="410" /></a></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Here, the word “fair” is being used in two senses: in the first, “impartial and honest,” and in the second, “lovely and pleasing.” Likewise, the word “virtuous” is also being used in two senses: in the first, “righteous and morally upright,” in the second, “chaste.” Both premise and conclusion therefore aren’t valid here, so the statement is actually a verbal fallacy.</span></p><p><br /><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Part IV:<br />Watching out against the verbal fallacies – 2</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We will now discuss the last four of the six kinds of <b>verbal fallacies</b>, namely the fallacies of <i>amphiboly</i>, <i>composition</i>, <i>division</i>, and <i>abstraction</i>. Together with the fallacies of <i>ambiguity</i> and of <i>equivocation</i> that we took up earlier, they comprise <i>the third broad category of logical fallacies</i>—false statements or conclusions that result when words are used improperly or ambiguously. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Amphiboly.</b> This fallacy results from ambiguous or faulty grammatical structures. The error isn’t with a specific word but with how the words connect or fail to connect. English is particularly susceptible to amphiboly because its vocabulary is so rich and its sentence structures so flexible. Some examples:</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="238" data-original-width="257" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCiv_VZvYpmHYY78d9JY5hR0f27JxMC0Et_CK83Do56N7mGnaW3guamNS-yMd24KygadKH_Lw74QtApnPaQAim7IXAQjQ9yYfxwA3MxPBHP6ILFStvKXFm6s4E3T_4JFEScEftsm2zfghjrJhzh85n16SuJUx4rmqo2jrHgFcOV7OQ7jf67vGFL5FTkhM/w415-h384/amphiboly_definition-1A.png" width="415" /></div><br /> <p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQmDrPAJCjPbkQBVVYkOBw5rtk_-JWwZWJdTNq7QT4rb6NZWsyR4V0xiRMDQQXjrBlw-eAv1ueaXsoMI4QF0Rm7refYBlY2Mjm4lPe9e9E43qiI3wDXKhHasY2vaqjD8chLmWfEmv12fSQndY6GvdQD0j1aBkXr8sqfH18hfxXU1lsxTLQbsDWvU9CH-Q/s429/amphiboly_bieber-tweet-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="199" data-original-width="429" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQmDrPAJCjPbkQBVVYkOBw5rtk_-JWwZWJdTNq7QT4rb6NZWsyR4V0xiRMDQQXjrBlw-eAv1ueaXsoMI4QF0Rm7refYBlY2Mjm4lPe9e9E43qiI3wDXKhHasY2vaqjD8chLmWfEmv12fSQndY6GvdQD0j1aBkXr8sqfH18hfxXU1lsxTLQbsDWvU9CH-Q/w491-h227/amphiboly_bieber-tweet-1A.png" width="491" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="221" data-original-width="685" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9ynBJrVCrTFq6Raupq79tUHv9ehjNL9DsKlXROSAZHmJMF4kLDxI0NtDvagVPRzsCbZ7kVccoxNj8emZaxpBsg4RCeRmhklx0hkyXMvctvmUJ0_9NGdavnUdmBS8rh7ZpIhntQT3PkdLc5Uhgk06vooDFA7wQzLtMhhqBuaduXpIIFBzv7QJamn26NB4/w610-h197/amphiboly_cable-news-postscript-1A.png" width="610" /></div><p></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">A grimly humorous example: <i><b>“Big Bargain: New highchair for toddler with a missing leg”</b></i> (Without ambiguity: <b><i>“Big Bargain: New toddler’s highchair with a missing leg”</i></b>). Here, we have a misplaced modifying phrase that needed to be relocated to its proper place.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">A classic case of amphiboly arises when the adverb “only” is variously positioned in these sentences: “<b>She <i>only</i></b> wrote that.” “<b><i>Only</i> she</b> wrote that.” “<b>She wrote <i>only</i></b> that.” “S<b>he wrote that <i>only</i></b>.” When “only” is positioned such that the statement yields a meaning other than what’s intended, that statement is an amphiboly.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And newspaper headlines are often inadvertent purveyors of amphiboly: <b>“Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant”</b>; <b>“Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge”</b>; <b>“Two Convicts Evade Noose: Jury Hung.”</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Composition.</b> This is the fallacy of guilelessly assuming that a group of things or actions as a whole will have the same attributes as the individual things or actions that comprise it. Take these examples: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“A story made up of good paragraphs is a good story.”</b> (Not necessarily, of course!)</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“If someone stands up out of his seat at a basketball game, he can see better. Therefore, if everyone stands up they can all see better.”</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“An elephant eats more food than a human; therefore, elephants as a group eat more food than do all the humans in the world.”</b> (Do your math; we humans grossly outnumber the elephants, so we consume more food than they overall.)