GETTING TO KNOW ENGLISH BETTER

How to deal decisively with the
“who” vs. “whom” conundrum
By Jose A. Carillo

Sometime in 2014, a member of Jose Carillo's English Forum called my attention to this sentence in a newspaper feature article: “I remember a memorable experience in the 1970s with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist living in Davao who I frequently visited.”

He then posed these two questions: “Is the use of the subjective ‘who’ in the sentence above correct or acceptable? Or should the objective ‘whom’ be used instead?”

To start with, I told the Forum member that prescriptive grammarians condemn the use of the subjective “who” in that sentence construction and would demand adamantly that it be replaced with the objective “whom.” Personally, though, I find this demand ill-advised because it makes the sentence sound too formal, too stilted, and too stuffy: “I remember a memorable experience in the 1970s with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist living in Davao whom I frequently visited.”

So what do we do to avoid this “who”/“whom” impasse? We can attempt a mild rewrite that uses neither “who” nor “whom” that knocks off the phrase “living in Davao” but retains the sense and tonality intended in the original passage: “I remember a memorable experience in the 1970s with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist I frequently visited in Davao.” The aspect of the subject’s “living in Davao” is lost in that reconstruction, of course, but I think it’s a small price to pay for skirting the “who” vs. “whom” conundrum while nicely streamlining the sentence.

But then why should we go to such lengths when presented with the choice between “who” and “whom”? It’s because aside from being highly debatable, the use of either “who” or “whom” is often too problematic from both the style and language register standpoints.

The grammatically unassailable “whom,” which is the true objective-case form of “who,” just doesn’t sound right to the modern ear; in many cases, in fact, “whom” imbues an unwanted pedantic, standoffish academic tone to what should be a simple conversational statement. On the other hand, using “who” instead often gives us with the uncomfortable feeling that something’s not right with the sentence.

On the very day that I was writing my reply to the “who”/“whom” question, a Harvard Magazine mailer providentially landed on my mailbox. It had this very timely advertorial question: “Whom Will You Honor This Mother’s Day?” That interrogative construction is actually one of the few iffy “whom” usages that I can tolerate without getting overpowered by the itch to replace it with “who,” but frankly, I’d be more comfortable and at peace with that message if it had used “who” instead: “Who Will You Honor This Mother’s Day?”

Other than total reconstruction, there are actually two ways of avoiding “whom” in an icky sentences like this: “The salesman whom we hired for the new product is doing a terrific job.” One way is to drop the relative pronoun altogether as in this elliptical construction: “The salesman we hired for the new product is doing a terrific job.” The other is to use the relative pronoun “that” instead: “The salesman that we hired for the new product is doing a terrific job.”

Personally, I wouldn’t hesitate to use “that” in such cases. After all, early English actually used words related to “that” to mark relative clauses, and used “who” and “whom” only as question words and as indefinite pronouns in such constructions as “I wonder who were at the hunt.” Indeed, it was only because of the strong influence of Latin on written English in the 1800s that led to the “highbrow” use of “who” and “whom” as relative pronouns.

These days, however, many native English speakers are rediscovering the grammatical virtue of “that” as an all-purpose relative pronoun. I do think that even nonnative English speakers these days can follow suit with very little danger of being marked as uneducated yokels.

This essay first appeared in my "English Plain and Simple" column in the December 6, 2023 issue of The Manila Times, copyright 2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO ON THE ENGLISH FIGURES OF SPEECH

The power of wordplay
By Jose A. Carillo

Let’s take a closer look at two forms of wordplay, or the witty, clever, malicious, insidious, or cruel manipulation of words themselves as phonemes or carriers of meaning. The first is punning, the humorous play on a word’s different meanings or on the similar meanings and sounds of different words; and the second is chiasmus, which surprisingly reverses the order of words in two parallel phrases for dramatic effect.

Part I - Punning

We can invest feeling and emotion in what we say by using such figures of speech as the simile, metaphor, and hyperbole. These are not new forms of expression at all. As early as 2,000 years ago, in fact, the Greeks had already made such a fine art of their language by cultivating as many as 80 rhetorical devices—“the flowers of rhetoric,” they called them. The figures of speech, of course, derive their power by unexpectedly comparing a subject to things already familiar to us, while rhetorical devices can stir our emotions with the surprisingly felicitous ways they arrange words in a sentence or passage.

Let’s now take a closer look at wordplay, or the witty, clever, malicious, insidious, or cruel manipulation of words themselves as phonemes or carriers of meaning.

