Redux 5: Remembrances of 10 Christmases Past

December 26, 2015

Dear Fellow Communicator,

Merry Christmas and a Happy, Prosperous New Year!

In the spirit of the Christmas Season, and particularly for the benefit of members of Jose Carillo’s English Forum who joined us only after December 2014, I am reposting this special Christmas feature that first appeared in the Forum five years ago. In this retrospective, 10 Forum members from various parts of the world recall their most memorable Christmas experiences or share their most intimate thoughts about Christmas. Whether celebratory, affirming, or contrarian, their thoughts remain timely and timeless as ever—a veritable springboard for our own reflections about Christendom’s holiest of seasons.

THIS MONTH IN THE FORUM (December 2015):

·       My Thoughts Exactly: Redux 5: Remembrances of 10 Christmases Past (Forum members from various parts of the world reflect on Christendom’s holiest of seasons)

·       Readings on Language: Contemporary Discourse in English Gets Plagued with “Verbal Eczema” (British novelist bewails the rise of subtly insulting and patronizing English expressions)

·       Media English Watch: Frenzied Arrival Reporting for the APEC Dignitaries (News reporters wrack their brains for alternatives to the verb “arrive,” to no avail)

·       Badly Written, Badly Spoken: What Does a Sentence Need to Take the Perfect Tense  (A later event or point in time to show the completion of a prior action or event)

·       News and Commentary: French Expected To Be World’s Most Spoken Language By 2050  (This will be due to sub-Saharan Africa’s burgeoning francophone populations)

·       Use and Misuse: Can “People” and “Persons” Be Used Interchangeably? (Yes, but for the singular form, using “person” is the better, more flexible option)

·       You Asked Me This Question: “Deployment” is Lingua Franca For Sending of OFWs Abroad (This military term is now generic for spreading out people for a deliberate purpose)

·       The Finest in Language Humor: Christmas Q&A for English Buffs (Sampler – “Q: What do you call Santa’s helpers? A: Subordinate clauses.”)

·       Getting to Know English: The Perplexing Workings of the Double Possessive (The evident superfluity of this default usage does seem like grammatical overkill)

·       Time Out from English Grammar: Focusing on Three Things at Once is Courting Information Overload (When a point called “decision fatigue” is reached, it’s difficult to think straight)

·       Advice & Dissent: Two Free-Thinking Advocates Discuss God, Sundry Subjects (Now you can read online the 2011 interview that became a sensation when it first came out in print)

·       Advocacies: William Zinsser on Writing: “Short is Better Than Long. Simple is Good.” (Beloved advocate of clarity and brevity in English prose writes 30)

·       How Good is Your English?: Debatable Answer Choices in English Practice Test (They can confuse when too arithmetical, too arbitrary, and too culture-bound!)

See you at the Forum!

Sincerely yours,

Joe Carillo

Click this link to go the website now: http://josecarilloforum.com

Wordsmithing verbs of destruction in English

A Hong Kong-based Filipina English teacher, Isabel F., recently shared with me this story about the usage of a verb of destruction:

“I’m a longtime listener to BBC iPlayer Radio and early this morning, I caught the program ‘The Why Factor’ hosted by Mike Williams. He read out some of his listeners’ mail criticizing him for using the word ‘decimated’ to describe something that had been destroyed. They pointed out that ‘decimated’ really means having destroyed or killed 1 in 10, according to the historical fact that Roman legions would kill 1 in 10 men as a form of punishment.

“Williams said he consulted an authority, British journalist and writer Oliver Kamm, who told him that the criticism is pure pedantry because ‘decimated’ is accepted today to denote ‘destroy or demolish completely.’

“I thought that you, as a wordsmith, would be interested in this.”

My reply to Isabel F.:

Your account of how the verb “decimate” evolved definitely interests me but not as a “wordsmith” in the context of being a word expert but only as one who happens to work with words as a source of livelihood. I’m making that distinction to make it clear that I’m not putting myself in the same league as Oliver Kamm, whose book on grammar, Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage, I featured in Jose Carillo’s English Forum recently (http://tinyurl.com/o7tgt8o).