<br /></span><br /><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="342" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4qWhvCTWbP3bXdZgjF3Xhmq4Earak6HQc-kwSBIgamxebOyfHNnznNL4CUbZbsUrim_u0RiC_kZAjuCxXsXfgCEbot0hshVafkpKE7rbkNLyOexG0Hyv1G6ghRoYjiChWTQe-UsX6kL6RQWdS1GA9o-AQc2XfzDBuZSJZWCHPCGw-yOxa_KrLLEV6-50/w509-h315/composition_chart-1A.png" width="509" /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="236" height="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyiGtXXn4aAJFMa0c7Nf12pLmSSsqkj5W-9SNCJDUCe8QwUwuhKAsrwwgbolKtio8dUayHCUK866rpqUab-jEIu6EAqz58jR0Knqwql1Mq6PvlYnM1KmKokW_L2UhFNOV3PSXQU_06189KAUeQPJDjhO1UwSCnEsispw2IYDb6V3FDockvFS7sp8Y_T_Q/w365-h440/composition_believe-1A.png" width="365" /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="257" data-original-width="283" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF9CzKMDpMMxeBrCCH5IxjcRnJ-c95yiKNfmJGmu9imc9W0Qzx4f66MYbb_lqXEpgnB2dBSyqjSNQN-FxiXyxSMKbHqZCYdH7HoVE4BOQYnfgVcRJF7-5grDwZNOoktZkHfXV26xwW6Kz0e5vK8ofitGRv6cCXzIoQf82qL4XnKMO-_NUUBY7Q24eQsdw/w370-h336/composition_cure-all-1A.png" width="370" /></div><br /><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Division.</b> The converse of the fallacy of composition, the fallacy of division wrongly assumes that the individuals in a group have the same qualities as the group itself. In reality, though, what is true of the whole isn’t necessarily true of its parts. Consider these fallacies of division: </span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“The universe has existed for 15 billion years. The universe is made out of molecules. Therefore, each of the molecules in the universe has existed for 15 billion years.</span></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“Female professionals in the Philippines are paid less than their male counterparts. Therefore, my Mom earns less money than my Dad.”</b> (Not necessarily!)</span></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijWuEpjt_EZUz17jZRbNdbWHXjeu6i5nV8ua9H9oPNX7vJUU_mpofHnm3lRCM4s4iBDmaK2p1EVA1UebBXdMEPqvcvgDNh0rUKmBvKccskuh1eNVpyPj75Y75tlL2ddU0v81hNesjRNc6aS2nwEGD-OyRIB2B1YmmzYTONGQmKMhf8HmexKwNswt8X7iE/s342/division_definition-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="342" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijWuEpjt_EZUz17jZRbNdbWHXjeu6i5nV8ua9H9oPNX7vJUU_mpofHnm3lRCM4s4iBDmaK2p1EVA1UebBXdMEPqvcvgDNh0rUKmBvKccskuh1eNVpyPj75Y75tlL2ddU0v81hNesjRNc6aS2nwEGD-OyRIB2B1YmmzYTONGQmKMhf8HmexKwNswt8X7iE/w493-h305/division_definition-1A.png" width="493" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="255" data-original-width="315" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5VpXeagPkeNJIFsU7SUN_4jwcsy5SLOuvU3KHwBOQPprRN12JuturyTfsp2dac_hnTvZFWborp__1BIvfESB6HJKOfmVNZ9B-rpVusBhQJp7QyL23OM-brXWjWZImFh-54-9t09c55taXo5uTkiNRin1uVurFy9L3c46QVGdowMCcqKZxIlyowTZynM0/w474-h384/division_soul-immortal-1A.png" width="474" /></div><br /><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><img border="0" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="659" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbZ5-XWRx3oyJnvCUNis_Qsu6cFmPpYVj8OzL0kIN_-MK8xx3ftXRVdpGbne1KXeWBdg6YiRZAzfFbbAiPmW3rdCi7xU6Dc3yMAS0e732KzBIjI4NaYPM7zSG6XOTDni4dkXccku57dKy_jaFtEmOvJzXXkt0llcRlgF0j-bcmcLYIZEUsEw6PPhnPws8/w634-h204/division_cartoon-girl-in-class-1A.png" width="634" /></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Abstraction.</b> This fallacy is the classical error of postulating or believing that everything that one comprehends through pure reasoning can actually happen in reality. Take the audacious illogic of this quote in a familiar inspirational poster: <b><i>“Everything your mind can conceive, your body can achieve.”</i></b> Sounds like a very desirable possibility, but saying it is actually the height of naiveté or ignorance about the ways of the world.</span><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="234" data-original-width="344" height="399" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj59gd_lhjl9ZIy7B7aPVUfc9Yo7nvroNOEBNiYBiPRoRlezri35IsR7vzr8DS20R6XcAhmq5kZg-j7GP_Yc109bR3lMbtRTbarh8nrRwKkCY6R8uwWKp_4dZIdwuqnPsfwM_dHKlgCzh3Zfm9JRO6U8YSNFp-H3ytye6R1MHb1r_K3n8ynbTFYHNR6Y7I/w584-h399/abstraction_model-1A.png" width="584" /></div><br /> <p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="236" data-original-width="334" height="348" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjTXLcuDBCTJhlEkMrB5OqomwhwnJphcBDsszd_Ui423aG9AVy-ABHAwIpcibv7mKtP2bxV9kqHHTiJNK-ytp8fPEH_cFxbiPy0LRB_jqFrjRiEDYFtU53Mf43wM57I3m6W5u32jYtneyHb4GETIBUk2c2bNrE79CbU6UAif8wXsjiFd_pVNOMRLORA2o/w493-h348/abstraction_to-have-soul-1A.png" width="493" /></div><br /> <p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="213" data-original-width="625" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUs2g-7SOPe4TdHAbj9zlhC-qgICqSQO3UjtiJJIhNCOS9xNHYmB_6Ozds0qFS9-H9Qi58CZcdUjhPsduwCJIQynpT068L3RkfINdp0I8OheV2zQZuox8rfUu2SagWU953eDGowijdZ_73oYMhxXan5u3QX4k8lSexrhmKMTKMbK0FfibYtJgtlswl_N4/w626-h213/abstraction_kids-want-you-1B.png" width="626" /></div><br /><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Another form of the abstraction fallacy is taking a quoted statement out of context. For example, a London newspaper carried this negative critique of a theatrical performance: <b><i>“I couldn’t help feeling that, for all the energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry, the audience had been shortchanged.”