Using “which” and “that” without fear

Because American English and British English differ in their use of the relative pronouns “which” and “that,” many of us who get exposed to both English standards get confused as to which of the two is the proper usage for particular relative clauses. Indeed, in my younger years as a writer and editor, this was my own grammatical Waterloo. Through so many encounters with the relative pronouns in my line of work, though, I have since attained a much clearer understanding of how to use them correctly. So, at about this time last year, I decided to share what I learned about them in the three-part essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times.

I am posting the essay here to help Forum members gain more confidence in constructing sentences with relative clauses.

Learning to Use the Relative Pronouns Confidently

Part I

One of the most common mistakes I encounter in my work as copyeditor and grammar consultant is the misuse of the relative pronouns. Not a few of the manuscripts I edit often embarrassingly fumble or stumble when using “who,” “which,” or “that” to relate a qualifying clause to an antecedent noun in the sentence. And I must admit that early in my writing career, I used to get pretty mixed up with the relative pronouns myself. Simply on gut feel, I would indiscriminately use “which” and “that” to announce my relative clauses, so I can imagine that my grammar then was probably correct no more than 50 percent of the time.

I can see now that I got into this predicament largely because in my youth, I had read a lot of novels by British authors. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them or profit from them in terms of getting a better grasp of the English language, but as I was to find out to my consternation many years later, British English uses “which” and “that” in almost the opposite way American English does.

So I think it’s high time we did a full-dress review of the relative pronouns. We’ll do it specifically in the American English standard, which is the standard we are using in the Philippines.

The relative pronouns are, of course, “who,” “which,” “that,” “whom,” “whoever,” “whomever,” “whatever,” and “whichever.” Each of them serves to relate a dependent or subordinate clause to an antecedent noun in a sentence, which can either be the subject or object of that dependent clause. And taken together, the relative pronoun and the dependent clause it introduces constitute what is called a relative clause.

Let’s examine this sentence that has a relative clause attached to it: “People who complain loudest about a problem often don’t do anything to solve it.” Here, the relative clause is “who complain loudest about a problem” and “who” is the relative pronoun that relates it to the antecedent noun “people,” which is the subject of the sentence. What the relative clause does here is to specify the particular people being written about; functionally, it provides additional information about the antecedent noun so the reader can understand the context of the statement better.

Now, in English, the choice of relative pronoun depends on two things: (1) whether the additional information being given is essential or not essential to the understanding of the idea or context of the main clause; and (2) whether the antecedent noun is a person or an animal or inanimate object. Either way, however, the relative pronoun can function as a subject or an object or can take its possessive form.

At any rate, a relative clause that provides essential information to the main clause is what is known as a defining or restrictive relative clause, as in the example we looked at earlier: “People who complain loudest about a problem often don’t do anything to solve it.” Here, the relative clause “who complain loudest about a problem” can’t be taken out from the sentence, for to do so will seriously change the meaning of what’s being said. Indeed, if we drop that relative clause, we would end up with “People don’t do anything to solve [a problem]”—a sentence that unreasonably and illogically generalizes on human behavior.

On the other hand, when the information in the relative clause is not essential to the idea or context of the main clause, we have what is called a nondefining or nonrestrictive relative clause. In such cases, a comma is normally needed to separate the relative clause from the main clause, as in this sentence: “The company decided to fire its legal counsel, who bungled the court filings in a crucial corporate dispute.” Here, the main clause can stand even without the relative clause. (September 20, 2008)

Part II

In the previous essay, we discussed the difference between the two kinds of relative clauses: a defining or restrictive relative clause provides essential information to the main clause of a sentence, while a nondefining or nonrestrictive relative clause provides information not essential to the idea or context of the main clause. We then saw that when the antecedent noun is a person, a defining relative clause is inseparably linked to the main clause by the relative pronoun “who,” as in “Young people who spend too much time playing computer games tend to have very short attention spans.” A nondefining relative clause is similarly introduced by the relative pronoun “who,” but it must always be set apart from the main clause by a pair of commas, as in “The great Jose Rizal, who has been called ‘The Pride of the Malay Race,’ was actually of Chinese ancestry.” Those commas indicate that the main clause can stand even without the relative clause.

(Again, to get a surer feel of the difference between a defining clause and a nondefining clause, see what happens when we drop the relative clauses from each of the examples above: “Young people tend to have very short attention spans.” “The great Jose Rizal was actually of Chinese ancestry.” With the relative clause gone in the first sentence, the statement has become too overgeneralized to be true; in contrast, even without the relative clause, the second statement remains perfectly valid.)

So far, though, we have only discussed the use of relative pronouns when persons are the antecedent subjects. When the subject is an animal, a place, an inanimate object, or a concept, we can no longer use the relative pronoun “who” to link the relative clause to its antecedent subject. Instead, we use either the relative pronouns “that” or “which” depending on the kind of relative clause we are using in the sentence.

