Looking back to Easter Sunday’s earthly and celestial foundations – Redux

For your Lenten Season reading, I am posting here “Matters of Faith,” an essay that first appeared in my column in The Manila Times a decade ago—on April 15, 2003, to be precise. I wrote the essay after being taken off balance when my then nine-year-old son asked me why Holy Week wasn’t being held on the same date like that of Christmas Day, which is always December 25. Why, he asked, have the church authorities made the scheduling of Holy Week so complicated and ever-changing? I simply didn’t know the answers then, and my abysmal ignorance compelled me to do some quick research about Holy Week, a celebration that as we all know culminates on Easter Sunday. I think the answers that I came up with remains relevant and worth reading after all these years. (March 31, 2013)

Matters of faith

I was making notes for a possible non-English-language topic for this column, thinking that grammar wouldn't be right for Holy Wednesday, when my nine-year-old tapped my shoulder and asked: “Dad, why is Holy Week from April 13 to 20 this year? Last year, it was from March 24 to 31.* Why not hold it on the same date like that of Christmas Day so it doesn’t get confusing?”

Talk about deja vu! I had wanted to ask my own father that same question when I was about the same age as my son now, but never got to ask. Now I am a father myself—three times over, in fact—and yet could only give a stock answer to veil my continuing ignorance: “It’s because the days of the Holy Week are movable feasts, son. They base it on a religious calendar—you know, that kind where there are names of one or two saints for every day of the year.”

“But why, Dad? They could do the same to every other religious holiday, but they don’t. And another question: Why is Easter Sunday called ‘Easter’? This celebration came from the West, so wouldn't it make more sense to call it ‘Wester’? And one last thing: Why is the bunny a symbol for Easter? It looks funny and doesn’t seem right.”

Those questions stumped me even more, so I told him: “I really don’t know the answers, son, but tonight I’ll get them for you. Go to sleep now and tomorrow we’ll talk again.”

My little research to answer my son’s questions, I must say, yielded more fascinating answers than I expected. To begin with, it turns out that the movable Holy Week schedules are not totally arbitrary at all. They are always exactly timed in relation to the natural, once-a-year occurrence called the vernal equinox. The equinoxes—there are only two of them—are those times in the year when day is precisely as long as night. The vernal equinox comes in March, marking the end of winter and the beginning of spring, while the autumnal equinox comes in September, marking the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.

The advent of spring was, of course, always a cause for great celebration in the ancient world. The Anglo-Saxons welcomed it with a rousing spring festival in honor of Eoastre, their goddess of springtime and fertility. The Scandinavians called her Ostra and the Teutons, Ostern, but they honored her in much the same way. The importance of this festival to the early Europeans was not lost on the second-century Christians, who wanted to convert them to Christianity. They therefore made their own observance of Christ’s Resurrection coincide exactly with the festival. Then they gradually made it a Christian celebration, even appropriating the name “Eoastre” for it. Thus, contrary to what my son thought, the later use of the term “Easter” for the high point of the Holy Week had absolutely nothing to do with global geography.

People in those early times, however, celebrated the spring festival on different days, mostly on Sundays but often also on Fridays and Saturdays. This became a thorny issue. To resolve it, the Roman Emperor Constantine—who had by then become a supporter of the Christian faith—convened the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. This council came up with the Easter Rule, decreeing that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday that occurs after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. The “full moon” of this rule, however, does not always occur on the same date as the full moon that we actually see; it is the full moon after the ecclesiastical “vernal equinox,” which always falls on March 21. By this reckoning, Easter will always fall on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25. This rule has withstood the test of time, remaining unchanged exactly 1,682 years later to this day.

As to the Easter Bunny, it may be natural for us to think that it is simply a modern-day contrivance to liven up Easter Sunday. It isn’t. Its provenance is even older than that of Easter itself. The prolific rabbit, whose reappearance in spring unerringly marked the end of the brutal winters of those days, actually was the earthly symbol of the goddess Eoastre. Along with the Easter Egg, itself a symbol of rebirth in many cultures, the Easter Bunny was, in fact, a powerful ancient symbol for activity after inaction, for life after death.

In the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Roman Catholics and the rest of the Christian faithful have similarly found such an enduring symbol. They have thus consecrated the Lenten Season in His Name as their holiest of days, ending it on Easter Sunday in a feast where church tradition and ancient belief find joyful convergence.