</i></b> However, the stage play promoters deviously pared down that statement to this blurb in their newspaper ads for that play: <b><i>“…having ‘energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry.’”</i></b> That’s a fallacy of abstraction that shamelessly distorts the intent and spirit of the original statement.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Vigilance over language—whether our own or those of others—is actually our only sure and effective line of defense against the verbal fallacies.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>These two essays essay appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Education Section of the September 14, 2017 issue (print edition only) of </i>The Manila Times<i>, © 2017 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181379236915374786.post-80000233192480116252023-08-31T10:52:00.006-07:002023-09-01T05:41:11.150-07:00Going Deeper Into Language - 3<p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span>Part III:<br /></span></b><span><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Watching
Out Against the Fallacies of Relevance</span></b></span></span></p><p><span><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;">W</span></b><span style="font-size: medium;">e have already taken up the nine most common kinds of material fallacies, so we will now proceed to the second broad category of logical fallacies—</span><b style="font-size: large;">the fallacies of relevance</b><span style="font-size: medium;">, which are arguments that seek to persuade people to accept evidently nonlogical propositions.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In this form of fallacy, the premises and evidence offered are actually irrelevant to the conclusion, but they are couched in language that makes them somehow psychologically or emotionally persuasive. People often have very strong opinions about the issues in fallacies of this kind, so they seldom notice when their attention has been diverted from the real issue.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Indeed, on the strength of one person’s persuasive powers alone, fallacies of relevance are often demonstrably false and can hook in only the unwary, the predisposed, and the gullible. But with the growing sophistication of their purveyors in using the modern mass media, particularly television and radio and the Internet, this form of illogic often acquires enough power to break the rational defenses of even the intellectually sophisticated and astute.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The 13 most common kinds of fallacies of relevance, identified and catalogued as early as 2,600 years ago during Aristotle’s time, are the following: <b>fallacies of irrelevance</b> <i>(ignoratio elenchi)</i>, <b>personal ridicule</b> <i>(ad hominem)</i>, <b>appeal to the people</b> <i>(ad populum)</i>, <b>appeal to authority</b> <i>(ad verecundiam)</i>, <b>appeal to ignorance</b> <i>(ad ignorantiam)</i>, <b>appeal to pity</b> <i>(ad misericordiam)</i>, <b>appeal to force</b> <i>(ad baculum)</i>, <b>appeal to money</b> <i>(ad crumenam)</i>, <b>emotive language</b>, <b><i>tu quoque</i></b>, <b>genetic error</b>, <b>anthropomorphism</b>, and <b><i>non sequitur</i></b>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We will now dissect a few specimens and show why their kind of reasoning can’t stand rigorous logical scrutiny.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-9cU9k9SzsMDZdCbT0TBBt9j3M2mo0CJ35L34iIjUYBCFmsXGWPvdFFxjRAshwSLUKS_wKvpksLayplcMalb8wuc0Z6lRqTZOt0tDte9P0a_Nu4vX_1XgeWre-VWGXCM4aghvf-6kQymQI8goLKSuEpjpfQsheWstvY-i-n3ORc7QDu8PL_hok1a-VSY/s700/fallacies-of-relevance_composite-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="241" data-original-width="700" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-9cU9k9SzsMDZdCbT0TBBt9j3M2mo0CJ35L34iIjUYBCFmsXGWPvdFFxjRAshwSLUKS_wKvpksLayplcMalb8wuc0Z6lRqTZOt0tDte9P0a_Nu4vX_1XgeWre-VWGXCM4aghvf-6kQymQI8goLKSuEpjpfQsheWstvY-i-n3ORc7QDu8PL_hok1a-VSY/w653-h224/fallacies-of-relevance_composite-1.jpg" width="653" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Fallacies of irrelevance.</b> Better known as <i>ignoratio elenchi</i> (which means “irrelevant conclusion”), this broad category covers practically all of the fallacies of relevance. They try to establish the truth of a proposition with arguments that support an entirely different conclusion. Example: “I’ve been accused of fathering my secretary’s child, but she actually signed an affidavit that the child is actually the fruit of artificial insemination. Therefore, I couldn’t have possibly fathered that child.”