In American English specifically, we use “that” to link a defining or restrictive clause to a nonhuman antecedent subject, as in the following examples: “The Siamese cat that our father found on a street gutter a year ago became the family’s favorite pet.” “The treehouse that the Sanchez brothers built during their teens was gone.” “The great idea that was propounded by the neophyte legislator got mangled due to too much politicking.” In these sentences, the relative clause is crucial to understanding the idea or context of the main clause; dropping the relative clause can seriously alter the import or significantly detract from the intended meaning: “The Siamese cat became the family’s favorite pet.” “The treehouse was gone.” “The great idea got mangled due to too much politicking.”

On the other hand, we use the relative pronoun “which” to link a nondefining or nonrestrictive clause to a nonhuman antecedent subject, as in the following examples: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was written by the British historian Edward Gibbon in the 18th century, has been hailed as one the greatest historical works produced by Western man.” “A subspecies of the chevrotain, which is also known as the mouse deer, is indigenous to Palawan and nearby islands.” The pair of enclosing commas is mandatory in such constructions; it sets the relative clause apart from the main clause and indicates that the relative clause is not essential to the idea of the main clause.

Indeed, when the relative clauses are dropped from such sentences, we will find that the main clauses can very well stand by themselves: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has been hailed as one the greatest historical works produced by Western man.” “A subspecies of the chevrotain is indigenous to Palawan and nearby islands.”

In the next essay, we will discuss how the American English usage of the relative clauses differs from that of British English, and how we can streamline sentence constructions that use relative clauses. (September 27, 2008)

Part III

A rather sticky point about the relative pronouns “that” and “which” is that their American English usage differs in one important respect from British English usage. Indeed, one who gets heavily exposed to books and periodicals in both English standards—as I had been in my younger days—would experience some difficulty in choosing between “that” and “which” to link relative clauses.

This is because as we saw in the previous column, American English specifically prescribes using “that” to link a defining or restrictive clause to a nonhuman antecedent subject, and restricts the use of “which” to linking a non­defining or nonrestrictive clause to a nonhuman antecedent subject. In contrast, British English uses “which” to link both defining and nondefining clauses in such situations: a defining “which” when no comma or pair of commas separates it from the relative clause, and a nondefining “which” when a comma or pair of commas (as the case may be) separates it from the relative clause.

In British publications, therefore, we will normally come across “which” introducing defining relative clauses, as in this sentence: “Nevertheless, [Charles Darwin’s] is the version of natural selection which has since been supported by a century and a half of observation and which is now accepted by virtually every scientist on earth.” (“How Darwin won the evolution race” by Robin McKie, The Observer, June 22, 2008). In contrast, American publications normally would use “that” for the two relative clauses in that sentence: “Nevertheless, [Charles Darwin’s] is the version of natural selection that has since been supported by a century and a half of observation and that is now accepted by virtually every scientist on earth.”

From my recent readings, though, I get the feeling that some British writers—probably due to the influence of American media—are no longer entirely averse to using “that” to introduce defining relative clauses. Consider this passage: “Heather McGregor, a City headhunter, echoes this analysis with the arch observation that ‘the UK bank that has come out of the current crisis strongest is the one that has most aggressively promoted women into positions of senior management: Lloyds TSB.’” (“What caused the crunch? Men and testosterone” by Matthew Syed, The Times-UK, Sept. 30, 2008). A thoroughly British writer would have used “which” to introduce the two defining clauses within the quoted material in that sentence.

Now, as I mentioned in my previous essay, there’s a way to avoid having to make a choice between “which” and “that” when linking restrictive relative clauses to their antecedent subject: to drop the relative pronoun altogether. See how this works in the following sentence: “The charming little beach that we used to visit in summer is now a crowded, high-end resort.” With “that” dropped: “The charming little beach we used to visit in summer is now a crowded, high-end resort.” Another example: “The emergency financial maneuver that was proposed by the chairman was rejected by the company’s stockholders.” With “that” dropped: “The emergency financial maneuver proposed by the chairman was rejected by the company’s stockholders.”

The two “that”-less sentences above are, of course, a form of elliptical construction, which we will recall is a streamlining procedure that makes a sentence more concise and easier to enunciate by omitting words that are obviously understood. This particular construction, though, is advisable only for informal writing and spoken English, and doesn’t work in all cases. In particular, we can’t omit “that” when the relative clause begins with an adverbial phrase, as in this sentence: “The speaker insisted that ultimately the people would suffer from the rejection of the emergency economic measure.”

See what happens when we drop “that”: “The speaker insisted ultimately the people would suffer from the rejection of the emergency economic measure.” The result is a squinting modifier, where the adverb “ultimately” could be understood as modifying either the verb before it or the entire phrase that follows it. (October 4, 2008)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, September 20 and 27, 2008, October 4, 2008 © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Rx for the hyphen in written English

Next to the comma, the hyphen is probably the most unappreciated and neglected element of the English language. This is because this punctuation mark hardly figures at all in speech; no one really bothers—and hardly need to bother at all—to make the presence of the hyphen felt when uttering English words compounded by a hyphen. The tongue simply enunciates hyphenated words with a millisecond gap or so, as in “flood-ravaged cities,” and the hyphen’s job is done.

