LOOKING BACK TO THE ORIGINS OF THE DAY OF HEARTS

 The Real Score About Valentine’s Day     
 By Jose A. Carillo

“If you must write about Valentine’s Day,” my wife Leonor admonished me, “don’t be a spoilsport. By all means take a break from your grammar columns, but don’t try to take away the romance from Valentine’s.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Leonor,” I said, “I won’t be a spoilsport. Why would I want to do that? On the contrary, I want to tell lovers all over the world that they are right on target in doing the things they do on Valentine’s Day. I mean, you know, exchanging love tokens, whispering sweet nothings, having dinner by candlelight—good, old romance the way it should be.”

“Then you’ve got nothing really new to say,” she said. “You’ll just recycle the same old story that everybody recycles this time of year.”

“Not with this one, Leonor. I have a new thesis: that people should thank their lucky stars they can celebrate Valentine’s Day not so different from how the ancient Romans did it. As you know, those people started it all almost a thousand years before the Christian evangelists came to Europe. They had this much-awaited love festival on February 14, precisely the same day as today’s Valentine’s Day. It went by another name, of course. They called it the Lupercalia.”

“Umm...interesting,” Leonor said. “Tell me more about it.”

“The Lupercalia, in plain English, was the ‘Feast of the Wolf-God.’ It was an ancient fertility rite in honor of a god who protected sheep from the wolves. Its high point was a mating game, a lottery for young, unmarried men and women. The organizers would write the names of qualified, interested women on small pieces of parchment, then drop them into a big vase. Each qualified male drew one piece from the vase, and the woman whose name was on that piece became his date or ‘steady’ for one whole year.”

“That simple? Unacquainted couples were paired with no courtship, no legal and religious mumbo-jumbo?”

“Yes, Leonor, and they had a whole year to find out if they were temperamentally and sexually compatible. If they were, of course, they married and raised a family.”

“How wonderfully uncomplicated, but how unromantic! And my heart bleeds for the young couples that had an eye for each other beforehand. With, say, 1,000 women’s names in that lottery, the probability of a woman getting picked by a man she already liked would be next to zilch; so were the chances of a young man picking the woman he really liked. And the chances of a mutually attracted pair being mated? That’s 1/1,000 multiplied by 1/1,000 or one in a million, right?”

“Right, Leonor! A priori romances simply couldn’t bloom unless the partners decided to mutually violate the rules. But there was one good thing going for that lottery, I think: it leveled the playing field for love and procreation. It must have exquisitely churned and enriched the gene pool of the ancient Romans.”

“Maybe so, but don’t you think their ritual was so elemental, so...shall we say, ‘uncivilized’?”

“That’s saying it mildly, Leonor. It scandalized the early Christian missionaries. They found it decadent, immoral, and, of course, unchristian. So they tried to change it by frying it with its own fat, so to speak.”

“How?”

“Well, the clerics simply revoked the practice of writing the names of young, unmarried women on the pieces of parchment. They wrote on them the names of the Christian saints instead. And you know what they offered to the young, unmarried man who picked the name of a particular saint?”

“What?”

“The privilege of emulating the virtues of that saint for one whole year.”

“What spoilsports, those clerics! Why would any sensible lover whether male or female want to play that sort of game? For Pete’s sake, that lottery was for love and romance and chance encounters, not for sainthood!”

Valentine was imprisoned by the Romans circa 270 A.D. for violating

a ban on performing marriages during wartime, then was stoned to

death on February 14, Lupercalia Day.

“That’s right, so the Romans resisted the new mechanics and stuck to the old. It was two centuries before the evangelists again tried to stamp out the Lupercalia in a big way. In 490 A.D., Pope Gelasius canonized a Roman by the name of Valentine. He was, by tradition, a priest martyred 220 years before for violating a ban on performing marriages during wartime. Valentine was stoned to death on a February 14, Lupercalia Day, so his feast day was conveniently made to coincide with it. In a sense, the clerics finally succeeded in Christianizing the ancient rites, but only in name and only edgewise, in a manner of speaking. As history would prove, no power on earth could stamp out its earthly and earthy attractions.”

‘You’ve got a lovely story there,” Leonor said, “and you kept your promise of not being a spoilsport. So Happy Valentine’s Day, my love!”