These are the things I’ll tell my nine-year-old when he wakes up today and reminds me of what I promised him. (April 15, 2003)
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*In 2013, of course, we are celebrating Easter on Sunday, March 31—the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the ecclesiastical “vernal equinox,” which in turn always falls on March 21. This really sounds complicated and rather arbitrary, but there it is.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 15, 2003 © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

No earthly reason why the clergy should be bad in English grammar

With the Holy Week just a few days away from now, I thought it’s again timely to ask this question that I first raised over a decade ago in my column in The Manila Times: In their efforts at evangelization, should the major organized religions just rely on the momentum and stickiness of their respective belief systems? Or should they make a purposive and continuing effort to be better communicators and defenders of the faith, whether using English or any other language?

I wrote that column, “The grammar of clerics and preachers,” after listening to a priest give his homily during a mass in Metro Manila sometime in 2003. That priest had bungled his English grammar and had stumbled on his English phrases and idioms far too often for comfort, and I felt that this was an untenable state of affairs that needed the immediate action of the church leadership.

Then as now, I believe that the church hierarchy in nonnative English-speaking countries shouldn’t ignore the English problem among its clergymen. It should start being really proactive about the matter, making sure that its seminarians and even its full-fledged priests are given much more intensive and rigorous grounding in English grammar and usage so they can be better communicators of the faith. (March 17, 2013)

The grammar of clerics and preachers

A few Sundays ago, my two sons and I attended Holy Mass in one of those improvised worship halls put up inside Metro Manila malls. The priest, in his late thirties or early forties, read the opening lines of the Eucharist in pleasantly modulated English, his voice rippling the familiar words and phrases like the chords of a well-tuned piano. His cadence and pronunciation reminded me of the late Fr. James Donelan, S.J., then chaplain of the Asian Institute of Management, who used to say morning mass at the institute in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He would regale the middle-aged management students with English-language homilies of simple beauty and depth, and then, in his formal humanities class, he would lecture them with delicious erudition about the cultural wealth of Western civilization. Now, listening to the young priest at the mall, I thought that here at last was one more man of the cloth of possibly the same weave. I thus settled down on my chair confident of hearing a well-delivered homily to strengthen my resolve as a believer for the week ahead.

That expectation was soon dashed to pieces, however, for as soon as the priest no longer read from the book and started speaking extemporaneously, it became clear that his command of English left a lot to be desired. He could not even make the form of his verbs agree with the number of his nouns and pronouns, and his grammar was so gender-blind as to be irritating (“The woman walked in the storm and go under the tree to deliver his baby.”). His command of the prepositions was likewise disturbingly inadequate, and he stumbled on his English phrases and idioms far too often for comfort.

I therefore listened to the rest of his homily with increasing distress. Of course, I couldn’t presume that the rest of the congregation shared my discomfort; perhaps I was just too exacting in my English grammar that I tended to magnify what could really be minor mistakes. But two weeks later, I asked one of my sons—then a high school senior—to validate my impressions of that homily. Having attended grade school in a Jesuit-run university, he would normally be squeamish about criticizing priests about anything, but he told me without batting an eyelash that he thought the priest’s English grammar was bad because he kept on messing up his noun-verb agreement and gender usage. I really needed no better confirmation of my impressions than that.

Looking back to that incident, I think that the country’s priests and preachers—more than anybody else in our highly Anglicized society—need better than just average English-language skills to effectively practice their vocation. We expect TV and radio broadcasters to have good English so they can properly report or interpret the news for us; we expect classroom teachers to have good English so they can effectively instruct our children on well-established, often doctrinaire areas of learning; and we expect lawyers to have good English to ably defend us in our mundane civil entanglements or prosecute those who have criminally acted against us and against society. But priests and preachers have a much more difficult job than all of them, for their goal is to teach us modes of belief and behavior that are matters not of fact but of faith. They ask us to believe with hardly any proof. And whatever doctrine they espouse, their mission is to help us experience the sublime, to make us shape our lives according to the hallowed precepts of prophets or sages of a bygone age. This is a definitely a tall order even for one with the gift of tongue, for it demands not only the fire of belief but also good or excellent command of whatever language he or she uses to preach.