In written English, however, the presence of the hyphen where it should be—when using nouns to modify adjectives, and when using phrases to modify nouns—spells the difference between good and bad English and between the disciplined and undisciplined writer. It is for this reason that I wrote the essay below, “Hyphenating for clarity,” in my column in The Manila Times over two-and-a-half-years ago. I suggest you read it to find out how your English fares with respect to hyphen usage and how grammatically disciplined you are in your written English.

Hyphenating for clarity

The clarity and precision of our written sentences are greatly dependent on how well we modify their various elements. Usually, of course, we modify nouns and pronouns with single adjective or adjective phrases (“The long wait is over.” “It was worth the trouble.”) and verbs with single adverbs or adverb phrases (The day was exceedingly bright.” “The fugitive was summarily brought to justice.”). Such grammatically simple modifications rarely leave room for doubt as to our intended meaning.

Every now and then, however, we need more complicated modifiers to convey precisely what we have in mind, as in this sentence: “Give me a real world example of a nation that was able to lift itself by its bootstraps.” The problem is that while the noun phrase “example of a nation” looks like it’s being modified by another noun phrase, “real world,” the context is so difficult to pin down. Are we referring to a “world example of a nation” that is real, which sounds nonsensical, or to an “example of a nation” in the real world, which seems to make sense but only vaguely?

Thankfully, English has a handy grammatical tool for fixing problems caused by the unusual compounding of its words: the hyphen. When we use the hyphen to form the composite word “real-world,” in particular, the semantic problem with the sentence we examined earlier simply vanishes: “Give me a real-world example of a nation that was able to lift itself by its bootstraps.” This time, it’s clear that “real-world” is meant to be a compound noun modifying the noun “example.”

Hyphenation can help us achieve clarity in meaning in two major grammatical situations: (1) when we use nouns to modify adjectives, and (2) when we use phrases to modify nouns. There are some generally accepted rules for hyphenating such compound modifiers.

Hyphenating nouns used to modify adjectives. When we use a noun up front to modify an adjective, we need to put a hyphen between them for clarity: “The insulin-dependent patient lived an otherwise normal life.” “The country promoted labor-intensive industries instead of capital-intensive ones.”

Such noun-adjective modifiers, however, typically need to do away with the hyphen when they come after the noun they are meant to modify: “The patient is no longer insulin dependent.” “The industries the country went into are not labor intensive.”

Hyphenating phrases used to modify nouns. When a phrase is meant to modify a noun up front, we need to hyphenate the phrase for clarity: “The big-budget film took five years to finish.” “The astute entrepreneur took advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity.” (See what happens when we knock off those hyphens.)

When adverb-adjective phrases are used to modify a noun up front, we need to hyphenate them if the adverb doesn’t end in “-ly”: “Her long-ailing husband made a dramatic recovery.” “The short-tempered boxer got knocked out early in the second round.” But we should never do so when the adverb ends in “-ly”: “The US dollar is the nearest we have to a globally accepted currency.” “A hastily organized press conference was called by the beleaguered senatorial candidate.”

When one of the adjectives in a two-adjective modifying phrase is meant to modify the other, we need to place a hyphen between them for clarity: “The man lost his light-red jacket in the mall.” When both adjectives modify the same noun, however, we need to skip the hyphen: “The man lost his light red jacket in the mall.” (Figure that one out.)

Using the suspensive hyphen. To streamline sentences, we can use the so-called suspensive hyphen for a series of two or more hyphenated compound modifiers with the same base element: “Small- and medium-scale industries deserve government subsidy.” “We need five-, six-, and nine-meter poles for this project.” Here, the words “scale” and “meter” are base elements of the modifiers that are used only once for conciseness.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 2, 2007 issue © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Make yourself confident in using “like” and “such as”

When writing a formal letter or report that requires a comparative statement or examples, you probably often agonize whether to use “like” and “such as” in your sentences. And I’m sure the following questions invariably pop up in your mind: Precisely when is it correct to use “like” and when to use “such as”? Are there specific and firm rules for the usage of each, or are they freely interchangeable?

These are the questions that I sought to answer in the essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2005. I suggest you read it and carefully study its prescriptions for the usage of “like” and “such as.” Once you have internalized those prescriptions, you can be confident of not taking a tumble ever again in your usage of these two slippery grammar trippers.

“Like” and “such as” are such slippery grammar trippers

Surely one of the most slippery grammar trippers we will encounter in English is choosing between “like” and “such as” in forming comparative statements or giving examples. Which of them, for instance, is correctly used in the following two sentences? “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures like a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.” “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures such as a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.”