</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That the woman had declared under oath that her child was conceived through artificial insemination would seem to clear the man of wrongdoing. However, it really isn’t conclusive proof that he didn’t father that child. What if the woman, out of love or terror or poverty or charity, is simply trying to protect the man’s reputation? The affidavit—that all-purpose device of law to support truth and falsehood alike—doesn’t really settle the biological and parental aspect of the premises. The only thing it proves is that the woman signed it. (Thankfully, modern science has developed the DNA test to scientifically debunk fallacies of this type.)<br /><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEVdJ5MeGQFLR5jIEK_xT5XzRyPcfRyQDLSIr5BSHkIWD2GH4IUYqAEQ-IbDAnSKb0kEUPQ_jA-f8wqbG5PwYwjZZU-Sn2rJDps8rDmaynEyckMVjW-8UzijrMGVWntrT7pb5AMGSKJwLp7gU3nXk0z6fdOLtsRTaXaQiUpWDKhkwihPO0ZWqxvftWMbk/s640/fallacies-adhominem_composite-1A.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="640" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEVdJ5MeGQFLR5jIEK_xT5XzRyPcfRyQDLSIr5BSHkIWD2GH4IUYqAEQ-IbDAnSKb0kEUPQ_jA-f8wqbG5PwYwjZZU-Sn2rJDps8rDmaynEyckMVjW-8UzijrMGVWntrT7pb5AMGSKJwLp7gU3nXk0z6fdOLtsRTaXaQiUpWDKhkwihPO0ZWqxvftWMbk/w645-h241/fallacies-adhominem_composite-1A.jpg" width="645" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Personal ridicule <i>(ad hominem)</i>.</b> When someone ridicules another rather than directly addresses the premises of his or her argument, one commits the fallacy of personal ridicule. Two examples: “You wouldn’t believe someone of such low social stature, would you?” “She may be right about the country’s economic situation, but don’t you remember that she was outrageously wrong twice during the past 10 years?”</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Easily the most popular variety of this fallacy is the so-called “straw man,” the tactic of misrepresenting someone’s argument to make it easier to refute. The trick is to distort an aspect of someone’s premises to make it less credible, attack the now distorted position, and then claim that the whole argument has been refuted.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Take the following conversation as an example: Niece to uncle: “Uncle, I’d like to take up mass communications instead of nursing. I think I’m not really cut out for nursing.” Uncle to niece: “You unthinking moron! Mass communications graduates today are dime a dozen. Nursing is the most in-demand job abroad these days!”)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We are now done with the first two the 13 most common kinds of fallacies of relevance, namely the <b>fallacies of irrelevance</b> <i>(ignoratio elenchi)</i> and <b>personal ridicule</b> <i>(ad hominem)</i>. Now we’ll take up the next five: <b>appeal to the people</b> <i>(ad populum)</i>, <b>appeal to authority</b> <i>(ad verecundiam)</i>, <b>appeal to ignorance</b> <i>(ad ignorantiam)</i>, <b>appeal to pity</b> <i>(ad misericordiam)</i>, and <b>appeal to force</b> <i>(ad baculum)</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Appeal to the people</b> <i>(ad populum)</i>. This is the fallacy of using the presumed feelings, actions, and prejudices of the general population to support an invalid argument, as in this assertion: “67.8% of our TV texters say that that high official couldn’t be guilty of corruption. He really must be innocent!” Two insidious varieties of this fallacy are mainstays in product advertising and religious belief: <i>the bandwagon</i>, as in “Nine out of every 10 doctors use X toothpaste. High time you did!”, and <i>appeal to belief</i>: “All of us in this town are true believers. You must be the son of the Devil if you aren’t.”</span><br /><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="365" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDgY-tXkGjLGhOPtUgwH-WzOxsuwunDC_4OImtU1khzou_GRm4y8jDlOKOPnTezqGPr2U1y4pLWbWCsxdIKBjBm564mIP838X4OCfrQb6InnWQol3a59UwutFbgGDnVhuVmqD_MprhOzW3BoiTVM90K3wCMSR5HGKo-iyt3Ygs9kScYkLW6RMaU62WLng/w421-h315/fallacy_appeal-to-popularity-1B.jpg" width="421" /></div><br /> <img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="360" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDKui8NTsKuIFNbeiS2M2eNpqxNdxO-rR-tQb0uHE23BJB58dTUhkQg0ftgfuuVajVjWBYWhSLWLSpSeQfd7L2mVuQWXH86rUtJznY713vwrd0Fv_Rrd8Y000vu6QsFvaaLj0TCh-y5Cy9QYUdnA2HE_RMBIs3mfX8YCg00o4ltHS-cVXtK8VvICD8b9o/w371-h278/fallacies_adpopulum-2A.jpg" width="371" /><p></p><p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Appeal to authority <i>(ad verecundiam)</i>.