A POWERFUL TALE ON THE NEED FOR SUASIVE DICTION

Giving a Touch of Authority to Our Prose
By Jose A. Carillo 

“What a pair we make,” whispered the Prince of Wales to the pilloried presumptive royal knight William in the riotously charming 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, “both trying hard to hide who we are, both unable to do so.”

For those who have not seen the movie, the prince was constrained to shed off his disguise as a monk among the lynching mob to save the disgraced knight, who a few days earlier had spared him from the ignominy of certain defeat by refusing to joust with him in a tournament. The knight, through the machinations of a villainous duke, was thereafter unmasked as a lowly thatcher’s* son masquerading as a member of royalty, thus leading to his arrest and humiliation on the pillory.

This medieval morality tale gives a powerful insight into the crucial need to speak and act in keeping with who we think, presume, or pretend we are. When we write, in particular, we must use language that conveys our thoughts in ways that validate and support our own self-concept or projection of ourselves. The wife of the Caesar must not only be chaste but must look and sound chaste. The professor must really look and sound professorial. The presidentiable** must really look and sound presidentiable. To fail to do this in both civilized and uncivilized society—or not to have the wisdom or guile to at least sustain the charade—is to invite catastrophe, which is precisely what brought the presumptive knight to the pillory for public lynching.

Be that as it may, our most potent tool for becoming credible is what the linguists call suasive diction. This is using language to persuasively convey facts and the speaker’s feelings toward those facts. No instrument is more potent for doing that, of course, than the writer’s or speaker’s vocabulary. Our words define us. Whether armed with excellent research or dubious information, whether motivated by good or bad intentions, we can turn off the audience with awkward or leaden words, or hold it in thrall with engaging words and well-turned phrases. It is largely through word choice, in fact, that we establish our credibility and rapport with our audience. Short of coercion or the force of arms, rarely can persuasive communication take place without this credibility and rapport.

The most basic technique for suasive diction is the proper use of the pronouns of power, namely “we,” “us,” “our,” “they,” and “them.” These innocent-looking pronouns can confer a sense of authority—the illusion of authority, if you may—to our written or spoken statements far beyond what the first-person singular can give. The first-person “I” and “me” speak only for the solitary communicator; on the other hand, the collective “we” and “us” speak for an entire group or institution, which people normally take for granted as less fallible and less prone to vainglory than the individual—hence presumed to be more credible, more authoritative.

This, for instance, is why newspaper editorials routinely use the institutional “we” although they may have been crafted by a solitary writer not so high on the paper’s editorial totem pole; it’s also why tyrants and despots of every stripe and persuasion always invoke “the right vested in me by God/ law/ the sovereign people” to seize power or hold on to it, and why candidates of paltry qualification and virtue invariably invoke “the people’s great desire for change” or “divine signs in the sky” as their passport to public office.

Of course, “we,” “us,” “our,” “they,” and “them” work just as well as pronouns of solidarity. They foster a stronger sense of closeness and intimacy with the audience, and can more easily put audiences at ease with what the speaker has to say. In contrast, the first person “I” often comes across as too one-sided and self-serving, particularly in writing, while the second person “you” can sound too pedantic and intimidating. We stand a much greater chance of getting a fair hearing from those antagonistic to our position by making them think that we are actually on their side.

Even if we are good at using the pronouns of power and solidarity, however, we must not for a minute believe that they are all we need to achieve suasive diction. The facts supporting our contention must be substantial and accurate. Our opinions must be truly informed, not half-baked, and our logic must be sound and beyond reproach. Otherwise, we may have to put on an act like that of the seemingly enlightened prince in A Knight’s Tale, lying to the lynching mob about the parentage of William the thatcher’s son, then justifying that lie by nonchalantly invoking royal infallibility: “He may appear to be of humble origins, but my personal historians have discovered that he is descended from an ancient royal line. This is my word, and as such is beyond contestation.”

A big lie indeed, but said with the confidence of a true royal. (March 2004)

This essay first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in March 16, 2004 issue of The Manila Times, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*Thatcher – A thatch is a sheltering cover, as a house roof, made of straw, grass, or—in our domestic usage—nipa or buri. A thatcher would therefore be someone whose occupation is to install a thatch or that kind of roofing. Of course, the name “Thatcher” became a media mainstay in the UK for many years when the feisty Margaret Hilda Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister for 12 years from 1979 to 1990.

**I use the term “presidentiable” here with some strong misgivings, for it is not even recognized in any respectable dictionary. But during every national election season, it forms part of the Philippine journalistic and political vocabulary much too strongly to be completely ignored.

ESSAY ON WRITING AND SPEAKING IN ENGLISH

Strategies for writing and speaking much better in English
By Jose A. Carillo

Sometime in 2013, a Tanzania-based member of Jose Carillo's English Forum thanked me for writing on the need to avoid officious stock phrases when writing or speaking. Mwita Chacha said: "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's why I'm sometimes tempted to alternate, say, ''about'' with such unpleasant bureaucratic phrases like ''with regard to,'' ''with reference to,'' ''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?"

In reply, 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, for 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.

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.

The two general types of words in English, you will recall, are the content words and the function words. The content words are the carriers of meaning of the language, and they consist of the nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections. The function words are the logical operators of the language, and they consist of the prepositions, conjunctions (the coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions), and conjunctive adverbs. In a class of their own are the articles “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 more manageable).

Among the content words, nouns are the most amenable to substitution with other words as a strategy for avoiding tedious repetition. For this purpose, of course, we routinely use pronouns 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. In feature writing and in the more creative forms of expression, we can use synonyms or similar words for subsequent mentions of particular nouns. 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.

For example, the subject or key word “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.

As parts of speech in English, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs 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.

This strategy should also be applicable to adjectives and adverbs. 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. 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.

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 bureaucratic phrases 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,” “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.

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 function words. 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. In the particular case of prepositions, 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. 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.

Now, the preposition “about” belongs to what I would call the normal, day-to-day language register of English. A language register is, of course, simply a variety of a language that’s used in a particular social, occupational, or professional context. In general, in terms of degree of formality, we can classify the language of register of English in six categories: very formal, which is characterized by very rigid, bureaucratic language; formal, characterized by ceremonious, carefully precise language; neutral, characterized by objective, indifferent, uncaring language; informal, characterized by casual or familiar language; very informal, characterized by very casual and familiar language; and intimate, 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.)

It so happens though that over the centuries, the legal profession developed a variety of English that’s pejoratively called legalese, 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.

The unfortunate fact, however, is 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.   

My advice to you therefore 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.

This essay first appeared in my weekly "English Plain and Simple" column in The Manila Times on December 12, 2023. Copyright 2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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.)

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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.