Since I was a child, my impression has always been that priests and preachers stay in school the longest—ten to eleven years if my memory serves me well—because they have to master the craft of language, suasion, and persuasion better than most everybody else. My understanding is that this is why seminarians study for the priesthood far longer than students pursuing a degree in medicine or law. I would think that those years of long study could give them a truly strong foundation in English grammar and usage, in listening skills, and in reading skills, then imbue them with a facility with the language that couldn’t be matched by lesser mortals. However, as shown by the fractured English of that priest delivering that homily at the mall and of so many other priests I have listened to over the years, that foundation has been resting on shaky ground indeed.

I therefore think it’s high time that the church hierarchy took steps to remedy this problem. This might be a tall order, but if nothing is done about this, I’m afraid that the established religious faiths would lose more and more of their flock to less virtuous but more English-savvy preachers—preachers who may have rickety or dubious religious platforms but who have honed their gift of tongue and powers of elocution to a much higher degree. I therefore suggest, for their own sake and for the long-term survival of the faith, that all seminarians and even full-fledged priests be given a much more rigorous grounding in English grammar and usage. They need to effectively smoothen out the grammatical and semantic kinks in their English to become more able promoters and defenders of the faith.

As the old saying goes, God helps only those who help themselves. (May 23, 2003)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 23, 2003, © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Don’t allow election propaganda to short-circuit how you vote

Every national election year in the Philippines, a lot of well-meaning people despair at the paltry qualifications of not a few of the candidates as well as the perceived low quality of the political discourse. In the campaign for the midterm polls this coming May, in particular, there’s understandable indignation against family members fielded by well-entrenched political dynasties and against candidates whose main preoccupation these past many months is to subvert the ban on premature election campaigning, assiduously endorsing all sorts of consumer products in various advertising media (herbals, house paints, generic drugs, instant noodles, dressed chicken, luncheon meat, even designer tea) to boost their face-recall and name-recall. Indeed, there’s hardly any effort to compare the comparative merits and demerits of the candidates as well as any intelligent discussion of the political platforms of the parties to which they have attached themselves. It’s clear that the campaign is largely being run on the basis of family ties, media visibility, and popularity.

This is not to say, of course, that boycotting the midterm elections as advocated by some extremists is a logical option. From among the whole lot of candidates in the national, provincial, and local level, there will always be the better candidate or the lesser evil. We thus can pin our hopes of good governance on these worthy candidates, but choosing them may not be that easy in the thick of the propaganda war that will be waged in this electoral campaign. This is why as this Forum’s contribution to the quality of this year’s midterm vote, I am again posting here an essay that I wrote way back in 2004 for my column in The Manila Times in the context of the presidential elections that year. I think that essay, “A primer on political propaganda,” remains as relevant as ever as a cautionary guide for preventing propaganda from short-circuiting the decision-making process in choosing our country’s leaders.

A primer on political propaganda

Propaganda did not start as something undesirable or downright evil. In fact, it had its origins in what many of us would consider the holiest of causes. Almost four centuries ago, in 1622, Pope Gregory XV was confronted with a twin-horned problem: heathens were fiercely resisting Christianity in the new lands that the papacy wanted to evangelize, and where the faith had already made a beachhead, heretics were attacking its very genuineness and patrimony.

Alarmed, the 68-year-old pope, once a fiery and outspoken doctor of laws but now afflicted by a dreadful bladder stone barely two years into the papacy (he died of the illness a year later), decided to form a special task force. He called it the Congregatio de propaganda fide, or “the Congregation for propagating the faith,” and gave it the task of putting more teeth to the worldwide missionary activities of the Roman Catholic Church.

That congregation’s successes and failures are today firmly etched both in the world’s religious geography and in the inscrutable, sometimes shockingly irrational ways that people on both sides of the great religious divide view that world. That, of course, is a fascinating subject crying for an intelligent discussion, but at this time, we will limit ourselves to how the entirely new word “propaganda” crept into the language, first into Latin and later into English, and how its practice evolved into a deadlier hydra than the twin-horned devil it was originally meant to vanquish.

Today, as most of us know, the word “propaganda” has become a noun that means “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” In plain and simple English, it is a one-sided form or persuasion seeking to make people decide and act without thinking. This blight on the logical thought process becomes virulent when serious clashes in religious, political, and ideological beliefs become inevitable. And what makes the once pious word and activity even more unchristian and linguistically anomalous is that it is waged as fanatically by the really bad guys as by the presumably good guys on our side.