If you still haven’t figured out the correct usage, you may take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone in the predicament. The use of “like” and “such as” is actually considered correct in both sentences, but the choice between them has remained debatable all these years. We therefore need to carefully study both sides of the debate so we can put ourselves on more solid semantic footing regarding the usage.

Some grammarians insist that “such as,” which means “for example,” is the only correct usage in such constructions: “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures such as a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.” They maintain that “like” should never be used as a substitute for “such as,” arguing that “like” doesn’t convey the idea of giving an example at all. Instead, they say, “like” in this usage can only imply similarity, resemblance, or comparison, as in “Her pillow lips look like Angelina Jolie’s.”

Other grammarians are not as restrictive in their prescription for using “like” and “such as,” but they do recommend the following more precise usage for them: (1) Use “such as” to introduce one or more examples that represent a larger subject, as in “Eduardo has a collection of vintage cars such as the 1955 BMW 507 and the 1915 Vauxhall”; and (2) Use “like” to convey the idea that two subjects are comparable, as in “Alberto wants to be a vintage car collector like Ramon.”

Take note, though, that these same grammarians consider “like” to be a close semantic equivalent of “such as.” They are therefore not averse to substituting “like” for “such as” in the sentence given in Item 1: “Eduardo has a collection of vintage cars like the 1955 BMW 507 and the 1915 Vauxhall.” On the other hand, they would find it unthinkable for anyone to substitute “such as” for “like” in the sentence given in Item 2 above. To them, the resulting sentence is unacceptable because it isn’t natural-sounding or idiomatic: “Eduardo wants to be a vintage car collector such as Ramon.”

At any rate, “like” in modern spoken English has practically taken over the role of

“such as” in comparative statements. The forms “such as” and “such...as” are now largely confined to formal writing. “Like,” in contrast, is now the preferred form for informal usage in which the example being given is offered not simply as an example but as the topic of the sentence itself, as in this case: "We are delighted to have a generous benefactor like Bill Gates." Using “such as” instead of “like” in such sentences must be firmly avoided, for it gives the sentence a false ring: “We are delighted to have a generous benefactor such as Bill Gates.”

In formal writing, of course, we are well advised to distinguish carefully between “like” comparisons and “such as” comparisons. In a “like” comparison, only one person or object from the class is usually named, and that person or object is understood to be excluded from the group being discussed. Take this example: “If you are a student taught by a brilliant mathematics teacher like Prof. Alberto Reyes, you would learn differential calculus in no time at all.” This comparison is about the possibility of students being taught by mathematics teachers whose brilliance is comparable to Prof. Alberto Reyes’s, with Prof. Reyes himself specifically excluded from the comparison.

On the other hand, in a “such as” or “such...as” comparison, one or several persons or objects can be named in the comparison, and all of those persons or objects are understood to be included in the group being discussed. Take these two sentences:

“With highly capable mathematics professors such as Prof. Alberto Reyes and Prof. Eduardo Cariño handling the differential calculus classes, we can expect a much higher percentage of passing among the students.”

“With such highly capable mathematics professors as Prof. Alberto Reyes and Prof. Eduardo Cariño handling the differential calculus classes, we can expect a much high percentage of passing among the students.”

In both sentences, the comparison this time is about brilliant mathematics teachers as a class whose members include both Prof. Reyes and Prof. Cariño.

Now that we can clearly distinguish the semantic difference between “like” and “such as,” we should now be able to use them without fear of tripping in our grammar.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, September 26, 2005 issue © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Watch out for those tricky contronyms or antagonyms!

The English language has its generous share of words that can mean the opposite of themselves. Such words, for which some grammar pundits have coined the terms contronyms and antagonyms*, include “bound” (which could mean either “moving” or “tied up”), “cleave” ( “to cut,” “to seal together”), citation (“award for good behavior,” “penalty for bad behavior”), “oversight” (“error from carelessness,” “watchful care”), “fast” (“moving rapidly,” “fixed in position”), and “ravished” (“raped,” or “overcame by delight”). They obviously could give us trouble if we aren’t careful enough, so it pays to be watch out for their skulking presence in the language.

As I’m sure you’ll remember now, one very commonly used contronym is “presently,” which could either mean “at present” or “very soon.” I confess that I often catch myself about to utter it to mean “at present”—this stands to reason from its spelling and sound—but some dialogue in a British movie in my mind stops me on my tracks and quickly redirects me to a safer word like “now” or a tamer phrase like “at this time.”

So precisely how do we use “presently” with the least danger of embarrassing ourselves? Or would it be wise to avoid using this tricky word together and use one of its more reliable and surefire synonyms? In the essay below that I wrote for my “English Plain and Simple” column at about this time last year, “Is ‘presently’ present or future?”, I offer some prescriptions and caveats for dealing with that slippery adverb without earning a reputation for being English-challenged.