IMAGE CREDIT: SEAS.MASHABLE.COM

The most common form of wordplay, of course, is punning. This is the often humorous play on a word’s different meanings or on the similar meanings and sounds of different words—with the requisite mild touch of mischief or malice, of course. The more razor-sharp and wounding the pun is to the target, the better and more satisfying it is to the third-party listener. For instance, if a club chair, unable to stop a talkative but incoherent member from dominating a meeting, tells all and sundry, “Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.” How do we react? We feel good not only at the wounding of the target’s ego but at the insult—at the power of the words to inflict the wound.

But puns fall flat if the speaker and listener don’t have a common referent and depth of understanding of the language. Many of Shakespeare’s puns, for instance, mean little now except to the most studious ears. In the play Hamlet, for example, Hamlet accuses Ophelia of unfaithfulness and verbally savages her: “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go.” Hamlet built his pun around the word “nunnery” to wound Ophelia’s self-esteem and give vent to his rage. Yet up to now, over 400 years later, scholars, dramatists, and English professors still argue over what Shakespeare had really meant when he used “nunnery.” Some take it at face value: a place where disgraced women can take refuge from the jeers of society. Some take it on the figurative level to mean “Get out of here!” Others interpret it on the relational level as “You disgust me!” Researchers of Shakespearean English, however, have found that “nunnery” was a contemptuous allusion to a “brothel” or “whorehouse.” This verbal cruelty, of course, is all but lost to the modern reader of Hamlet.

Now see how contemporary puns can elicit mirth or laughter (or our anger, if we ourselves are their targets) without us having to go through the same analysis that we have done above: “Cole’s Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.”  “Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?”  “My accountant always writes religious phrases down the left side of the page. That’s his prophet margin.”  “Shin: A very sensitive device for finding furniture in the dark.”  “I used to think I was indecisive ... but now I am not sure.” Don’t they all have a delicious ring?

People also use wordplay simply for the sound of it, as in these juxtapositions of similar-sounding phonemes: “Is a sea of sequoias aqueous?” (William Waite).  “Reverse errors to persevere” rearranged to “Errors prosper over beer” (Mike Rios). Then there is recreational linguistics, or “letterplays,” where words are manipulated by transposing their letters or syllables; the wordplay literature is full of them.

But an even more hilarious form of wordplay is taking any word from the dictionary and altering it by adding, subtracting, or changing only one letter, then supplying a definition for the newborn word. The Washington Post, which runs a “Style Invitational” on this type of wordplay, drew out from readers the following gems in the 2003 edition of the contest: “Intaxication. Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.”  “Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.”  “Glibido: All talk and no action.”  “Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.”  “Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.  “Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.”  “Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.”  Marvelous, marvelous!

To fully appreciate and enjoy these verbal pyrotechniques, of course, we must continually widen not only our grammar but our semantic grasp of English. Few can enjoy English-language wordplay at all unless they have already graduated from using English simply as a rickety pushcart for conveying information. (October 13, 2003)

Part II - Chiasmus

 

Ever wondered how some people have moved us or inspired us to do great things their way, or mesmerized us, put blinders on our eyes, then made us do irrational things that we would never have dreamed of doing had we not been under their spell?

If so, then the speakers—unless they had recited great poetry—must have been using chiasmus. This figure of speech towers above all the other rhetorical devices in its ability to lower our built-in defenses and arouse our emotions. We could very well call chiasmus the linguistic incarnation of charisma—that rare and elusive power of certain people to inspire fierce loyalty and devotion among their followers.

                 IMAGE CREDIT: BUCKLEYSCHOOL.COM

The use of chiasmus dates back to antiquity. In the 6th century B.C., the extremely wealthy Lydian king Croesus went on record using it: “In peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.” Such wisdom in only 13 words! Is it possible that he became fabulously wealthy because he was so adept at chiasmus and—by implication—at compelling people’s obedience? Or did he become so good at coining chiasmus because his wealth had allowed him the leisure to craft it?

Now take a look at this very familiar line from U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, on which so many English-language elocution students had labored investing their own vocal energies over the years: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Just 17 words, but they give us the feeling of an immensely satisfying four-hour lecture on good citizenship. Then see chiasmus at work in this charming line by the English physician and author Havelock Ellis: “Charm is a woman’s strength; strength is a man’s charm.” And, one more time, hark to this timeless sage advice from Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.”