The essential problem with propaganda, of course, is its single-minded goal of short-circuiting rational thought. As practiced in the Philippine election campaign, for instance, it is excessively bigoted in agitating our emotions, in exploiting our insecurities and ignorance, in taking advantage of the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of the language, and in bending the rules of logic whenever convenient or expedient. Propaganda can delude both the ignorant and intelligent alike, and the even greater danger is that even astute people could become its victims and crazed believers, as we are witnessing right now.

To fortify our defenses against political propaganda, we have to do two crucial things ourselves: (1) know at least the most basic tricks used by political propagandists to subvert rational thinking, and (2) cultivate an open and objective mind to counter their deceptions and sleighs of the mind.

A practical first step for this propaganda-defusing process is to critically scrutinize those aspiring for the top national positions. For our own and this country’s sake, and no matter what the poll surveys and the TV or radio commercials say, we must cut the candidates down to size. We must for decision-making purposes think of them simply as applicants for a specific job, or consider them as nothing more than branded products on the supermarket shelf.

By looking at a candidate as just another job applicant, we can greatly loosen the grip of his or her propaganda on our senses. That will allow us to dispassionately go over his or her application and résumé and make a reasonably sound judgment on the following basics: (1) communication and writing skills, (2) quality of mind and self-appraisal, and (3) qualifications and job-related work experience. Anybody who skips this elementary procedure for hiring entry-level stock clerks and senior corporate executives alike is obviously an incompetent, irresponsible fool who deserves to be fired outright. And yet, as we can all see, skipping this very basic process is what many propagandists of national candidates would like the Filipino electorate to do.

It would be even more instructive to treat the candidates simply as products on a supermarket shelf. We can then proceed to mercilessly strip them of their elaborate branding and packaging to see the intrinsic worth of the actual product inside. It would shock many people to know that the cost of the packaging of certain shampoos in glitzy sachets can run to as much as 85 percent of their total selling price. How much more profound their shock would be to find that some highly touted candidates, when stripped of their glitzy imaging and positioning, have less probative value for the national positions they are seeking than the paper their faces and names are printed on.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 29, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

The seductive power of repetition in fostering acceptance of ideas

Since it’s election campaign season again in our part of the world, I thought of again offering as food for thought an essay that I wrote for my “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times way back in March 2004. I came up with that essay both as a basic lesson in communication as well as a cautionary guide for appreciating the campaign messages of the candidates in the Philippine presidential elections in May of that year. The earliest members of Jose Carillo’s English Forum will probably recall that I posted that same essay here in the Forum in July 2009 as a grammar lesson in creative repetition. This time, in the context of the campaign season for the Philippine midterm elections in May this year, I am posting it once more in the Forum and here for precisely the same twofold purpose that I originally wrote it. I hope it will help forearm the public against deceptive or downright false blandishments of certain candidates and—it is profoundly to be desired—help the electorate come with an intelligent vote.

When saying it once isn’t enough

Each one of us wants to make a deep impression on our readers or listeners. Whether we are a teacher teaching an inattentive, rowdy, or recalcitrant class; a priest or preacher preaching to a flock of insensate, glassy-eyed believers; a lawyer making logical or semantic convolutions to convince judge or jury that a guilty defendant is innocent; an advertising person hawking an old, jaded product as something excitingly new; or a ward leader trying to pass off a thoroughly unworthy candidate as the best there is for an elective post, we will always want to emphasize the things we want to be accepted as true and de-emphasize those we want to be rejected as untrue. The objective is the same in all cases: to convince the audience of the wisdom of the position we have taken, whether we are speaking with the light of truth or with a forked tongue.

The easiest way to emphasize things, of course, is to embellish them with such off-the-rack qualifiers as “new and improved,” “the one and only,” “especially,” “particularly,” “most of all,” and “the best choice,” as in this sentence: “X Facial Cream is especially designed for tropical use, but best of all, it gives 100% expert conditioning for wrinkle-free cheeks.” As tools to snare the unthinking mind, however, such self-serving adverbs could be persuasive for at most only one or two hatchet jobs apiece. Discerning audiences can only take so much of words that demand acceptance not on the basis of logic but on blind faith.