Yes, I absolutely agree with Kamm that it’s pure pedantry—the unimaginative emphasis of minutiae in the use of knowledge—to insist that “decimated” be limited to the sense of having destroyed or killed 1 in 10. That’s its original sense, of course, having come from the Latin “decimatus,” for the practice of punishing mutinous Roman military units by the brutal execution of one soldier, chosen by lot, in every 10.”

Over the centuries, however, “decimate” had evolved in usage to mean “exacting a tax of 10 per cent.” It later lost the percentage aspect to mean just “reducing drastically especially in number,” as in “Unchecked urban migration severely decimated the rural population.” Eventually, it also became generic for “causing great destruction or harm,” as in “Serious citizenship and residency questions could decimate the poll-survey frontrunner’s chances of winning the presidency.”

Those are vast leaps in the meaning of “decimate” as a verb of destruction. But if some British English speakers find them disturbing, they would likely be shocked—nay, infuriated—to know that English speakers elsewhere in the world are even more aggressive in wordsmithing verbs like “decimate” beyond recognition.

Among Filipino speakers of English, in particular, the verb “salvage” has suffered an even worse fate. We all know that “salvage” normally means to rescue or save someone or something from wreckage or ruin, as in “Victims of Typhoon Lando came back to salvage their belongings from their devastated homes.” In recent years, however, “salvage” acquired the opposite meaning of “to kill” or “to assassinate,” as in “Which is a better way to deal with a serial plunderer—to salvage him or jail him for life?”

The website ArchipelagoFiles.com describes that sense of “salvage” matter-of-factly: “The word gets a whole new meaning when used in the Philippines wherein it has become synonymous to murder. To salvage is to kill. The word is often used by the media in referring to murder cases wherein the victims were put to death for being criminals. The victims are aptly called salvage victims. So if you are reading this and you happen to be a non-Filipino, consider yourself warned. When a Filipino says he’s going to salvage you, he’s not going to save you, he’s going to do just the opposite.”

In a very real sense, therefore, the benign “salvage” has become a verb of destruction in much the same way as “decimate”—only much deadlier.     

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 24, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

In English, it’s the helping verb that takes the tense

This rant about bad English grammar was posted in the Facebook page of Jose Carillo's English Forum recently by visitor Zzyggy Zubiri:

           

“Pardon my grammar and punctuation, for I wasn’t a very good student then. My English may not be that good but still, I find from reading Internet forums that unlike people in India and in other nations that use English as a second language, Filipinos have a very irritating, if not confounding, way of using the past tense with words like ‘did’ or ‘would,’ as in ‘did helped’ or ‘would cared.’ Now I’m starting to think that by sheer force of numbers, they may be correct.

“Is this what our teachers are teaching in school nowadays or should the teachers themselves be taught? Or, more disturbing is—am I wrong?”

My reply to Zzyggy Zubiri:

Even by sheer force of numbers, not by a long stretch are those Filipinos correct when they use the past tense of the verb with words like “did” or “would,” and I’m absolutely sure that their English teachers aren’t teaching them that terribly wrong usage either. It’s just that being nonnative English speakers, many Filipinos can’t seem to grasp the fact that in English, it’s the helping verb—not the main verb—that takes the tense.

I’ve taken up this grammar quirk every now and then in this column and in the Forum over the years (http://tinyurl.com/olyxuw5). However, as I had pointed out to an incredulous lawyer puzzled by the cluelessness of some people about that usage, it does need some brainwork to grasp the difference between the tensed main verb and the non-tensed bare infinitive in English sentences.

The thing to keep in mind is that in English, the auxiliary or helping verb “do” works in two basic ways: (1) as an intensifier to emphasize or to insist on something, (2) to indicate that a question is being asked and to give an emphatic answer, whether positively or negatively. But mark this rule: in both usages, it’s not the main verb but the helping verb “do” that takes the tense.

1. “Do” functions as an intensifier. It emphasizes a response to a probing question in the present tense or past tense, taking the position right before the main verb of the response. For instance, to the question “Do you really know this woman?” or “Did you really know this woman?”, the typical emphatic positive response is “Yes, I do know this woman” or “Yes, I did know this woman.” In such responses, it’s the helping verb “do” that takes the tense. The main verb remains in its base form (the infinitive stripped of the function word “to”), which we shouldn’t confuse with its present-tense form. Thus, in the examples presented above, “know” is a bare infinitive and doesn’t take any tense at all.