By now you must have already discovered for yourself the fundamental structure and mechanism of chiasmus:  it reverses the order of words in two parallel phrases. Take this chiasmus by the legendary Hollywood actress Mae West: “I’d rather be looked over than overlooked.” “Looked over” is “overlooked” in reverse, making the speaker wickedly but deliciously imply that she enjoys being ogled at. Or take this arresting advertising slogan of a Philippine insurance company: “If someone depends on you, you can depend on Insular Life.” By some linguistic alchemy, the parallel word reversals arouse our senses, disarming us so we readily accept their claim as true. Chiasmus has this power because it heightens the sense of drama in language by surprise. It is no wonder that it holds the distinction of being mankind’s all-time vehicle for expressing great truths and, conversely, also great untruths.

Most types of chiasmus reverse the words of familiar sayings in a felicitously parallel way, as in the French proverb, “Love makes time pass, time makes love pass.” For chiasmus to succeed, however, the two insights offered by the word reversals should both be true and survive subsequent scrutiny. (They could also be untrue, and therein lies the danger in chiasmus in the hands of demagogues and charlatans.)

But chiasmus need not be an exact reversal of a familiar saying. Take what the English writer Richard Brinksley said on beholding for the first time the woman whom he was to later marry: “Why don’t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.” This implied chiasmus cleverly reverses this usual invitation of proud homemakers: “I’d like you to see my roses.” And chiasmus also nicely takes the form of questions, as in this line from Antigone by the 5th century Greek dramatist Sophocles: “What greater ornament to a son than a father’s glory, or to a father than a son’s honorable conduct?"

If chiasmus is this pleasurable, does it mean that we should spend a lot of time composing it ourselves to impress people? Not at all! Chiasmus is meant to be used very sparingly, to be reserved only for those very special moments when saying them can truly spell a make-or-break difference in our lives, like preparing for battle, wooing the hearts and minds of people, ruing abject failure, or celebrating great success. In our everyday lives, it is enough for us to spot a good chiasmus so we can savor its wisdom, and to have the wisdom to know when we are simply being conned with fallacy or propaganda masquerading as great truth. (October 16, 2003)

From my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times, October 13 and 16, 2003, © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

WHAT A GREAT BOON THE WEB IS TO ENGLISH LEARNERS EVERYWHERE!

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

                                                                                                                            LEFT IMAGE CREDIT: WWW.W3.ORG

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

I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night

And still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings

And done a thousand things I’ve never done before.

I’ll never know what made it so exciting,

Why all at once my heart took flight…

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

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

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

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

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

All of my readings from grade school through college, in fact, would amount to only a tiny fraction of the readings that I have already done on the Web in the less than six years that I started mining it for its treasures. And I have been enjoying every minute of my freewheeling incursions into its pages, far better than when I had the likes of Professor Higgins telling me to my face to read my English textbook from cover to cover or else fail and repeat his English course. (2003)

This essay first appeared in my English-usage column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times sometime in 2003, © 2003 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. It subsequently appeared as Chapter 1 in Part IV, Section 1 of my book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language, © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

My Fair Lady "I Could Have

Danced All Night"

(Music Video)

As sung by Marni Nixon, dubbing the singing

voice of Audrey Hepburn, in the 1964 film

adaptation of the musical

THE THREE SPECIAL FORMS OF THE ENGLISH PRESENT TENSE

The Historical, Literary, and Eternal Present
By Jose A. Carillo 

We deal with the here and now by using the simple present tense: “I work as a translator for a publishing house.” “She sees something sinister in this.” And when we want to express an action that’s happening right now, we use the present progressive tense: “Can’t you see? I am working as hard as I can.” “She is seeing something moving at the ceiling.” Of course, we can also use the simple present to express an often-repeated action or permanent condition: “She takes a break at precisely 10:00 a.m.” “He is totally deaf in the right ear.”

The present tense is obviously the most basic the tenses can get, but we must be aware that in English, the present tense takes three more special forms not necessarily dealing with the immediate present. They are the historical present, the literary present, and the “eternal present” of scientific principles and general truths.

The historical present. This form recounts past events in the present tense to make them more vivid and immediate. Often used in third-person and first-person narratives as well as in dialogue, the historical present is a story-telling technique designed to make audiences or readers imagine they are right at the scene of the unfolding action. 

Feel the immediacy of this passage from Alphonse Daudet’s short story, “A Game of Billiards”:

“The game is fascinating. The balls roll, graze, pass; they rebound. Every moment the play grows more interesting. A flash of light is seen in the sky, and the report of a cannon is heard. A heavy rumbling sound shakes the windows. Everyone starts and casts an uneasy glance about. The Marshal alone remains unmoved.”