*Contronyms, antagonyms. Both of these nouns are still neologisms, or new words whose existence is not yet acknowledged by the mainstream dictionaries. From what I can gather, the term "contronyms" was coined by Richard Lederer in his book Crazy English; Jim Ellis, in his family website, lays claim to having coined the term “antagonym.”

Is “presently” present or future?

Let’s settle this vexing word-choice problem once and for all: Do we use the adverb “presently” to mean “at present” or “very soon”? I realize that I had already taken a position on this matter years before in this column—that the word should mean “very soon” and not “at present”—and I must admit that when I’m copyediting manuscripts, I always itch to change “presently” to “now” when the author had obviously used the word in that sense, as in “The couple presently lives in a charming little apartment.” But then, when I watch a British movie with snotty butler telling snotty master “I’ll be with you presently, sir,” I’m absolutely sure that the word means “very soon” instead.

The truth of the matter is that “presently” has two acceptable senses in current usage: “currently” or “at the present time,” and “very soon” or “in a short time.” The neologisms “antagonym” and “contranym” have been coined for words like this, which could sometimes mean the opposite of itself. At any rate, The American Heritage Book of English Usage says that “at the present time” or “currently” was actually the original sense of “presently,” one that dates back to the late 14th century. For some reason, though, the usage seems to have disappeared from the written record in the 17th century. This disappearance, my digital Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary implies, was probably what prompted the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary to declare in 1909 that that sense of the word had become obsolete—even as the OED observed that the sense remained in regular use in most English dialects.

Since then, some language critics have became partial against the “now” sense of “presently,” declaring it erroneous usage. They insist that “presently” should be used only in its primary sense of “soon” or “in a short time.” In fact, according to The American Heritage Book of English Usage, only 50 percent of its Usage Panel found the “now” sense of “presently” acceptable. (In one recent official count, the Usage Panel had 180 members, including such notables as Jacques Barzun, educator; Alfred Kazin, English professor; Henry Louis Gates Jr., humanities professor; Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, and Pat Conroy, novelists; Paul Theroux, travel writer; and William Zinsser, writer-editor.) This, of course, puts sentences like “The 29th Olympics is presently being held in Beijing” in serious jeopardy. Indeed, it’s obvious that if the Usage Panel had their way, they’d rather restate that sentence as “The 29th Olympics is [now, at present, currently] being held in Beijing.”

I must admit that it was the collective judgment of all these English-language notables that had persuaded me to take a firm position in this impasse. I’m not saying that the “now” sense of that word is incorrect, but being not a native English speaker and not bound by a particular English dialect, I’d rather rely on how professional users of American English perceive the meaning of a word than on simple dictionary meaning or anecdotal evidence.

Thus, to avoid confusing myself and my readers, I would never use “presently” in this sense: “They are presently in Boracay Beach on their honeymoon.” Hands down, I would use “now” as first option, and perhaps use “at present” only if I have already used a lot of “nows” in preceding sentences. As to “currently,” I’d shy away from it because the word sounds to me too officious for comfort. These, too, would be my advice to writers who until now are unsure of how to deal with “presently.”

One more question needs to be answered, of course: When do we use “presently” to mean “very soon,” if at all? Well, perhaps when we’re in London to visit the Queen, and the cab driver is badgering us to hurry up while we’re buying some souvenirs, we can tell him with absolute nonchalance: “Just you wait. I’ll be with you presently.”

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, Saturday, August 16, 2008 issue © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Weaning ourselves from a wrongheaded use of “between”

There’s usually no problem when people use “between” as a stand-alone preposition to mean “from one to another,” as in “There’s no secret between us,” or to mean “something shared or in common to,” as in “The inheritance was divided between the patriarch’s four sisters.” But when it comes to “between” in the sense of “setting the limits or endpoints of a range,” many young professional writers often flub the usage. Seemingly from force of habit, they would write, say, “The taipan’s fortune is estimated between P50 billion to P60 billion,” where, of course, the preposition “to” need to be replaced by the conjunction “and” to make the grammar of the sentence beyond reproach: “The taipan’s fortune is estimated between P50 billion and P60 billion.”

It was the high incidence of such faulty usage in manuscripts for intended for publication that prompted me to write the essay below, “A recurrent misuse of ‘between’,” late last year in my column in The Manila Times. I hope that reading this essay could help wean off more people from this wrongheaded preposition usage that, if committed repeatedly, could mark them as less than grammar-savvy English writers or speakers.

A recurrent misuse of ‘between’

One grammar error I frequently encounter in my work as a copy editor is the misuse of the preposition “between” in the sense of setting the limits or endpoints of a range. This usage of “between” being so basic in English (as in “between you and me” and “between heaven and earth”), I used to think that getting it wrong was simply due to oversight by the writer or to what we might charitably call a typing error. But over the past three years or so, my coming across this grammar transgression much too often has convinced me that there’s actually more to the problem than meets the eye.