“For you, Leonor, Happy Lupercle’s Day just this once, OK?” (2004)

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This essay in conversation form first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004 and subsequently formed Chapter 142 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge.

THE GRAMMAR OF NEGATION IN ENGLISH

Mastering the fine art of negation in English 
By Jose A. Carillo

We know that to affirm something to be true is much easier and more pleasant to do than to declare it to be untrue. This is because doing the latter often involves negating what somebody else holds to be true—a situation that could cause bad feelings, wounded pride, acrimonious exchange, or even vicious and protracted debate. It is therefore important for us to develop negation to a fine art, the better to diffuse the pain and unpleasantness to the one being refused, rebutted, contradicted, denied, lied upon, or denigrated.

The staple negation adverbs in English are, of course, “no,” “not,” “never,” and “without.” In addition to them, however, the language uses a remarkably wide range of devices for lexical negation (words with negative connotations) and affixal negation (positive words negated by affixes). I surveyed these negation devices in an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in the early 2000s, and I am now reposting it in this week’s edition of the Jose Carillo's English Blogspot for the benefit of Forum members and nonnative English speakers who may need a refresher on how to say “no” without causing offense.

Forming negative sentences correctly

Without any doubt, the adverb “no”—abetted by its semantic cousins “not,” “never,” “without,” and several others with a negative bent—is the most subversive word in the English language. Look how “no” undermines and negates every single thought and idea to which it latches on: “No, I don’t like you.” “No, I have never loved you.” “No, go away; my life will be much better without you.” And if you look back at the adverbial phrase “without any doubt” that begins the first sentence above, you would see how the word “without” totally reverses the sense of “doubt” to “certainty.” Overwhelmingly powerful, “no” and its cohorts can quickly and very efficiently demolish every declarative or affirmative statement that we can think up in the English language.

 IMAGE CREDIT: ENGLISHHINTS.COM

We can see that to negate entire statements, “no” takes a commanding position at the very beginning of sentences. It does so with brutal efficiency: “No swerving.” “No entry.” “No, sir, minors aren’t allowed here.” On the other hand, when “no” has to do the negating within a sentence, it often assigns “not” to take its place, commanders an auxiliary verb, and positions “not” right after it: “The woman drove.” “The woman did not drive.” “The woman will not drive.” Of course, we already know that when “not” does this, the main verb relinquishes the tense to the auxiliary verb. In the example given above, in particular, the auxiliary verb “do” takes either the past or future tense, and the main verb takes the verb stem “drive.”

The pattern of negation is slightly different in the perfect tenses. The adverb “not” simply inserts itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, with the main verb remaining in the past participle form even as the negation is consummated: “The woman has driven.” “The woman has not driven.” The important thing to remember is that “not” always positions itself between the helping verb and the main verb; for it to do otherwise would be grammatically and awfully fatal: “The woman not has driven.” “The visitors not have eaten.”

In contrast, “never” is a movable negator, certainly much more versatile than “not.” Watch: “The woman never drives.” “Never does the woman drive.” “The woman has never driven.” “Never has the woman driven.” “The woman never has driven.” “Never” is negation in its emphatic form—demolishing an idea to the extreme.

The adverb “no,” of course, can routinely negate any element by denoting absence, contradiction, denial, or refusal: “Under no circumstances will Claudia’s offer be accepted.” “I see no sign of reconciliation.” “The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are no more.” “Have you no conscience?” The adverbs “not” and “never” work in much the same way: “Not a single drop of rain fell last summer.” “She will always be a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

But there’s one major caveat on “not”: it’s wrong to use it in sentences that have an “all…not” form (to mean “to the degree expected”). Take this sentence: “All of the women in the district did not vote for the lone female candidate.” This sentence is semantically problematic; it could mean that “some of the women did not vote for the lone female candidate”, or that “none of the women voted for the lone female candidate.” Better to remove the ambiguity by fine-tuning the negation to yield the desired meaning. The first option: “Not one of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.” The second option: “None of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.”

The same caveat should also be observed when using “not” with the adjective “every,” as in this ambiguous sentence: “Every candidate did not meet the voters’ expectations.” Better: “None of the candidates met the voters’ expectations” or “All of the candidates failed to meet the voters’ expectations.”