We all know, of course, that the historical present is common fare in magazine journalism. Take this lead passage from a 2004 Time Magazine feature on the U.S. presidential campaign:

In the bleak midwinter, Bill Clinton sits in the two-story garage out back, kneading memory into history. He scribbles his memoirs in longhand on legal pads, poring over notes and transcripts of his White House years. For the moment, the deadline is more pressing than raising money for India’s earthquake victims or promoting peace in Northern Ireland or touring Miami nightclubs with Julio Iglesias.

The historical present is also the stuff of dialogue: “And so what does he say about your proposal?” “Well, he says it’s great and needs only a little fine-tuning. He’s particularly delighted by the high potential savings in production costs.” “So what does he tell you about implementation?” “He says it’s a ‘go’ for the second quarter.” “Amazing! That sounds like your idea really knocked him over! He usually first shoots proposals like that to the Corplan guys to see if they can tear it apart.”

The literary present. As a rule, the English language uses the simple present when discussing literature. This follows the academic concept that fiction exists in a timeless world that is best described in the present tense, particularly in discussions of theme, plot, or author’s intent. Take this passage about Filipino novelist N.V.M. Gonzalez’s novel, The Bamboo Dancers:

“In the first chapter, the first-person narrator begins his story by recounting that early summer he was in New York. He has a room all to himself in a place called Fairfield House. He is through with what he calls his ‘American year,’ having just completed work at the Harrington School of Fine Arts...

Then this blurb for the British novelist John Fowles’ novel, The Collector:

“The setting is a lonely cottage in the English countryside. The characters are a brutal, tormented man and the beautiful, aristocratic young woman whom he has taken captive. The story is the struggle of two wills, two ways of being, two paths of desire…”

The “eternal truth” present. This is the English-language convention for stating scientific principles and general truths in the present tense: “Newton’s First Law of Motion holds that a body continues in its state of motion unless compelled by a force to act otherwise.” “The meter is the base unit of length that is equal to the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second, or about 39.37 inches.” “The sum of the angles of a triangle is always equal to 180 degrees.” “The distance from Earth to Mars is at least 56 million kilometers.”

On the other hand, principles that have proven false must be stated in the past tense: “The phlogiston theory held that an elementary principle, called phlogiston by its proponent, G. H. Stahl, was lost from substances when they burned.” (This theory has been displaced by Antoine Lavoisier’s oxygen theory.)  “The ancients believed that Earth was flat, and that one who stepped beyond its edge would fall into a bottomless abyss.” (We know now that Earth is spherical or, more accurately, spheroid due to the flattening at its poles.)

-------------------------------

The above article is from Chapter 51 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge (Manila Times Publishing, 2009). I have decided to post it here in my Blogspot to answer the many lingering concerns and doubts—all understandably valid in the absence of specific guidance—raised about the variants of the present tense and the application of the normal sequence-of-tenses rule in English.

RUMINATIONS WHILE MUNCHING A SANDWICH ON THE ATLANTIC COAST

The Roots of English 
By Jose A. Carillo 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USE AND MISUSE RETROSPECTIVE

A potpourri of dubious English usage
dissected in the Forum 14 years ago

By Jose A. Carillo

From 2010 to 2011 or 14 years ago, the Forum had an informal and wide-ranging colloqium of sorts on dubious or questionable English usage. The participants were an Irish priest doing religious missionary work in the Philippines, a former University of the Philippines-Diliman chancellor, a former Filipino accounting associate professor in Okinawa, and at the time a Europe-based Filipino foreign-service professional. Learn from their lively potpourri of insights on proper English as used in various parts of the world.

IMAGE CREDIT: PINTEREST.CH

MAGE CREDIT: MAXENGLISH.TIPS

The colloquium of sorts got started by the e-mail below sent to the Forum in November of 2010 by Fr. Sean Coyle, an Irish missionary priest based in the Philippines. A native English-speaker from Ireland who had been doing missionary work here 1971, he is the editor of Misyon, the website of the Columban Lay missionaries in the Philippinesn (www.misyononline.com).

Fr. Sean Coyle sent me this e-mail:

Dear Mr Carillo:

If you haven’t done so already, maybe you can address some common mistakes in writing. One is, e.g., 'The church is across McDonalds on Rizal Avenue' instead of 'The church is across from McDonalds...' or, better still, 'The church is opposite McDonalds...'

Then I often come across such things here in the Philippines as 'I was discriminated by the head of the Organization..' instead of 'I was discriminated against by the head of the Organization...' 

Another very common misuse of English here is 'I asked sorry' or 'I asked for an apology' when the very opposite is meant: 'I apologized.'

Another common mistake I often come across  in the [domestic] broadsheets is 'Majority of Filipinos are opposed to...' instead of either 'A majority of...' or 'The majority of...', depending on the context. The word 'majority' should always have either the definite or the indefinite article in front of it, except in headlines.