</b> This is the fallacy of supporting dubious or patently false premises with the opinion of a leader, authority, or expert in a field outside the field being discussed: “Our beloved Brother Y got a message from Heaven that M should be our next president. We’ve got no choice but to vote for M.” It may sound ridiculous, but the danger to modern society is that fanaticism of all stripes almost always makes this kind of fallacy work with people of certain persuasions—especially clueless believers.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTqEhCC16Vqq-2VTXj82CNaKSj6CQFNYYh6NJNsQQKVl-_1YvfMZQI3C_QCw4KItRkObGyswZY7wPprGuGetOj0lm7DnWG3f_vRlAKJDWTeOGcgq3LO4_Y3ttnYKd8B_f0csmPYb-QpXoWfhiFMG7ZMeUQGp-r3HOwDssem4iDRMsbLVPlZlyhRDR4Vlc/s471/fallacies_appeal-to-authority-3A.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="471" data-original-width="294" height="581" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTqEhCC16Vqq-2VTXj82CNaKSj6CQFNYYh6NJNsQQKVl-_1YvfMZQI3C_QCw4KItRkObGyswZY7wPprGuGetOj0lm7DnWG3f_vRlAKJDWTeOGcgq3LO4_Y3ttnYKd8B_f0csmPYb-QpXoWfhiFMG7ZMeUQGp-r3HOwDssem4iDRMsbLVPlZlyhRDR4Vlc/w363-h581/fallacies_appeal-to-authority-3A.jpg" width="363" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Appeal to ignorance <i>(ad ignorantiam)</i>.</b> This is the fallacy of assuming that a premise is correct because it can’t be disproved. Here’s its basic form: “There’s no proof that what you say is true; therefore, what you say isn’t true.” The same illogic runs in this assertion: “We have no evidence that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, so no intelligent life must exist elsewhere in the universe.”</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMHbaFJC9v-mbxxalDyLD9Cq8iuhPRXcrgz6d-ENv2UFTfaItg2lKNvXKg1z_jWsso5pzb1ekz4FY5azOJxplOHt4ApbqLslVUvjlszyrxZQ_-CI8-HW50JHMRXft17erFcsjBv-F5McWqFLtTsPj7fSNYP5dOGAXe2v1gH9a9PJgFfsdovIGUxdaxGPA/s420/fallacies_appeal-to-ignorance-2B.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="260" data-original-width="420" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMHbaFJC9v-mbxxalDyLD9Cq8iuhPRXcrgz6d-ENv2UFTfaItg2lKNvXKg1z_jWsso5pzb1ekz4FY5azOJxplOHt4ApbqLslVUvjlszyrxZQ_-CI8-HW50JHMRXft17erFcsjBv-F5McWqFLtTsPj7fSNYP5dOGAXe2v1gH9a9PJgFfsdovIGUxdaxGPA/w425-h263/fallacies_appeal-to-ignorance-2B.jpg" width="425" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM6PbVJ3RJn9s-s5YCh7ZyYTSAIu9GwxB65iMDGTmb2ucA5NpCdhydPF5BQj_bT_nPg_0aPKjmAS18BdWQsDB95KUjs99KG70dycpXJexxbdjZorwssT-TlXupHAlpwWXMRtq4P9YsnCfgeTVa0wcvsPYeOlP6QfKwiLtJCA2-8m3Bm7TiozJbGIJyFrA/s267/fallacies_appeal-to-ignorance-1C.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="254" data-original-width="267" height="355" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM6PbVJ3RJn9s-s5YCh7ZyYTSAIu9GwxB65iMDGTmb2ucA5NpCdhydPF5BQj_bT_nPg_0aPKjmAS18BdWQsDB95KUjs99KG70dycpXJexxbdjZorwssT-TlXupHAlpwWXMRtq4P9YsnCfgeTVa0wcvsPYeOlP6QfKwiLtJCA2-8m3Bm7TiozJbGIJyFrA/w373-h355/fallacies_appeal-to-ignorance-1C.jpg" width="373" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">The same faulty reasoning props up the “guilty until proven innocent” fallacy, in which police authorities make suspects wear the orange garb of prisoners and then parade them before the broadcast and print media. They score media and political points in doing this, of course, but they are actually engaging in a blatant appeal to ignorance, running roughshod over the legal presumption that someone is “innocent until proven guilty.”</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Appeal to pity <i>(ad misericordiam)</i>.</b> This is the fallacy of trying to get support for one’s premises not on logical grounds but on compassion. In Philippine parlance this is the <i>“paawa”</i> (“have mercy on me”) effect; elsewhere it is known as the “victim mentality.” This form of illogic marks many court pleadings, as when a defense lawyer asks for leniency towards his self-confessed client: “Your Honor, he may have killed the winning candidate but he is a highly intelligent law graduate whose conviction will forever ruin what could be a most illustrious legal and political career.”</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRHg85b_TAARnnYteBTaxSWc_IuVUqwWDL0FBupAZ7qrkPvzJUA85sEgNWzOKOrgX-wPPwyUkKJATsHfM6cSDOzGt-JX5qFclH7QkqLg3PjKThtggssKMgan2hFUkKFwp2X7dGfb7tO0uVI8KK2LNY6Pgrj00HDHjbg6Jbk7BmIWA7E8KOHjo3VnFP-w4/s723/fallacies_appeal-to-pity_composite-1B.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="220" data-original-width="723" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRHg85b_TAARnnYteBTaxSWc_IuVUqwWDL0FBupAZ7qrkPvzJUA85sEgNWzOKOrgX-wPPwyUkKJATsHfM6cSDOzGt-JX5qFclH7QkqLg3PjKThtggssKMgan2hFUkKFwp2X7dGfb7tO0uVI8KK2LNY6Pgrj00HDHjbg6Jbk7BmIWA7E8KOHjo3VnFP-w4/w651-h197/fallacies_appeal-to-pity_composite-1B.jpg" width="651" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Appeal to force <i>(ad baculum)</i>.