A much better way to emphasize the things that we deem important is creative repetition. This is the technique of repeating in speech or in writing the same letters, syllables, or sounds; the same words; the same clauses or phrases; or the same ideas and patterns of thought. When done just right, this time-tested rhetorical strategy beats most other devices for achieving emphasis, clarity, retention, and emotional punch.

Just to see how this strategy works, take a look again at how the first paragraph of this chapter tried to hook you to the subject of repetition. In the first sentence, the word-pair “teacher teaching” deliberately repeated the first syllable “teach”; the phrase “a priest or preacher preaching” used the “pr-” sound thrice and the syllable “preach” twice (this figure of speech is known as alliteration); the phrase “judge or jury” repeated the first syllable “ju-” sound (alliteration, again); and the five clauses that carry the examples of people wanting to make a great impression repeated the same structure and pattern of thought (parallelism). 

This reiteration of the same grammar and semantic patterns certainly didn’t come by accident; the patterns were intentionally constructed in the hope of making a human-interest appeal strong enough to make the reader read on. (Did they succeed? You be the judge.)

A staple device to achieve emphasis by repetition, of course, is to use the same key word or idea in a series, as in this statement:

At Village X, enjoy cosmopolitan living with a touch of country: a life with all the amenities but without the inconveniences of the big city, a life amidst lush farmlands fringed by pristine mountain and lake, a life that someone of good taste who has definitely arrived truly deserves.

You will probably recall that “a life” in the passage above functions as a resumptive modifier. Its repeated use of “a life” as key words emphasizes the promise of “cosmopolitan living with a touch of country,” progressively building up the imagery and giving it a strong emotional appeal. This kind of repetition is actually what most advertising in the mass media routinely uses to persuade us, for good or ill.

Even more powerful than simply repeating key words or phrases is suddenly breaking that pattern once it is established:

Airline X is first in passenger comfort and amenities, first in both in-flight and ground service, and last in delayed departures and arrivals.

The disruption by the word “last” of our expectation of a series of all “firsts” dramatizes the airline’s claim of being the industry leader in flight reliability. It’s a neat semantic device that rarely fails to catch immediate attention.

Persuasion by repetition is a powerful device for inducing audiences to identify, recognize, and respond to our messages, but we have to do it with an eye and ear and feel for words and sentence structure. Uncreative repetition, like the ones that regularly assault us during election campaigns, are too predictable, awkward, tedious, and boring—if not downright untruthful. But when done purposively and competently, like the mesmerizing prayers and chants that we live by and the melodious songs, poems, mottos, and credos we love to sing or recite ad infinitum, repetition could shape our beliefs and likes and dislikes for life, Pavlovian and unalterable.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 8, 2004 issue © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved. This essay later appeared as Chapter 126 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

The versatility of free relative clauses in modifying our ideas

In “Crafting more elegant prose with free modifiers,” an essay of mine that I posted here last December 2, 2012, I showed how we can craft more elegant English prose by making good use of the so-called free modifiers instead of bound modifiers. To highlight the difference between these two, I likened a bound modifier to an animal species that has already perfected itself genetically, thus arriving at its evolutionary dead-end; in contrast, I said that free relative clauses form part of the wide gene pool of language that makes infinite permutations of thought possible.

This time, in “Making good use of free relative clauses,” an essay that I wrote for my daily English-usage column in The Manila Times on February 26, 2004, we will take an even closer look at the great versatility of this grammar device in modifying ideas. This is the last of the seven essays on grammar strategies for crafting more readable and compelling sentences that I have posted here from June 2012 onwards.

 

Making good use of free relative clauses

In the preceding chapter, we compared a bound modifier to an animal species that has already arrived at its evolutionary dead-end, and a free relative modifier to a species that partakes of a wide gene pool for its further evolution. This was in the context of the power of free relative clauses to expand ideas beyond the limits of the usual subject-verb-predicate format. We saw that while bound relative clauses simply affirm the identity of a subject noun, free relative clauses expand ideas in any way the writer or speaker deems suitable to his exposition.

There’s a handy guide for spotting the two: most bound relative clauses that refer to non-persons are introduced by “that,” while most free relative clauses that refer to non-persons are introduced by “which”: “The sedan that you delivered to me last week is a lousy clunker!” “That sedan, which you told me would be the best my money can buy, is a lousy clunker!” Notice how self-contained and peremptory the first sentence is, and how awkward it would be to add any more ideas to it (better to start all over again with a new sentence!).