'Taken cared of' instead of 'taken care of' is one of the most common mistakes.

I often read 'The President’s plane arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport' instead of ‘. . . arrived at Ninoy Aquino...’ You don’t read in American papers 'He arrived at the John Kennedy . . .' or 'He arrived at the JFK' but rather 'He arrived at John Kennedy..' or 'He arrived at JFK...' On the other hand, if the name of the airport isn’t used, the use of the article is proper, e.g.,.'He arrived at the airport'.

Maybe this is due to the influence of the languages of the Philippines that use the preposition 'sa', e.g., in Cebuano, 'Nakaabot siya sa Ninoy Aquino...'

I have come across some very fluent writers of English who nevertheless make grammatical mistakes. I don’t know if there is a good summer course available to give good writers a good grounding in English grammar.

P.S.  I prefer to follow British usage with regard to abbreviations, e.g., 'Mr' instead of 'Mr.' The top English and Irish broadsheets go even further: 'Major-General', for example, becomes 'Maj Gen'. I’m surprised that American-usage is still so old-fashioned in this digital age!

My reply to Fr. Coyle:

Thank you so much for pointing out the English-usage errors you commonly encounter in your readings. I have had occasion to discuss many of those errors myself in my weekly English-usage column in The Manila Times over the past eight years and, lately, also in my English-usage website, Jose Carillo’s English Forum, that I launched in May 2009. I agree with the correct usages you prescribed, and I’m enjoining the members and guests of the Forum to take careful note of them.

The only point where I differ with you is in the matter of your preference for not using the article “the” in sentences like “The President’s plane arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.” I think this stylistic choice is best left to the discretion of the writer or speaker, not prescribed or forced on him or her. As far as I can gather, in both their written and spoken English as well as in the print media, Filipinos automatically put the article “the” before the proper name of international airports as a matter of convention and stylistic choice, and I think it’s best to leave it at that.

On the matter of punctuation: Since you are a native English speaker from Ireland, Fr. Coyle, I made it a point to print your e-mail as is, retaining the exact way you use punctuation marks like the period (it’s the “full stop” in British English, of course), the comma, and the single-quote quotation mark as well as the way you don’t use the period to punctuate abbreviated words like “Mr” and “Maj Gen.” The way you use those punctuation marks is actually very illustrative of how British English differs from American English—the English standard used in the Philippines—in the matter of punctuation alone.

Let me just quickly summarize those punctuation style differences for everybody’s benefit:

1. British English uses single-quote quotation marks, while American English uses double-quote quotation marks; then, for quotes within quoted material, British English uses double-quote quotation marks, while American English uses single-quote quotation marks.

2. British English puts the closing quotation mark inside the period (or “full stop”) that marks the end of a sentence, while American English puts the closing quotation mark outside the period that marks the end of a sentence.

3.  British English puts the comma outside the quotation mark that closes quoted material (whether the quoted material is a statement or a quoted term) before the word outside the quotes that immediately follows it, while American English puts that comma inside the quotation mark in such grammatical constructions.

(Click this link to read my extensive discussion of how American English and British English differ in the way they handle quoted material.)

You say that the American English style for the use of punctuation marks, particularly its preference for putting the period in the abbreviated “Mr.”, is “still so old-fashioned in this digital age” I must say that I disagree with you on this. I think it’s simply a widely accepted grammatical convention that’s no different from the way British English spelled “music” as “musick,” “traffic” as “traffick,” and “check” as “cheque” way back in the early 1800s, until Noah Webster in the United States decided to change them to their simpler spelling that are much more widely used until today. As I said earlier, style in language is a matter of choice and whatever becomes predominantly accepted is the “correct” one.

And like you, Fr. Coyle, I also don’t know if there’s a good summer course currently available in the Philippines to give writers a good grounding in English grammar. Perhaps we should address this question to Forum members who might happen to know of one. In the meantime, if I may be allowed to pitch a little commercial, I would like to suggest as reference my three English-usage books, Give Your English the Winning Edge, English Plain and Simple, and The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors. They deal with practically all of the grammatical mistakes you mentioned—plus so many other interesting things besides about English writing and exposition.

***

Roger Posadas
Re: Some common mistakes in English writing 

Reply #1 on: November 06, 2010

Hi Joe,

To add to Fr. Coyle's list of common Filipino mistakes in English, may I point out the following common mistakes which I often encounter in my students' papers, in newspapers, in street signs, and in some uniforms of traffic officers:

1. "cope up with" instead of cope with

2. "avail of" instead of avail oneself of

3. "request for something" instead of request something

4. "bound to Antipolo" instead of bound for Antipolo

5. "Filipino-Chinese" to refer to Filipinos with Chinese genes instead of the correct term, Chinese-Filipino. A "Filipino-Chinese" is a Filipino immigrant in China just like a "Filipino-American" is a Filipino immigrant in the US.