</b> When the usual means of persuasion fail, some people use threat and intimidation to compel others to accept their argument. This is the most insidious fallacy of all because it marks the end of civility and the beginning of belligerence: “Park here at your own risk.” “If I hear that line from you again, you better start looking for another job.” “If they convict me of treason, the government will have a bigger rebellion in their hands.” “Mr. Senator, you’ve just called me a crook. Say that again without parliamentary immunity and I’ll slap you with a twenty-million-peso libel suit!”</span><p></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfx2-vH_sO46J4FSU6qLGeEJffFTL31HkTPVvQWhm46Z-RNcvxGmWLPuSOdq4M0eZoLb1kFHOoY4ucc__AqiE9hhRWi67McYk6P2sQx6NA2ZHV-NZ7cDJbgQl9inzHZpQatAJnDnSK07nEy4k4CrqrPXZHxlPIQHXsR39LGm7TNNHeXnhXOwkJENlChSA/s713/fallacies_appeal-to-force_composite-1A.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="713" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfx2-vH_sO46J4FSU6qLGeEJffFTL31HkTPVvQWhm46Z-RNcvxGmWLPuSOdq4M0eZoLb1kFHOoY4ucc__AqiE9hhRWi67McYk6P2sQx6NA2ZHV-NZ7cDJbgQl9inzHZpQatAJnDnSK07nEy4k4CrqrPXZHxlPIQHXsR39LGm7TNNHeXnhXOwkJENlChSA/w635-h224/fallacies_appeal-to-force_composite-1A.jpg" width="635" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">We’ve already discussed seven of the 13 most common kinds of the fallacies of relevance, which are arguments that attempt to persuade people to accept evidently nonlogical propositions. This time we’ll take up the next three: <b>appeal to money</b> <i>(ad crumenam)</i>, <b>emotive language</b> <i>(argumentum ad populum)</i>, and the <b>“You also” or “You, too” fallacy</b> <i>(tu quoque)</i>.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Appeal to money <i>(ad crumenam)</i>.</b> This is the fallacy of thinking that money is a reliable standard of correctness, and that the more moneyed one is, is more likely one will be right. Consider the bias in this all-too-common passing motorist’s remark about a car collision along the way: “That Toyota Fortuner is obviously not the aggressor because it’s brand-new and much more expensive than that old Beetle, and it was being driven for that respectable-looking executive. Look, that Beetle’s careless driver isn’t even shaven and is only in a dirty undershirt!”</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5whKWs5g5EOjGZBhdCRHHQmWMKTHK71hJJcVEZiVYfwASsCrjp035eUxBZPwe7lJNCoLiltsIIDVqwOFyKagqynMY5Z0aPDBBhCi52CbjEN8RhGVi-v_uGrmbOItZz8WrgKnoVCEszLJzp8AZl3DBEr04tKx0b0ZK5x0Q7lX-PiI4cx2YyuYIDnJ42sQ/s707/appeal-to-money_composite-1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="260" data-original-width="707" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5whKWs5g5EOjGZBhdCRHHQmWMKTHK71hJJcVEZiVYfwASsCrjp035eUxBZPwe7lJNCoLiltsIIDVqwOFyKagqynMY5Z0aPDBBhCi52CbjEN8RhGVi-v_uGrmbOItZz8WrgKnoVCEszLJzp8AZl3DBEr04tKx0b0ZK5x0Q7lX-PiI4cx2YyuYIDnJ42sQ/w609-h223/appeal-to-money_composite-1.png" width="609" /></a></div><br /><br />I<span style="font-size: medium;">n the so-called <b>appeal to poverty</b> <i>(argumentum ad lazarum)</i>, this fallacy works in reverse: “That Toyota Fortuner is obviously at fault because it’s much sturdier and bigger than that old Beetle. The Fortuner’s driver must have bullied the poor Beetle’s driver and raced him to the intersection.” Of course, the appeal to money and the appeal to poverty, which together are counted as one type of fallacy, are both illogical ways of looking at the situation, for we know that neither greater wealth nor poverty indicates greater good or truth.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Emotive language <i>(argumentum ad populum)</i>.</b> This is the fallacy of using emotionally loaded words to establish a claim without proof; the appeal is neither to reason nor logic but to the beliefs or feeling of the majority of the people towards a particular issue.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">One remarkable example of emotive language in history is the response of Spain’s Queen Isabella when Christopher Columbus broached to her in the year 1493 the idea that based on his trans-Atlantic voyage, the Earth must be a sphere. She was recorded to have said: “The Earth must be flat. Millions of people know that it is. Are you trying to tell them that they are all mistaken fools?” (Based on modern scientific knowledge, of course, they were and so was she!)</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHn8AvaMC5gml6fZR9dxGQ0g7TOIRT3yKFiHgYuDjPMH1q-9c3LB6bzCqcdmT-F4s71Zdkj46r_WcNp_sB6fNZlLxL_DR4vx1cDIeqrUPyHYe2rSc-2AnDQ7E2xeuGvRZZjxcOnYtB0t06ErLUIpKQV1GoJqJJdMdv1ULyhRlMRCx91QBtTfQg1EAY5J4/s705/emotive-appeal_composite-1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="238" data-original-width="705" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHn8AvaMC5gml6fZR9dxGQ0g7TOIRT3yKFiHgYuDjPMH1q-9c3LB6bzCqcdmT-F4s71Zdkj46r_WcNp_sB6fNZlLxL_DR4vx1cDIeqrUPyHYe2rSc-2AnDQ7E2xeuGvRZZjxcOnYtB0t06ErLUIpKQV1GoJqJJdMdv1ULyhRlMRCx91QBtTfQg1EAY5J4/w642-h216/emotive-appeal_composite-1.png" width="642" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">As we all know, emotive language is likewise the bread-and-butter stuff of political advertising. By using strong emotional rather than rational appeals, political slogans attempt to short-circuit the logical evaluation of the candidate’s fitness for the position by making the candidate’s name resonate positively in the voter’s mind.