Apart from using “no,” “not,” and “never,” we can also use the lexical semantics of negation as well as affixal negation to reverse the sense of things. Lexical negation is simply the negative structuring of sentences by using words with negative denotations, such as “neither,” “nor,” “rarely,” “hardly,” and “seldom.” Affixal negation, on the other hand, negates positive words through the use of the affixes “un-”, “im-”/“in-”/“il-”, “dis-”, “de-”, and “-less,” as in “unnecessary,” “imperfect,” “ineffective,” “illegal,” “disregard,” “decamp,” and “useless.”

IMAGE CREDIT: HAGARLANGUAGES.WORDPRESS.COM

When using these negative affixes, however, we must always remember to drop the “no,” “not,” or “never” in the sentence if our true intention is to negate the statement. Failure to do so will result in a grammatically incorrect double negative. “It is not illegal to steal,” for instance, will mean exactly its opposite, “It is legal to steal”—with all its dire consequences to civilized society.

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From the book Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose A. Carillo © 2009 by the author, © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

SOUND AS AN ELEMENT OF WRITING STYLE

Aiming for euphony in our English prose
By Jose A.Carillo

My first impulse was to approach euphony from a purely grammatical and structural sense, but I soon discovered that I was dealing with an entirely different species of expression altogether. Explaining euphony is like putting a strange quicksilver animal inside a ribbed cage, the better to observe its physique, behaviors, and eccentricities; as soon as the creature gets settled in the cage, however, it collapses itself into viscous globules, leaches through the cage floor, and eludes further scrutiny.

No wonder then that even the venerable H.W. Fowler, in his 1908 language classic The King’s English, dealt with euphony not so much with a general definition as with copious particulars. He focused on the ten most common devices English writers use to achieve euphony, then gave scores of examples of where they succeeded or failed in the effort.

 IMAGE CREDIT: THEWRITEPRACTICE.COM

(For those who wish to pursue Fowler further, here are the ten euphony devices he dwelt on with his trademark wit: jingles, alliteration, repeated prepositions, sequence of relatives, sequence of “that” and other constructions, metrical prose, sentence accent, causal “as” clauses, wens and hypertrophied members, and careless repetition.)

We can’t be as expansive on euphony here as Fowler, so we will begin more modestly with a formal definition. “Euphony” comes from the Greek euphonia,” for “sweet-voiced, musical.” It is the acoustic pleasure from the sound of words and their combinations, apart from what their surface meanings give us. But measuring euphony is highly subjective; indeed, it’s no surprise that of the elements of style, euphony is the hardest to teach and to learn. Also, euphony is intimately language-based, so we will only know if prose is euphonic if we (1) have a keen ear for words, and (2) have more than just an adequate understanding of the language.

Euphony obviously begins with the right choice of words. The choices need not be fastidious if we are simply doing news reportage or objective treatises; it would, in fact, render our piece suspect to begin with something as lilting as My Fair Lady’s lyrics, “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain.”

In persuasive writing, however, we must choose words not only for their surface meanings but also for their acoustic and emotional power. Some words just happen to be euphonic, or look, feel, and sound good, like “dawn,” “luminous,” “melody,” and “lullaby”; but others are naturally cacophonic, or assault the ears and grate on the nerves, such as “belch,” “screech,” “treachery” and “phlegmatic.” 

It’s no accident that many English words with unpleasant meanings are cacophonic; they are sounds of disgust people don’t want to dwell on or can only stand to hear on a fleeting basis.Good-sounding words, in contrast, often find themselves enshrined in aphorisms, mottoes, psalms, songs, poetry, and prose literature. As the American poet and philosopher George Santayana said:

“The stuff of language is words, and the sensuous material of words is sound; if language therefore is to be made perfect, its materials must be made beautiful by being themselves subjected to a measure, and endowed with a form... The tongue will choose those forms of utterance which have a natural grace as mere sound and sensation; the memory will retain these catches, and they will pass and repass through the mind until they become types of instinctive speech and standards of pleasing expression.”

To succeed in writing and speech, then, requires a conscious exercise of euphony or wordplay—the skillful layering of words for both their denotations and connotations, the gentle coaxing of language to yield unstated (or subconscious) yet persuasive meanings through such devices as tone, mood, rhythm, even sound for sound’s sake. A master of this word-layering technique was, of course, Shakespeare, who still speaks cogently to us today through the wit and wordplay of his Elizabethan stage creations. Shakespeare, observes contemporary American writer Christopher Meeks, “was able, through language both simple and complex, to play not only to the groundlings—the poor people standing in the front—but also to the educated royalty in the boxes, and to future generations.”