6. "for a while," used in answering a telephone caller, instead of the correct "just a minute"

7. "result to" instead of "result in"

8. "traffic enforcer" instead of "traffic regulator" or "traffic officer." One can enforce traffic rules but one cannot enforce traffic.

I can cite many more common Filipino mistakes, particularly in English pronunciation, but this list is getting too long. I'm certain that you have already addressed most, if not all, of these mistakes in your previous postings and columns.

Best regards,
Roger Posadas

***

Ms. Aurora Riel-Grimes

Re: Some common mistakes in English writing
November 7, 2010

Ms. Aurora Riel-Grimes in North Carolina sent in by e-mail this feedback about common errors in English writing:

Dear Joe,

Call me “Simple Simon.”

I suspect that most of our errors can be avoided by using short and simpler sentences. I also suspect that we need to learn how and when to use each of the 90+ one-word prepositions.  Such may help retire most of our trite prepositional phrases we call clichés.

For subject-predicate disagreement, it is easy to lose sight of the subject that is amidst wordy clauses, modifiers, and prepositional phrases. 

Misplaced modifiers and clauses suggest that we did not plan to say them before we opened our mouths. They were second thoughts. They should not be forced insertions. They belong in the next sentence. The next sentence will allow us to place the modifier close to the modified, whether before or after.

 

As communicators (writers, speakers), we need not feel like we should say everything in one breath.

Pausing, we may hear how our listeners hear us. We may realize how good, or awkward, or pretentious, or even ludicrous we sound.

***

Fr. Sean Coyle

Re: Some common mistakes in English writing

November 7, 2010

Thanks for your reply to my email. When I became editor of Misyon in 2002 I asked a journalist on the Sunday Business Post, published in Ireland, about 'correct' usage. He told me that each paper has its own style and rules. Publications in Ireland, Britain, Australia and New Zealand follow British usage generally while those here and in the USA use American English. In Canada they use a mixture of both, as far as I know. Having lived in Ireland, the USA, the Philippines, Canada and Britain, I'm sometimes confused about the spelling of certain words such as 'surprise' or 'surprize' and other words that end in 'ise' or 'ize' and also about words such as 'windshield', the British usage for 'windscreen'.

I accept your point about Philippine usage with regard to 'arriving at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport' even though I would never write that myself, nor do I think that 'he arrived at the Heathrow Airport' would be accepted outside this country. However, it is an area where the writer's 'feel' for language comes into play. I would be inclined to write 'He went to the University of San Carlos' because it 'runs' better than 'He went to University of San Carlos'. Yet I would write 'He went to USC' and not 'He went to the USC'.

With regard to quotation marks, British usage allows both, single or double, using the opposite for a quotation within a quotation. I checked today's Irish Independent online and found double quotation marks in one article and single in another.

I've moved towards placing the period or full stop at the end of quotation where logic dictates it should be. I'm not always consistent.

I still think that the convention in American English of using the period at the end of an abbreviation such as 'Mr." is curiously old-fashioned, though correct. It is strange that the country that gave us 'plow' as an alternative to 'plough' and 'labor' instead of 'labour' still sticks to the period where British English has largely, though not totally, discarded it. However, this is not a question of correct or incorrect. For me it's also a question of aesthetics. To me 'Mr Carillo' looks better than 'Mr. Carillo'.

The Dominican Province of the Philippines has a family magazine - I can't remember the title - that doesn't use the period at the end of abbreviations, so I'm not a lone voice. However, I stress that this is not a matter of correct and incorrect. Language is living and would never change or grow if writers and editors didn't make choices.

The closing paragraph of former Chief Justice Panganiban's column, "With Due Respect," in today's PDI* reads:

"As a footnote, may I add that the inquisitorial system is still regularly used in many countries. On the other hand, the adversarial system was introduced to the Philippines by the Americans at the dawn of the 20th century and had been used regularly since the Supreme Court was founded in 1901. As an exception, contempt cases initiated by the judges themselves had always been decided via the inquisitorial method."

Surely 'has' should have been used instead of 'had' since Artemio V. Panganiban was explaining the difference between the adversarial system and the inquisitorial system and when the Supreme Court uses each. 'Had' seems to imply that the Court no longer uses either system.

Thank you for reading this.