In contrast, marvel at how the second sentence readily lends itself to further elaboration: “That sedan, which you told me would be the best my money can buy, which you bragged would give me the smoothest ride, and which you claimed would make me the most sophisticated-looking motorist in town, is a lousy clunker!” We can add even more “which” clauses to that sentence in direct proportion to the speaker’s anger and indignation, and still be sure that the speaker won’t be gasping for air when he gives vent to them.

We must be aware, though, that bound relative clauses are sometimes not that easy to spot in a sentence. Recall that we learned to routinely knock off “that” from relative clauses as part of our prose-streamlining regimen. Thus, the bound-clause-using sentence above would most likely present itself in this guise: “The sedan [that] you delivered to me last week is a lousy clunker!” This, as we know, is a neat disappearing act that “which” can oftentimes also do to link free relative clauses smoothly with main clauses.

But what really makes free relative clauses most valuable to prose is their ability to position themselves most anywhere in a sentence—at the beginning, in the middle, or at the tail end—with hardly any change in meaning; bound relative clauses simply can’t do that. We can better understand that semantic attribute by using three ways to combine sentences using the free-relative-clause construction technique. Take these two sentences: “The new junior executive has been very astute in his moves. He has been quietly working to form alliances with the various division managers.”

Our first construction puts the relative clause right at the beginning of the sentence: “Working quietly to form alliances with the various division managers, the new junior executive has been very astute in his moves.” The second puts it smack in the middle: “The new junior executive, working quietly to form alliances with the various division managers, has been very astute in his moves.” And the third puts it at the very tail end: “The new junior executive has been very astute in his moves, quietly working to form alliances with the various division managers.”

The wonder is that all three constructions yield elegant sentences that mean precisely the same thing—sentences that look, sound, and feel much better than when they are forced into bound-modifier straightjackets like this: “The new junior executive who is working quietly to form alliances with the various division managers has been very astute in his moves.”

We can see clearly now that free relative clauses work in much the same way as resumptive and summative modifiers: they allow us to effortlessly extend the line of thought of a sentence without losing coherence and cohesion and without creating unsightly sprawl. However, free relative clauses differ from them in one major functional attribute: they specifically modify a subject of a particular verb.

In contrast, resumptive modifiers pick up any noun, verb, or adjective from a main clause and elaborate on them with relative clauses, while summative modifiers make a recap of what has been said in the previous clause and develop it with another line of thought altogether. Free relative clauses specifically need verbs to start off thoughts that elaborate on the subject of the main clause: “She loves me deeply, showing it in the way she moves, hinting it in the way she looks at me.”

We can attach more and more free relative clauses to that sentence, but the point has been made: using free relative clauses is—short of poetry—one of the closest ways we can ever get to achieving elegance in our prose.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 26, 2004 issue © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved. This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 64 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

The power of free modifiers to make ideas more expansive

From June 2012 onwards I have presented here in this blog six grammar strategies for crafting more readable and compelling sentences, namely (1) the use of synonyms to enliven prose, (2) the use of reference words to avoid unduly repeating ourselves when driving home a point, (3) the use of demonstrative reference words to make what we are saying more immediate and forceful, (4) the use of repeated action and sequence words to give punch and sparkle to our statements, (5) the use of resumptive modifiers to dramatically improve the organization of our ideas, and (6) the use of summative to eliminate verbal sprawl and make our sentences more emphatic.

This time, for the seventh in this blog’s series of grammar strategies for effective writing, I’ll show how we can craft more elegant English prose by making good use of the so-called free modifiers. In the essay below that I wrote for my daily English-usage column in The Manila Times in February of 2004, we will first survey the entire universe of modifiers in the English language, after which we’ll zero in on the eight forms of free modifiers and take up how each of them does its modifying job. (December 2, 2012)

Crafting more elegant prose with free modifiers

To better appreciate the value of free modifiers, particularly of the kind that works in the same league as resumptive modifiers and summative modifiers, we must first survey the entire universe of modifiers in the English language. We will recall, to begin with, that there are two basic types of modifiers: the bound modifier and the free modifier. Bound modifiers are those that are essential to the meaning of a clause or sentence, as the relative clause “those that are essential to the meaning of the sentence” in this particular sentence is essential to its main clause. Without that relative clause, the main clause and the sentence itself cannot exist; all we will have is the meaningless fragment “bound modifiers are.”