How do we achieve euphony in own prose? It would take a lot of practice, but we can begin now by thinking not only in terms of ideas but also in terms of sound. We have to work with words not only to create meaning but also to create sounds that evoke feeling. The most memorable prose from Ecclesiastes down to Shakespeare and on to E.L. Doctorow in our own time were constructed not only for their message but for their tonalities, artfully using such acoustic devices as alliteration, consonance, onomatopeia, rhyme, and rhythm. Their thoughts live on as much for the cogency of their ideas as for the great communicative power that euphony brought to their words. From them we have much to learn to make our own words sing and set minds on fire when the occasion calls for it.

This essay first appeared in my “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times and subsequently became Chapter 122 of my book  Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 and published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp.

THE GRAMMAR OF MANNERS

 “Mind” is a very tricky, very often misused English verb
By Jose A. Carillo

“Mind” is a very tricky English word, probably as deceptive as the statistical practice of equating popularity with fitness for a country's presidency. My dictionary defines “mind” in so many ways. As a noun it is “the seat of awareness, thought, and feeling”; “the intellect”; “memory and remembrance”; “one’s opinion”; and “the focus of one’s thoughts and desires.” As an intransitive verb, it means “to object to”, “to remember,” “to take care of,” “to take charge temporarily,” “to apply or concern oneself with something,” “to be obedient to,” and “to take heed or notice.” With such a profusion of meanings, it is no wonder that “mind” is among the most misused of English words.

    PERIOD PHOTO OF YOUNG PEOPLE PARTYING USED HERE 

    SIMPLY FOR REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY

The most embarrassing misuse of “mind,” I think, happens in the grammar of manners. I remember long, long ago my abysmal ignorance about this when I attended a party in Manila for the very first time, one hosted by an English professor. I was the last to enter her living room among a batch of adolescent guests, and as I did so she called out with quintessential sophistication: “Mr. Carillo, do you mind closing the door? The wind and flies outside are so bothersome.” The remark was so incomprehensible to me that I could only stare at her for several pulse-pounding seconds. Finally I stammered: “Yes, of course, Mrs. Reyes!” And with that I gingerly closed the door.

Then, as I walked towards her to pay my courtesies, I noticed her staring at me as if she had seen a ghost. But she regained her composure quickly and became her professorial self. “Mr. Carillo,” she began gently, “You didn’t answer me right. You should have replied, ‘No, Ms. Reyes, not at all!’ That’s the polite and cultured way of saying that you didn’t object to my request for you to close the door. You see, the verb ‘mind’ in ‘Do you mind closing the door?’ doesn’t mean ‘please.’ It means ‘object,’ as in ‘Do you object to the idea of closing the door?’ It’s not the same as “Could you, please?’, which you can politely answer with a ‘Yes.’ Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mrs. Reyes, I understand,” I said, and made a motion to leave.

“Don’t you go yet, Mr. Carillo,” she said, gently taking hold of my wrist, “I’d like to give you a few more lessons in the grammar of manners. The food can wait. When I said that ‘No, not at all’ is the polite reply to ‘Do you mind?’, it doesn’t mean you don’t have the option to say ‘Yes.’ For instance, if I asked, ‘Do you mind not staring at me?’, you actually have the option of saying ‘Yes, I do mind, because I just love staring at you,’ but of course that would be impolite—not the answer, but the act of staring at me. If I asked, ‘Do you mind if I light my cigar?’, you can politely tell me, ‘Yes, Mrs. Reyes, I mind very much—I am terribly allergic to cigar smoke, and I don’t like women who smoke cigars.’ Of course, if the idea of cigar smoke or women doesn’t bother you, you can readily tell me, ‘No, not at all’ or ‘Go right ahead.’ Do you get the drift?”

“Yes, Miss Reyes, I do.”  

“Great, Mr. Carillo! That means we’re off to a good start. You may go now and join the guests for dinner.”  