2. “Do” indicates that a question is being asked. As we all know, “do” takes the front-end position in present-tense and past-tense questions, as in “Does she take unsolicited advice?” and “Did she take unsolicited advice?” In future-tense questions, the auxiliary verb “will” or “would” takes the place of “do,” as in “Will she take unsolicited advice?” or “Would she take unsolicited advice?”

Take note that in positive answers to such questions, it’s not the main verb but the helping verb “do” or “would” that takes the tense: “Yes, she does take unsolicited advice.” “Yes, she did take unsolicited advice.” “Yes, she would take unsolicited advice.” When the answer is negative, the helping verb must be positioned before the word that negates the main verb: “No, she does not take unsolicited advice.” “No, she did not take unsolicited advice.” “No, she would not take unsolicited advice.”

Always, it is not the main verb but the helping verb that takes the tense.

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 22, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

3 US nonfiction bestsellers flawed and faulty like that PHL textbook

June 29, 2015

Dear Fellow Communicator,

I’m sharing in this week’s edition of Jose Carillo’s English Forum a report that will hardly be any consolation to Filipinos who are finding to their disgust that some of the locally produced textbooks for primary and secondary students are not only incompetently written and chockfull of errors but are horribly edited or not even edited.  It’s about the finding that three current nonfiction bestsellers in the United States—Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin, The Road to Character by David Brooks, and On the Run by Alice Goffman—contain factual inaccuracies, false statistics, or shaky details serious enough to warrant disclaimers or frantic assurances of revision by their respective publishers. The culprit? By tradition and by default, nonfiction books in the U.S. are not fact-checked to anything near the standard of a magazine piece. But because of these scandals over bestselling nonfiction running afoul with accuracy, Kachka says, the U.S. publishing status quo might shift a notch this year by finally making pre-publication fact-checking of nonfiction mandatory. Let’s not just hope but prod the Philippine publishing status quo, particularly those engaged in textbook production for public schools, to shift several notches in the same direction.

THIS WEEK IN THE FORUM (June 28 – July 4, 2015):

·       Essays by Jose Carillo: “All” is a Many-Splendored Word Prone To Subject-Verb Disagreement (It’s because it can either be singular or plural depending on the context)

·       Readings on Language: The Lively Craft of Creating Words As Razor-Sharp Social Commentary (Though seemingly overly self-indulgent, they are a delight to read and to hear for the first time)

·       Use and Misuse: How To Use “Only” Without Risk of Being Misunderstood (When everything fails, we need a disambiguating qualifier to clarify things)

·       Advice & Dissent: 3 US Nonfiction Bestsellers Found Riddled With Errors Like That PHL Textbook (The culprit? By tradition and by default, nonfiction books in the US are not rigorously fact-checked)

·       Badly Written, Badly Spoken: A Noun Modified By “Respective” Should Always Be Plural in Form (The adjective “respective” means particular or separate so it needs to modify a plural noun)

·       News and Commentary: French Teenagers “Unable to Cope” With Baccalaureate English Question (They found the question about Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement incomprehensible and impossible to answer)

·       You Asked Me This Question: Is “In Line With This” An Ineffectual Phrase? (No, it effectively says what it means; it’s just that it’s too formal and officious for comfort)

·       The Finest in Language Humor: 50 of Arguably the 100 Funniest English Words (Sampler: Formication - The sense of ants crawling on your skin)

·       Advocacies: William Zinsser on Writing: “Short is Better Than Long. Simple is Good.” (Beloved advocate of clarity and brevity in English prose writes 30)

·       Students’ Sounding Board: Aspiring for Much Better English Than That of Today’s Teachers (A self-imposed, self-monitored improvement program can make the big difference!)

·       Time Out from English Grammar: U.S. Students Not Interested in Their Professors as Thinkers and Mentors (Most look at their teachers simply as grade-givers, not as authority figures or role models)

·       Education and Training: Alternatives to LEAP: Hot Potatoes To Learn Spoken English Quickly (You can use this online program to create your own interactive grammar and vocabulary exercises)

·       My Media English Watch: Shell-Shocked by English Grammar Bombs in Entertainment Reporting (All I can say is that they’re “Awful, awful, eww English!”)