On the other hand, in that same sentence, the long phrase that begins with “…as the relative clause” and ends with “…essential to its main clause” is a free modifier. We can knock it off and it will not even be missed in the sentence that will be left: “Bound modifiers are those that are essential to the meaning of a clause or sentence.” The sentence has shed off a substantial chunk of itself, of course, as a lizard might lose its tail and yet grow it again someday, but otherwise nothing serious or untoward has happened to its semantic health.

One distinctive feature of bound modifiers is that they are not set off from the rest of the sentence; they normally form an unbroken chain of words that ends with a period, or pauses with a comma or some other punctuation mark. Free modifiers, on the other hand, are set off by commas most of the time, as the comparative clause “a lizard might lose its tail and yet grow it again someday” finds itself hemmed in by two commas in the sentence we examined earlier. Not to have those two commas, or not to have at least one of them in what we will call their frontline acts, would make free modifiers such a disruptive nuisance or outright killers of sense and meaning.

Now that we are about to examine their semantic structures in detail, we might as well make a quick review of the eight forms free modifiers usually take to do their job. Those forms have familiar and largely self-explanatory names: subordinate clauses, infinitive phrases, verb clusters, noun clusters, adjective clusters, appositives, absolutes, and free relative clauses. For a better understanding of them, let’s now look at sentences that use the various forms of free modifiers (shown in italics):

Subordinate clause: “You may leave now even if you haven’t finished your work yet.”

Infinitive phrase: “To win this bout, you must knock him out in this round.”

Verb cluster, a crossover pattern that puts the “-ing” form of verbs into modifying-clause mode: “Taking the cue, the buffoon withdrew his candidacy.”

Noun cluster, a crossover pattern that puts the second noun from a main clause into modifying-clause mode: “A veteran of many campaign seasons, the aging politician knows the turf that well.” (Its basic, rather convoluted form: “The aging politician is a veteran of many campaign seasons who knows the turf that well.”)

Adjective cluster, a crossover pattern that puts an adjective or a verb’s past-participle form into modifying-clause mode: “Desperate over the taunts about her academic deficiencies, the woman withdrew her job application.”

Appositive, the nifty description that we insert between nouns and their verbs: “The widow, a pale ghost of her old self, wailed at her husband’s funeral.”

Absolute nominative, which puts the passive-voice verb into the “-ing” or past-participle form and knocks off the helping verb: “All hope gone, the soldier beat a hasty retreat.”

Free relative clauses. I have deferred discussion of free relative clauses for last because we’ll be giving them much fuller treatment than the rest. There is a special reason for giving them a much closer look. Free relative clauses, along with resumptive modifiers and summative modifiers, are actually among the most powerful tools available to us for achieving clarity and coherence as well as elegance in our prose.

We will first focus on the power of free relative clauses to expand ideas in a sentence way beyond the limits of the usual subject-verb-predicate format. As we already know, a bound modifier is limited to identifying the noun form that precedes or follows it in a clause, as in this example: “The Makati City executive with whom I had a heated traffic altercation last month is now my friend.”

The long italicized clause in the sentence above is actually a bound modifier that closes the sentence in an airtight loop. Every word in that clause is essential to its own meaning and that of the whole sentence. We can liken a bound modifier to an animal species that has already perfected itself genetically, thus arriving at its evolutionary dead-end. Free relative clauses, in contrast, form part of the wide gene pool of language that makes infinite permutations of thought possible.

We will explore that idea in greater detail in the next Forum update.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 25, 2004 issue © 2004 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved. This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 63 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

Using summative modifiers for more emphatic sentences

Previously, I presented in this Forum an essay of mine showing how resumptive modifiers can dramatically improve the organization of our ideas and make our sentences more readable and compelling. Now, as the sixth in the Forum’s series of grammar strategies for expository writing, I’ll be presenting the advanced sentence-development technique of using summative modifiers.