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Consider these slogans of the presidential candidates in the 2016 Philippine national elections: Rodrigo Duterte: <i>“Tapang at Malasakit”</i> (“Fearlessness and Compassion”); Manuel “Mar” Araneta Roxas II: <i>“Ituloy ang Daang Matuwid”</i> (“Continue the Straight Path”); Grace Poe Llamanzares: <i>“Gobyernong May Puso”</i> (“Government with a Heart”); Jejomar Binay: “Competence and Experience: Only Binay”) and the late Miriam Defensor Santiago: <i>“Si Miriam and Sagot!”</i> (“Miriam is the Answer!”). Regardless of their truthfulness or validity, only in retrospect would we know if these slogans actually work in getting a candidate elected. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“You also” or “You, too” fallacy <i>(tu quoque)</i>.</b> This is the fallacy of demolishing someone’s position by presenting evidence that his or her past actions or beliefs are inconsistent with the position or view he or she is presenting now. A very common example in Philippine elections is this argument: “Your party cheated heavily to win in the last elections, so why is your party advocating honesty now and condemning my party for preparing to do what you did in the coming elections?” It’s the obnoxious tit-for-tat mentality that bedevils supposedly free and democratic elections.</span><br /><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="251" data-original-width="728" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizgIbBYolv_Dy34PD-PbSHlPpCtx17yeYmxMYfL6EVWu3dWJ88KaPZoIEEl14G_JAA4EqGjQHWL2UUe_bEvoaNnoVCAj50oHOOsC9H8Hjpl_avyENa-N1Ccn3UEktVB5zGOXDDakBYLyLwN9gNTrn0HpR8W3r0ymVAUdWslBl_CzzMXQ1pI8nDE7Potvk/w624-h215/tu-quoque_composite-1.png" width="624" /></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">We’ve already taken up 10 of the 13 most common kinds of the fallacies of relevance, which are arguments that attempt to persuade people to accept nonlogical propositions. Now we’ll now discuss the last three: <b>genetic error fallacy</b>, <b>anthropomorphism</b> <i>(pathetic fallacy)</i>; and <i><b>non sequitur</b></i> (Latin for “it doesn’t follow”).</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Genetic error.</b> A variation of the <i>ad hominem</i> (personal ridicule), this fallacy doesn’t necessarily attack the person directly; instead, it attacks the origins of the position that person is proposing. This fallacy is termed “genetic” because it’s based on the notion that the original source of an idea is a reliable basis for evaluating its truth or reasonableness.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHSsaK1K--0FAaeX9oB7VhQXNv6JfYnwzTw_H2oAogRhj3ucNHi-yCBB1YYHxwDWexFBKmIFEHh-cn1yRxpYv-GsNW0O4eFGUTXZmgAQF7dGaUqsaHk_zQzPN9O41f6hL2MoGnDOUoZdrDadtbyUzpIn1EesPp2yIhBBKO6n33ecb1SBb6B-CbEG6omP8/s746/genetic_fallacy_composite-1B.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="746" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHSsaK1K--0FAaeX9oB7VhQXNv6JfYnwzTw_H2oAogRhj3ucNHi-yCBB1YYHxwDWexFBKmIFEHh-cn1yRxpYv-GsNW0O4eFGUTXZmgAQF7dGaUqsaHk_zQzPN9O41f6hL2MoGnDOUoZdrDadtbyUzpIn1EesPp2yIhBBKO6n33ecb1SBb6B-CbEG6omP8/w652-h265/genetic_fallacy_composite-1B.png" width="652" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">One example of the this fallacy is this argument: “You believe that that there are measurable differences in IQ among the different human races? You must be a despicable racist then!” This highly emotional diatribe is often raised against scientists who, based on their objective and dispassionate researches, as much as privately and quietly raise such a possibility.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Understandably, people of any race will find that view horrid and patently unacceptable, but this belief has no bearing on whether such IQ differences do, in fact, exist. Indeed, in an honest-to-goodness effort to establish logical proof, where an argument comes from is irrelevant.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Anthropomorphism <i>(pathetic fallacy)</i>.</b> This type of fallacy treats animals or inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thoughts, or sensations. Although using the pathetic fallacy can be a good way to make complex concepts or difficult ideas more easily understood, it can be carried to unreasonable, illogical extremes.