Fr Sean Coyle

*PDI - Philippine Daily Inquirer  

***

Gregorsoph

Forum Member Initiate

Re: Some common mistakes in English writing 

Reply #4 on: November 08, 2010

Hi Joe,

To add to Fr. Coyle's list of common Filipino mistakes in English, may I point out the following common mistakes which I often encounter in my students' papers, in newspapers, in street signs, and in some uniforms of traffic officers:

1. "cope up with" instead of cope with

2. "avail of" instead of "avail oneself of"

3. "request for something" instead of "request something"

4. "bound to Antipolo" instead of "bound for Antipolo"

5. "Filipino-Chinese" to refer to Filipinos with Chinese genes instead of the correct term, Chinese- Filipino. A "Filipino-Chinese" is a Filipino immigrant in China just like a "Filipino-American" is a Filipino    immigrant in the US.

6. "for a while", used in answering a telephone caller, instead of the correct "just a minute"

7. "result to" instead of "result in"

8. "traffic enforcer" instead of "traffic regulator" or "traffic officer." One can enforce traffic rules but one cannot enforce traffic.

I can cite many more common Filipino mistakes, particularly in English pronunciation, but this list is getting too long. I'm certain that you have already addressed most, if not all, of these mistakes in your previous postings and columns.

Best regards,
Gregorsoph

***

bance33 
Initiate

Re: Some common mistakes in English writing

Reply #8 on: January 11, 2011

Webster defines "enjoin" as "to command, order someone with authority: to forbid, to prohibit". I remember using this word a long time ago believing it meant the same way as you mean it now. However, my British editor colleague disagreed with the use of the word and when I checked the dictionary, I got Webster's meaning which was not what we wanted (we didn't want to sound arbitrary). I recalled that incident when I saw your use of the word. However, if other dictionaries define "enjoin" as "urging strongly" or "giving instructions" then I agree with you that the use of "enjoin" in that context is just fine. And it's good to know its meaning is not limited to Webster's.

Joe Carillo
Administrator

Re: Some common mistakes in English writing
Reply #9 on: January 13, 2011

That’s right, bance33. Surprisingly, despite being reputed to be more descriptivist and permissive than other dictionaries in its league, the Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary indeed restricts the verb “enjoin” to the following definitions:

enjoin

1 : to direct or impose by authoritative order or with urgent admonition  <enjoined us to be careful>

2 a : FORBID, PROHIBIT  <was enjoined by conscience from telling a lie>  b : to prohibit by a judicial order  : put an injunction on  <a book had been enjoined prior to publication — David Margolick>

synonyms see COMMAND

In contrast, the Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged provides more definitions for “enjoin” and much wider latitude for its usage:

enjoin

vb (tr)

1. to order (someone) to do (something); urge strongly; command

2. to impose or prescribe (a condition, mode of behaviour, etc.)

3. (Law) Law to require (a person) to do or refrain from doing (some act), esp by issuing an injunction

[from Old French enjoindre, from Latin injungere to fasten to, from in-2 + jungere to join]

The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary similarly provides more definitions and senses for “enjoin”:

 

enjoin

• formal to tell someone to do something or to behave in a particular way

[+ to infinitive] We were all enjoined to be on our best behaviour.

He enjoined (= suggested) caution.

• US legal to legally force someone to do something or stop doing something

It’s evident that “enjoin” is used in many more senses than what the Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate has captured in its more restrictive definitions. This shows that the sense of a word in actual usage can prevail over the definitions prescribed for it by particular dictionaries.

(Full disclosure: I use the Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary in CD-ROM as a quick reference for my English-usage columns and Jose Carillo's Emgish Forum, but I don't feel bound by its prescriptions when they don't dovetail with what I personally know to be a word's denotations in actual usage in my own linguistic community.)

THE GRAMMAR OF NUMBERS AND TIME

Your handling of numbers and time
reflects the clarity of your thinking
By Jose A. Carillo

Some people are very finicky with the grammar and the overall look and styling of their English expositions, but they are often very inconsistent and messy in handling their numbers and timekeeping. Rarely do they have a firm system for when numbers should be stated in figures or when they should be spelled out in words, so they end up writing memos, letters, or reports that are often too unsightly and unpleasant to read.

How people handle numbers and time in their prose is, of course, a clear reflection of their mental discipline and the clarity of their thinking. This is why self-respecting companies and institutions adopt a writing stylebook and require everybody in the organization to adhere to its prescriptions. Still, it takes a lot of doing to get everybody to follow that stylebook correctly and religiously, as evidenced by the spotty handling of numbers and time by the scores of writers—even professional journalists and corporate communicators—that I have edited over the years.