Consider the following sentences (I have changed some particulars to protect the identity of the writers): “Putting up a water refilling station requires an initial capital outlay of anywhere between P600,000 to P1.1 million.” “Plain chocolate contains between 30 percent to 70 percent cocoa solids.” “Each shop can carry between 1,000 to 1,800 items, with groceries comprising the bulk of its sales.” “The tunnel provided the perfect setting for the locals, who could only go partying between 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. because of the curfew.” “The estimated investment recovery period for the restaurant is between one to three years.” “His distributorship moves between 1,000 to 2,500 units a month.”

In all of the six “between”-using sentences above, of course, the grammatically acceptable usage is not “between _______ to_______” but “between _______ and _______” instead: “Putting up a water refilling station requires an initial capital outlay of anywhere between P600,000 and P1.1 million.” “Plain chocolate contains between 30 percent and 70 percent cocoa solids.” “Each shop can carry between 1,000 and 1,800 items, with groceries comprising the bulk of its sales.” “The tunnel provided the perfect setting for the locals, who could only go partying between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. because of the curfew.” “The estimated investment recovery period for the restaurant is between one and three years.” “His distributorship moves between 1,000 and 2,500 units a month.” This is because in all of the six sentences, the “between”-phrase is describing not the range itself but a point somewhere within that range.

Now, for those who’d rather use “to” because they feel queasy using “and” as go-between for the endpoints of the range, there’s a perfectly acceptable alternative: get rid of “between” and replace it with the preposition “from,” and, if possible, get rid of “from” itself afterwards. The original five sentences will then read as follows: “Putting up a water refilling station requires an initial capital outlay of anywhere from P600,000 to P1.1 million.” “Plain chocolate contains from 30 percent to 70 percent cocoa solids.” “Each shop can carry 1,000 to 1,800 items, with groceries comprising the bulk of its sales.” “The tunnel provided the perfect setting for the locals, who could only go partying from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. because of the curfew.” “The estimated investment recovery period for the restaurant is one to three years.” “His distributorship moves 1,000 to 2,500 units a month.”

Note that the third, fifth and sixth sentences above did away with “from” and are none the worse for it. In all six sentences, though, it’s clear that the phrase at hand is describing not a particular point within that range but the range itself.

There’s one other thing to make sure of when converting an erroneous “between _______ to _______” phrase to a “from _______ to _______” phrase in which the endpoints are dates: don’t change the “to” to a hyphen. When correcting, say, “The business flourished between 1995 to 2007, then floundered during the 2008 economic meltdown,” avoid reconstructing the sentence as “The business flourished from 1995-2007, then floundered during the 2008 economic meltdown.” For clarity and elegance in construction, always spell out the “to”: “The business flourished from 1995 to 2007, then floundered during the 2008 economic meltdown.”

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, November 15, 2008 issue © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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The vulnerabilities of our free speech and press freedom

Free speech and press freedom are beautiful in theory; in practice, however, they can often be used for organized, large-scale deception or outright lunacy masquerading as legitimate news or informed opinion. Let’s face it: when national election season comes in our country, political operators ruthlessly manipulate the print and broadcast media to advance their interests, and some candidates with obviously low levels of intelligence or discernment make fools of us—and often make such fools of themselves as well—by mouthing uninformed, superstitious, or daft statements on television or radio.

Network TV and radio are, of course, highly vulnerable to this abuse of the freedom of self-expression. This is in sharp contrast to practically all of the other information media, which have strong built-in checks against such abuse—newspapers, magazines, and other printed literature have copyeditors and photo-editors to prune out excesses in the written word and in visuals, while movies, video shows, and other forms of canned entertainment have directors, editors, and producers to methodically expunge excessively abusive language and images. But not so with live TV and radio broadcasts, where hardly any form of regulation is exercised over messages and language being aired live during news coverages or live talk shows. (Remember that time in the recent past when, on stage during a political rally in Makati City covered live by network TV and radio, a high elective public official made such a sordid spectacle of himself by spouting a particularly vile obscenity against the country’s president?)

Indeed, through these two very powerful and highly pervasive media, anybody can say any fabrication, self-serving propaganda, or utter nonsense in front of the video camera direct to millions of viewers or listeners. Lately, in fact, in the guise of instant opinion polling during talk shows on controversial topics, some TV channels now also blithely allow libelous text messages or outright invectives to scroll continuously at the bottom of the TV screen. Where is the wisdom, good judgment, and sense of fair play in such forms of unbridled media abuse? What happened to the need for civility and decency in our public discourse?

We can only hope that no matter how heated the forthcoming polical campaign turns out, our country’s broadcast TV and radio networks will not abdicate their responsibility for restraint and self-regulation. They should be ever be self-aware and vigilant that apart from being the most manipulative of all the mass media (a power that can actually be harnessed for the public good), they are the most easily manipulated mass media as well. For their own long-term survival, they shouldn’t allow this country’s much-vaunted free speech and press freedom to go straight to the gutter.