·       How Good is Your English?: Debatable Answer Choices in English Practice Test (They can confuse when too arithmetical, too arbitrary, and too culture-bound!)

See you at the Forum!

Sincerely yours,

Joe Carillo

Click this link to go the website now: http://josecarilloforum.com

When an English teacher prescribes an awful subject-agreement blunder

Arguably one of the prickliest aspects of the English language is that it doesn’t have a singular third-person possessive adjective of indeterminate gender. All that English has are the masculine “his” and the feminine “her," so what happens is that when a sentence has the indefinite pronoun “each,” “everyone,” or “everybody” for its subject, a grammatical dysfunction invariably arises when that pronoun is the antecedent of a possessive-case construction later in the sentence. Consider this example: “Each student should value _____ education.” Should the possessive modifier be “his,” “her,” or “their”? Choosing from among the three usually stumps even the most English-savvy people, for virtually none of them can do the modifying job logically and indisputably. But one English teacher chose the plural “their” without even qualifying it and even had the effrontery to post the usage on Facebook: “Each student should value their education.” Predictably, one doubting student brought it to my attention, and in a recent essay in The Manila Times that I wrote in reply and is now posted below, I described that prescription as “at best contentiously correct and at worst indefensibly wrong” because of the glaring subject-verb disagreement that it engenders. (June 6, 2015)

The possessive disconnect of ‘each’ and ‘everyone’

Let’s talk about the prickly disconnect that develops when indefinite pronouns are used as antecedents of nouns in the possessive case.

A student, Mary Anne Fernandez, recently asked me this provocative question in the Facebook page of Jose Carillo’s English Forum: “My English teacher posted this sentence on his Facebook wall: ‘Each student should value their education.’ Is this grammatically correct?”

My first instinct was to say that her English teacher was prescribing a monumental subject-verb agreement blunder, but I changed my mind and told her that he probably just got carried away by a wrongheaded grammar guidance from somewhere. Indeed, it’s at best contentiously correct and at worst indefensibly wrong to use the plural possessive “their” when the antecedent is any of these indefinite pronouns: “each,” “everyone,” and “everybody.” 

Recall that “each,” “everyone,” and “everybody” are notionally plural but grammatically singular pronouns that refer to every unspecified person in a group. Despite their inherent duality in sense, however, hardly any unforeseeable subject-verb disagreement arises when these indefinite pronouns are used in the nominative or subjective case, as in “Each has a role to perform in this major undertaking” and “Everyone is expected to be here by 12:00 midnight.” This is true in the objective case as well, as in “I gave each a token of appreciation” and “The teacher treated everybody with respect in the class.”

But these indefinite pronouns have the built-in drawback of giving rise to grammatical dysfunction when used as antecedents in possessive-case constructions—the unhappy result of English not having a singular third-person possessive adjective of indeterminate gender. All that English has are the masculine “his” and the feminine “her.” So, when the antecedent subject is any of those three indefinite pronouns, the equivocal possessive “his or her” is typically used to modify the object noun to ensure grammatical correctness: “Each student should value his or her education.”

The problem with using “his or her,” however, is that it irritatingly suggests that the writer or speaker is clueless—or vacillating—on whether the antecedent subject are males or females. Worse, the more that usage is repeated, the more it frays the nerves of readers and listeners.

The traditional recourse for avoiding this semantic and stylistic problem is to use the masculine “his” as default possessive adjective. With gender equality now the order of the day in most democratic societies, however, “his” as default usage is now widely frowned upon as unacceptably sexist.

This is why the plural “their” has gained some currency as default usage in such grammatical situations:  “Each student should value their education.” I do think, however, that it is misguided—perhaps even insolent—for an English teacher to endorse using “them” to skirt the gender disconnect in possessive usage; to my mind, the subject-verb disagreement is so glaring as to make the cure worse than the disease, so to speak. The better part of valor for grammar teachers would be to qualify that sentence not as prescribed usage but only as an undesirable fallback when every other alternative fails.