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe6PrPtpSLPWeS3E0jd5b1BYFbQKVz85qwEaJIEqVs-4qroe30IViAZmo-0XxqclxYwjkUtKk-SrH5y89znu_ZPWNQtGccYDIcoFyyn6zNCdGhUVPwukXbEvrmBConNQm3b-DLCJzbXQ6bv9jRwmTG9FfvxmITk8z1JZ8zy7DzLyVEknKcNlhUiAXQKco/s312/anthromorphism_rain-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="312" data-original-width="270" height="418" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe6PrPtpSLPWeS3E0jd5b1BYFbQKVz85qwEaJIEqVs-4qroe30IViAZmo-0XxqclxYwjkUtKk-SrH5y89znu_ZPWNQtGccYDIcoFyyn6zNCdGhUVPwukXbEvrmBConNQm3b-DLCJzbXQ6bv9jRwmTG9FfvxmITk8z1JZ8zy7DzLyVEknKcNlhUiAXQKco/w362-h418/anthromorphism_rain-1A.png" width="362" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="263" data-original-width="466" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnYjf9it6srnfS0oPQoAe6QKTtFmYju5S01xkNEDS7xf2XbmuoOMk7L7bxrXyeI6h5Vr5ImzMKOraw7A46O1kRqI1RthLWO98ODoZgq73jB9yUEYNkM95MyAyr1LOzr18ggyQPABpoTVCBXlsBF8u2APg1whHoKzEiYeFCMpLizt4by7_c0yepXG7PFXQ/w354-h200/anthromorphism_lionking-1C.png" width="354" /></span></div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">One useful pathetic fallacy is this personification of the behavior of gases: “Air hates to be crowded, and when compressed it will try to escape to an area of lower pressure.” Being inanimate, air is obviously incapable of hating and of trying to escape; it just behaves according to natural law. Still, attributing human traits to air makes its behavior more comprehensible. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But anthropomorphism can take this much less useful and more odious form: superstition. For example, growing a fortune plant right outside the door of the house is supposed to bring good luck to the homeowner. However, when the fortune plant doesn’t grow well despite adequate care, it is anthropomorphism to conclude that the fortune plant detests the homeowner and won’t bring good luck. Conversely, it is also anthropomorphism to believe that the fortune plant’s robust growth will bring great fortune to the homeowner. In reality, regardless of whether its owner has good or bad luck, the fortune plant will grow largely on its own accord, depending only on the care it gets.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><i>Non sequitur</i></b> (Latin for “it doesn’t follow”). In formal logic, a non sequitur is any argument whose conclusion doesn’t follow from its premises. The conclusion may either be true or false, but the fallacy in the argument arises from a disconnect between the premise and the conclusion. Indeed, all of the formal fallacies we’ve taken up are special cases of non sequitur.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWjXGd3doqdeUJL6p_2JrBXtAoqETC3EMoaFRe8cYdyIgPbj_1OJ1qb0pPM6fzBP4Bo-p5GOaB6jMS3w4bnJ04Zz2ACyNmLFPsfJ8l_FZyuh83lKZIXpuPHkK5t-II1I5mVb2ZjfDYczMAeWQpp-qI3bnBvjuPFTHaw1LWOajm014FUSbrGJn0N4zy4KM/s388/non-sequitur_pregnant-man-1B.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="388" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWjXGd3doqdeUJL6p_2JrBXtAoqETC3EMoaFRe8cYdyIgPbj_1OJ1qb0pPM6fzBP4Bo-p5GOaB6jMS3w4bnJ04Zz2ACyNmLFPsfJ8l_FZyuh83lKZIXpuPHkK5t-II1I5mVb2ZjfDYczMAeWQpp-qI3bnBvjuPFTHaw1LWOajm014FUSbrGJn0N4zy4KM/w395-h283/non-sequitur_pregnant-man-1B.png" width="395" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnWzq5hK0rwP6DWTVs5G03NJhYVKRMvnmouKhBvjJ49v4LT8kVJ6qGCCXGyp69DWlrQvr9WgrmtpCoitHMAJBiyG5yluvIQ-eGQt_-QeDDcUUBlbxwxXI8e-hsrxRF9HV--vd8TKay_cMB4UVfikCnrzuivmfxF8OGagzxcr37IO5Dk_64Pv_6zGcMyFA/s281/non-sequitur_gambling-1A.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="234" height="460" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnWzq5hK0rwP6DWTVs5G03NJhYVKRMvnmouKhBvjJ49v4LT8kVJ6qGCCXGyp69DWlrQvr9WgrmtpCoitHMAJBiyG5yluvIQ-eGQt_-QeDDcUUBlbxwxXI8e-hsrxRF9HV--vd8TKay_cMB4UVfikCnrzuivmfxF8OGagzxcr37IO5Dk_64Pv_6zGcMyFA/w384-h460/non-sequitur_gambling-1A.png" width="384" /></a></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The campaign trail for national elections is invariably littered with non sequiturs, as in these very instructive election slogans in 2010: <i>“Kung Walang Corrupt, Walang Mahirap”</i> (If No One’s Corrupt, No One will Be Poor); <i>“Para sa Mabilis na Pag-aahon”</i> (For Quick Recovery); <i>“Pagbabago Sigurado”</i> (Change for Sure); <i>“Ipagpatuloy ang Magandang Simula”</i> (Let’s Continue Our Beautiful Beginning).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Scrutiny of each of these slogans will quickly show that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise; in short, the statement is a fallacy, often unrealistic and logically indefensible. They are simply attention-getters and rallying cries.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This ends our discussion of the 13 most common kinds of fallacies of relevance. We’ll take up next and for last the <b>verbal fallacies</b>, or the false statements or conclusions that result from the improper or ambiguous use of words.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Next: <b>Watching out against the verbal fallacies</b><span> </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"> September 7, 2023</span> </p>JoeCarillohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07788768736802648247noreply@blogger.com0