Related to these thoughts of mine, many of which I had previously expressed in my columns in The Manila Times shortly before and during the 2004 national election campaign season, I wrote the essay below, “Caution in times of reasonable doubt,” to remind us to be much more discerning and critical when subjected to the barrage of election propaganda from all sides of the political spectrum. I feel that the points I raised in this essay have once again become relevant now that we are seeing the beginnings of another season of ruthless character demolition and counterdemolition.

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It’s not only in the Philippines that civility in public discourse is seeing serious erosion. In the United States, as if taking the cue from the strident, demonizing language that we hear day in and day out in our domestic TV newscasts, a Republican representative called the US president a liar while the latter was addressing the US Congress.

Do we bewail or cheer the parallel?

Read “‘You lie!’ further erodes discourse” in Yahoo News

Caution in times of reasonable doubt

There was a time when the spread of false information took a much slower and largely linear path. A jealous or enraged person concocts a lie against a perceived enemy, whispers the lie to a neighbor’s ear ostensibly in the strictest of confidence but certain that in no time at all, that neighbor will break that confidence and whisper the same lie to another neighbor, who, in turn, can be expected to ensure that the process gets repeated ad infinitum. The lie then acquires an attractive reality of its own. Still, there was a downside to the process. Word of mouth was relatively slow, so even the most resourceful prevaricator needed at least a few days or weeks to fan the tiny flame of a lie to a major conflagration.

Modern communications technology has changed all that. These days, radio and TV, the daily papers, landline and mobile telephony, e-mail, and now even the mechanisms of the law itself make disinformation as fast as blabbering a sound-bite over the broadcast networks, punching the “Send” key of a cellular phone or computer keyboard, or filing fabricated charges against one’s target in a fiscal’s office. Organized deception has become a thriving industry, ruthlessly exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of the very same mechanisms that make democracy possible.

This is clearly manifest in the current election campaign. Every seeker of public office is a prime target. Both the good and the bad are fair game for political demolition. Each of them—whether a true leader, visionary, zealot, crackpot, or nincompoop—is prey to the dangerous phenomenon described by the British psychologist R. H. Thouless in his “Law of Certainty”: “If statements are made again and again in a confident manner, then their hearers will tend to believe them quite independently of their soundness and of the presence or absence of evidence for their truth.”

Thouless has pinned down one fundamental flaw of the human psyche: its profound tendency to believe statements based on repetition instead of actual evidence. Of course, few would take pleasure in the notion that even the intelligent and more discerning among us can be so gullible, but other investigators have validated the “Law of Certainty” and have come up with even more disturbing corollaries: (1) The exposure effect, demonstrated by Borstein in 1989, which states that repeated exposure of people to a stimulus results in the enhancement of their attitude toward it; (2) The twin repetition-validity effect and the frequency-validity effect, established by Brown and Nix in 1996, the first confirming that belief in a supposed truth increases with repeated exposure to it, and the second, that the rated truth of a stimulus is determined by how often it is repeated; and (3) The truth effect, demonstrated by Schwartz in 1982, which states that when messages of questionable truth value are repeated, their repetition tends to move their truth-value ratings toward the truer end of the scale.

The “Law of Certainty” and its corollaries are, of course, the principal tools of ideologues, religious extremists, and political propagandists in foisting untruths in the minds of their targets. They know that by sheer repetition, the feeble resistance of rationality soon caves in and crumbles. This is why in this election campaign season, practically all of the communication channels in our midst are bristling with deceptive messages. Their financiers and practitioners have no time to lose and everything to gain, and can take comfort in the fact that the effort costs so little and that the laws against it are so weak and inutile.

Now, the big question we have to ask ourselves is this: Shall we be sitting ducks to these blatant deceptions? What is our defense against the syndicated lie and half-truth? Thouless gave us what I think is a sound course of action: be thoughtful and skeptical, and adopt a position of caution when there’s reasonable cause for doubt about a particular assertion. In plainer terms, we should never, ever make a fool of ourselves by taking scurrilous political messages at their face value.

So the next time we see a derogatory blind item in the papers, a slanderous e-mail in our electronic mailbox, or a poison text message on our cellular phone, we should not honor it even with a single thought. We should resist the temptation to pass it on. We should stop it on its tracks by skipping it or by zapping it with the “Delete” button. That’s the only way we can run the character assassins out of business. If we don’t, who knows, they just might succeed in getting us to elect people who will send this country further down the road to perdition.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 27, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The misguided journalistic practice of fiddling with idioms

In my recent postings in My Media English Watch at Jose Carillo’s English Forum, I have called attention to the misguided practice of some newspaper reporters to fiddle with English idioms to put color to their stories. Take a look at some of their more flagrant idiom modifications: “people from all walks of life will paint the town yellow,” “people desperate to shore up their cash,” “it may look like a tit for tat,” and “for four years and running, the bank...”* Even worse, some reporters have a strong tendency to mix two or more metaphors in a single lead sentence, such as describing desperate people as becoming more likely “to fall prey to glib tongues” when “all kinds of scams rear their ugly heads.”