That terribly humiliating lesson in the grammar of manners sent me on a weeklong search for the other meanings of the treacherous word. In fact, I was to discover so many other slippery idioms using “mind” and set out to internalize all of them: (1) “We’re of the same mind” means we share the same feeling or opinion; (2) “They can’t fool around with me if I just put my mind to it” means they can’t do any hanky-panky if I firmly don’t allow them; (3) “We’re not in our right minds if we elect overtly deceptive people” means we are crazy to do that; (4) “Mind to think out clearly who to trust” means we should remember not to trust the untrustworthy; (5) “Mind to figure out why these politicians are suddenly all over media endorsing commercial products” means we should find out what they really are up to; and finally, (6) “Mind what our conscience tells us” means to obey what we know to be true, ethical, and just.

Now that we have looked closely at the various meanings of “mind,” I’ll ask this question: Do we mind that some pollsters are foisting on us the deceptive art of equating popularity with fitness for the highest post in the gift of the nation? I pray that the answer is “Yes, we do mind and we’ll tell them to go practice their modern witchcraft elsewhere!” I do hope this is our answer, or else God help us all! (July 3, 2003)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 3, 2003 issue © 2003 by Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

WATCHING OUT AGAINST GLITTERING OR GLOWING GENERALITIES

When Faulty Logic Overrides
Good Grammar and Semantics
By Jose A. Carillo  

Some seemingly matter-of-fact and grammatically airtight statements often get accepted in everyday discourse despite their faulty logic. Known as glittering or glowing generalities, they strongly appeal to our emotions because of their close association with such highly valued concepts and beliefs as the primacy of family, home and country, the sanctity of religious dogma, and the nobility of teaching as a profession. As such, we take them to be true at face value without examining the rationality of their premises.

     IMAGE CREDIT: MICROSOFT CANADA PHOTO IN STRAIGHT.COM/LIFE

A statement like “Being a teacher, she likes children” is a glittering generality

that’s not necessarily true.

These thoughts came rushing to mind when I was asked this innocuous grammar question sometime ago by Forum member Baklis: “Sir, I just want to know the difference between ‘being’ and ‘having been’ in these two sentences: ‘Being a teacher, she likes children.’ ‘Having been a teacher, she likes children.’”

Momentarily stumped by the perfect grammar and semantics yet disarmingly deceptive logic of both sentences, I got back my bearings and came up with this reply to Baklis: 

The difference between the sentences “Being a teacher, she likes children” and “Having been a teacher, she likes children” is clear-cut, but the sense of both has a logical peculiarity that defies a simple, straightforward explanation.

In the sentence “Being a teacher, she likes children,” the use of the present tense “being” in the participial modifying phrase “being a teacher” indicates that the subject “she” is at present a teacher. However, the main clause “she likes children” makes the implication—but it’s not a certainty—that teachers typically like children, and that the teacher in this particular instance is such a teacher who likes children. This implication, of course, makes the logic of the statement debatable even if its grammar is airtight.

On the other hand, the use of the perfect gerund “having been” in the sentence “Having been a teacher, she likes children” indicates that the subject “she” used to be teacher but ceased to be a teacher sometime in the indefinite past. Like the first sentence, however, the main clause of this second sentence makes the implication—and it’s likewise not a certainty—that teachers typically like children, and that the teacher in this particular instance liked children when she was still teaching and that she still likes children even now.

That second sentence has the further implication that the experience of being a teacher or of having been a teacher imbues a liking for children, but the logical justification for that second implication is not made clear. Thus, even if the grammar and semantics of the second sentence are airtight like those of the first sentence, those two unsupported implications make the logic of the second statement even more debatable than that of the first.

Indeed, I told Baklis, those two simple sentences that he presented are semantic conundrums, or statements that raise a question or problem that only has a conjectural answer. Within such statements lurks a fallacy or illogical conclusion so grammatically flawless and beguilingly attractive that the mind encounters great difficulty rejecting it.

Two days later, Baklis came back to me with this more down-to-earth grammar question about those two problematic sentences: “Sir, if we consider only the two participial phrases in those sentences, what would be their use or implication?”

In that case, I told Baklis, here’s what each of those two phrases will denote:

1. “Being a teacher,” a present progressive participial phrase, would mean the current continuing state of teacherhood, meaning that one is a teacher by profession and is practicing it at present; and

2. “Having been a teacher,” a past-perfect progressive participial phrase, would mean that one used to be teacher but ceased to be a teacher sometime in the indefinite past, and has not been a teacher again up to the moment of speaking.

This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the May 15, 2015 issue of The Manila Times, ©2015 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.