In the essay below that I wrote for my daily English-usage column in The Manila Times in January of 2004, we will see that as good as the resumptive modifier is in doing its job, it finds worthy competition in the summative modifier for achieving the same objective. We already know that to eliminate verbal sprawl and to make a sentence more emphatic, a resumptive modifier does away with relative clauses by repeating a key phrase used in a preceding clause of the sentence. In contrast, the summative modifier does the same job by introducing an altogether new word or phrase that sums up a core idea of the preceding clause, then makes that word or phrase the thematic subject of succeeding relative clauses.

Go read the essay now to see precisely how the summative modifier works and how you might find good use for it in your own written and spoken English. (October 7, 2012)

The usefulness of summative modifiers

Using relative clauses is a very convenient way to load sentences with more information. They do their job quite well when only one or two of them are involved, as in this sentence: “The car that figured in the smashup ran through the red light, first hitting the sedan, which rolled over on impact.” The first relative clause in the sentence is, of course, “that figured in the smashup,” modifying “car”; the second is “which rolled over on impact,” modifying “sedan.”

When we attach more and more relative clauses to the sentence, however, ambiguity and monotony start getting into the picture. The sentence becomes progressively confusing until it breaks into an incomprehensible sprawl. See, for instance, what the addition of three more relative clauses does to the sentence given as example above: “The car that figured in the smashup ran through the red light, first hitting the incoming sedan, which rolled over on impact, hitting in turn a van that was parked on the side of the road, which then hurtled toward eight joggers having breakfast at the sidewalk café.” This time, we have produced a mishmash of vague antecedents and linkages—a clear sign of a serious relative-clause overload.

We have already seen how a good resumptive modifier straightens out this messy and confusing state of affairs. By using, say, “smashup” as a resumptive modifier, we can construct this compelling, admirably coherent rendition of the same sentence:

A car that ran through the red light figured in a terrible smashup, a smashup that made an incoming sedan roll over on impact, a smashup so strong the sedan hit a parked van and sent it hurtling toward eight joggers having breakfast at a sidewalk café.

Not even the most well-organized string of relative clauses in the world can match the drama of this resumptive-modifier-using sentence.

As good as the resumptive modifier is in doing its job, it finds worthy competition in another semantic device for that same assignment. That device is the summative modifier. Instead of repeating a key phrase used in a preceding clause of the sentence, a summative modifier introduces an altogether new word or phrase that sums up a core idea of the preceding clause, then makes that word or phrase the thematic subject of succeeding relative clauses.

The phrase “tragic accident,” for example, works as a summative modifier in this alternative rendition of our previous example:

A car that ran through the red light figured in a terrible smashup, a tragic accident in which the wayward vehicle first hit an incoming sedan, creating a domino effect that made the sedan roll over and slam on a parked van, which in turn hurtled toward eight joggers having breakfast at a sidewalk café.

This sentence packs an even more powerful wallop than the resumptive-modifier version, principally because its summative modifier offers even more graphic and more compelling imagery than the resumptive modifier used in the other sentence.

Let’s take a closer look at the mechanism of the summative modifier. We can see that this device positions itself right after a pause created by a comma at the end of a sentence segment. It comes in the form of a noun or noun phrase that concisely—and very quickly—recapitulates a major idea presented earlier in the sentence, and a relative clause in turn elaborates on it with new information. There isn’t much room in a sentence for long, extended summative modifiers; the best ones are single summary words or very short noun phrases of perhaps two to three words. To make summary modifiers longer than this only serves to arrest the momentum of the exposition, defeating the very reason for using them in the first place.

Look what happens when a summative modifier gets too long for comfort:

A car that ran through the red light yesterday figured in a terrible smashup, a tragic accident of such horrendous proportions and repercussions in which the wayward vehicle first hit an incoming sedan, creating an unparalleled, bizarre, and gory domino effect that made it roll over and slam on a parked van, which in turn hurtled toward eight joggers having breakfast at a sidewalk café.

The extended noun phrases “a tragic accident of such horrendous proportions and repercussions” and “an unparalleled, bizarre, and gory domino effect” invalidate themselves as summative modifiers because of their excessive length and ponderousness.

The summative modifier is meant to help us avoid ambiguity and monotony in our prose, not to create confusion and introduce tedium to it. It’s an excellent sentence extender but it doesn’t tolerate delay or hesitance in execution. So long as we keep this in mind, the summative modifier—like the resumptive modifier—can make our writing much better organized and more expressive than it can ever be with only plain relative clauses at our command.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 25, 2004 issue © 2004 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved. This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 62 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.