That situation was what prompted me to write the essay below, “The Grammar of Numbers and Time,” for my English-usage column in The Manila Times way back in 2003. I am posting this retrospective here in my blogspot to help people who don’t have or aren’t obliged to follow any stylebook yet to be more systematic in dealing with numbers and time in their written work.

The grammar of numbers and time

A math wizard from Bangalore, India by the name of Shakantula Devi made it to the Guinness Book of Records in 1980 when she mentally multiplied two 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds. This was the arithmetic operation she performed: 7, 686, 369, 774, 870  x  2, 465, 099, 745, 779 = 18, 947, 668, 177, 995, 426, 773, 730. Since then, Ms. Devi had been routinely beating sophisticated computers right in their own turf. In one such contest, she took only 50 seconds to get the 23rd root of a 21-digit number, while the computer took more than a minute to perform the same job.

My point in writing about Ms. Devi’s astounding arithmetic powers is not really to goad lesser mortals to try to emulate her feat, nor to shame the arithmetic-challenged among us to improve their basic computing skills, but simply to encourage people to accord more respect to numbers in their English prose. Take note, for instance, that I did not write the year “1980” in the first paragraph as “The Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eighty” (as some lawyers are still wont to do even now); that I did not write “13-digit” as “thirteen-digit”; that I did not write “28 seconds” as “twenty-eight seconds”; and that I did not write “23rd” as “twenty-third.” The grammar of numbers and time is not a science—too many national and cultural variations militate against a universal numbers-writing style—but we certainly can minimize unsightly crimes of prose innumeracy by agreeing on a basic numbers stylebook.

Let us begin with two generally accepted rules: (1) numbers from 1 to 10 should be written as words when used in a sentence: “The customer ordered eight red shirts and five blue ones, but returned three browns”; and (2) numbers from 11 upwards in a sentence should be written in figures: “The professor discovered to her dismay that 12 of her pupils were absent, and that 546 of the entire student population did not make it to their classes either.” And if perchance the sentence has numbers ranging from 1 to any number higher than 10, the two rules above still hold even if it means mixing figures and spelled-out numbers: “We counted a total of 800 words in her essay and found ten misspelled words and 17 wrong word choices.”

There are just two notable exceptions to these rules. First, any number that starts a sentence should be written in words: “Thirteen is considered an unlucky number by some people.” “Four hundred eighty-two years ago, a Portuguese explorer stumbled on a group of islands on the Pacific and named it the Archipelago of St. Lazarus.” Second, when numbers are used to list a series of items within a sentence, all such numbers should be written as figures (or digits) even for numbers below 11: “These are the 14 reasons why I won’t live in your city: (1) the traffic is horrible, (2) the overcrowding is simply too much, (3) the cost of living is too high, and… (14) it gets so cold there in winter.”

Many people, of course, after writing out a number in words, indiscriminately repeat them in figures enclosed in parenthesis, as in: “I would like to discuss with you today three (3) aspects of the problem being encountered by four (4) of our regional offices.” Is this correct usage? Definitely not; this kind of absurd overemphasis literally insults the reader. This should be strictly confined to commercial or legal writing, as in writing checks or in preparing affidavits to make sure that nobody can easily monkey around with the numbers: “Pay to Cash: Five Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Pesos Only (PhP5,260.00)” “…for and in consideration of the delivery of Eight Hundred Sixty-Seven (867) pieces of widgets.”

Marking time gives us more latitude in using numbers. We can write, say, “9:00 A.M. (or a.m.)” or “nine o’clock in the morning” depending on the accuracy we want to convey. But most everybody on the planet is agreed that exact dates should be written in numbers, as in “August 24, 1946.”

We have to take up just three more important rules about writing numbers before we close: (1) We should use figures and not spell out numbers immediately before a unit of measure: “a 10-minute wait,” “a 3-3/4 cm. length of tape,” “16 Megahertz on the FM band”; (2) We should use figures and not spell out numbers that represent statistical or mathematical functions or formulas: “divided by 6,” “multiplied by 9,” “a ratio of 50:1,” “8% bigger”; and (3) We should use figures and not spell out numbers that represent time, ages, money, sizes, scores, and points on a scale: “at 12 midnight,” “4 years old,” “$9,” “5 cm. x 12 cm.,” “73:69,” and “Intensity 5 on the Richter Scale.”

We use numbers all the time in our lives, so it pays to do our numbers right.(November 12, 2003) 

--------

From my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times, November 12, 2003 issue, © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. This essay later became Chapter 129 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.