It really isn’t a linguistic crime to fashion a sentence with the help of an idiomatic expression that fits the idea to a T (“fits the idea to a T” is another idiom, by the way); after all, idioms are handy, off-the-shelf rhetorical devices that can quickly drive home a point that would otherwise take the writer so many more words to express. But to use two or more of them in the same clause or sentence is, to say the least, bad judgment on the part of the writer (and of the editor who tolerates the idiom overuse). And to fiddle with idioms and alter them to suit the writer’s literary whim or the exigencies of the moment is nothing less than a language atrocity. It’s a practice that I believe newspaper writers—and every writer for that matter—must stop if they are to remain role models for good English usage.

I wrote the essay below, “The Nature of True Idioms,” over two years ago in the face of what I saw as a growing tendency of some writers in the major Philippine broadsheets to misuse or overuse idioms. There has sadly been a resurgence of that practice in recent weeks, so I’m running the essay again in the hope of fostering a better appreciation and understanding of the need to curb or at least moderate that tendency.

*The original, correct phrasing of these idioms are as follows: “paint the town red,” “to shore up their finances,” “tit for tat” (without the article “a” before the idiom), and “for four years running” (without the “and”). The idiom “paint the town red” had actually been modified to “paint the town yellow” ad nauseam by so many print and broadcast media outlets in the wake of the death of former Philippine President Corazon Aquino.

The nature of true idioms

Idioms are collocations—the linguist’s term for certain common arrangements of words—that don’t translate. Every learner of a new language discovers this when he or she starts encountering its idioms. Whether a phrasal verb, an idiomatic expression, a proverb, or a euphemism, an idiom congeals into a fixed, indivisible form once established, and it loses both cogency and meaning when we attempt to express it in different terms or in a different language. For instance, the idiom “eat your heart out” (be jealous) disintegrates when we change, say, “eat” to “chew”(“chew your heart out”), “heart” to “aorta” (“eat your aorta out”), or “out” to “bits and pieces” (“eat your heart to bits and pieces”). Worse, it becomes nonsense when translated into another language, as what happens when we say it as “laklakin mo ang puso mo” in Tagalog.

These things happen because idioms are essentially metaphors that draw their communicative power from shared knowledge or experience between the speaker or writer and the audience. It’s either we know and accept an idiom or we don’t, and it would be foolhardy to use it—much less to fiddle with it—without being sure that the audience knows it, too. True idioms are embedded in the culture of most native speakers of the language, which is why nonnative speakers can’t really get proficient in another language unless they make an effort to learn its most common idioms.

We must beware, though, that not every collocation is a true idiom. For instance, the expression “spirits are up” may sound like an idiom but it really isn’t. We can actually replace its operative words—“spirits” and “up”—with other words and it would still hold and be meaningful in other ways: “spirits are down” or “spirits are low,” “energy is up” or “energy is down,” or “motivation is up” or “motivation is down.” In contrast, the phrasal verbs “turn in” (hand over), “turn out” (to prove to be), “turn off” (to cause a loss of interest), “turn over” (to overturn), and “turn down” (to reject) are true idioms, each change in preposition giving the collocation an entirely different meaning.

Indeed, the true idioms of a language share three common features that differentiate them from plain and simple collocations: (1) They are not compositional, (2) Their words are not substitutable, and (3) They are not modifiable.

An idiom is not compositional. We can’t compose or construct an idiom from the individual meanings of its component words. For instance, the idiom “take a lot of flak” (get strongly opposed or heavily criticized) draws its metaphorical power from the quandary of combat pilots whose aircraft are met by bursting shells (the “flak”) fired from anti-aircraft guns. In its current form, however, this collocation no longer has anything to do with combat pilots, flak, or aerial warfare; only the aspect of strong opposition is retained in its meaning and it has since been largely applied to serious intra-office or political disputes.

The words of an idiom are not substitutable. When a word in a true idiom is replaced with a related word or even a close synonym, the idiom collapses and loses its intended meaning. This is what happens to “take a lot of flak” when we change “take” to “sustain” and “flak” to “gunfire” to form “sustain a lot of gunfire”—a different but purely literal collocation.

An idiom is not modifiable. Changing the way the words of an idiom are put together or inflected alters its meaning or, worse, changes it beyond recognition. Imagine the semantic consequences when we modify “take a lot of flak” to, say, “get flakked a lot” or “take so much flakking”!

True idioms are meant to make ourselves quickly understood through the common knowledge and understanding we share with our audience, so it doesn’t really pay to monkey around with them.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 23, 2007 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.