But are there, in fact, other options for avoiding that grammatical impasse? There are actually two: one is surefire, and the other advisable only when the syntax of the particular sentence allows it.

The first is to replace those three indefinite pronouns with the plural “all,” then use the possessive adjective “their” to modify the object noun, as in “All students should value their education.” Even without “students” to modify, “all” works very well as a stand-alone subject in that sentence: “All should value their education.”

The second, but only if the sentence will still read and sound right, is to drop the possessive adjective “their” altogether, as in “All students should value education.” This, I must say, is neater and much more elegant than that teacher’s patently objectionable grammar prescription.

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, June 6, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

A serious grammar malfunction about a wardrobe malfunction

In early April, I departed from my usual range of topics by taking up the atrocious English of two recent wedding-related stories that came out in entertainment news and gossip websites (“Shell-shocked by grammar bombs in entertainment reporting”). The first was about American singer Beyoncé Knowles’ mother getting married to an actor, and the other about Marian Rivera and Dingdong Dantes, the recently wed and overhyped Filipino TV-and-movie couple, telling all and sundry that they are now expecting a baby. Having done that despite the fact that critiquing entertainment-cum-gossip English isn’t exactly my cup of tea, it was farthest from my mind to do it again. As it happened, however, an even more provocative and instructive grammar lapse caught my attention in another entertainment story, this time in a leading Metro Manila broadsheet. So, against my strong reluctance to wade into entertainment-cum-gossip waters, I found myself jumping in again by taking up that grammar lapse in an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in the May 2, 2015 issue of The Manila Times. (May 17, 2015)

A grammar malfunction due to a compromised subordinate clause*

Doing critiques of grammar errors in entertainment-cum-gossip news isn’t exactly my cup of tea, and having done that in my most recent column, it was farthest from my mind to do it again. But then my attention was irresistibly drawn back by an even more provocative and instructive grammar lapse, this time in an entertainment story that came out recently in a leading Metro Manila broadsheet.

That story begins with this lead passage: “Alex Gonzaga experience(d) a minor wardrobe malfunction during her ‘AG From The East: The Unexpected Concert’ on Saturday. A part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed while performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G’ during the said concert.”

A wardrobe malfunction—you know, perhaps a breast popping out of a bra or a Delta of Venus peeping through sheer lace—is par for the course in sultry performances by uninhibited female songbirds, but not when nude-colored underwear is, of all things, discovered singing songs beneath a gown! That very curious grammar malfunction thus needs to be looked into methodically and as dispassionately as possible.

The faulty grammar in that lead passage isn’t difficult to spot: “A part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed while performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G’ during the said concert.” The main clause, “a part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed,” is grammatically beyond reproach because it has a legitimate subject and a legitimate verb, but its  supposed subordinate clause is compromised. This is because “while performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G’ during the said concert” turns out to be neither subordinate nor even a clause.

The problem with that construction is that it has no subject at all. Recall from basic English grammar that a clause needs an obligatory subject—whether noun or pronoun—to qualify and work as a clause. But here, what we have is only an adverbial phrase improperly clinging for dear life to the singer’s “nude-colored underwear” in the main clause. In a word, it’s a dangling modifier, creating the absurd mental picture of nude-colored underwear not doing its job of covering the performer’s private part but—like a portable karaoke—actually performing prerecorded songs for her.

Now, before attempting to fix that grammar malfunction, let’s do a quick review of that technique in English grammar of streamlining sentences by reducing adjective clauses and adverbial clauses into adjective phrases and adverbial phrases, respectively. For instance, in the sentence “She flirted like an Arabian temptress while she was performing her act,” we can drop the second “she” and the verb “was” to reduce the subordinate clause “while she was performing her act” into the grammatically simpler subordinate phrase “while performing her act.” This streamlines the complex sentence into this simple sentence: “She flirted like an Arabian temptress while performing her act.”

The thing is, such a reduction is possible only when the subject of both the main clause and its subordinate clause is one and the same, as “she” in the example I presented above; otherwise the reduction is a big no-no. In particular, in the sentence “A part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed while performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G’ during the said concert,” the subject of the main clause—“her nude-colored underwear”—is different from that of the subordinate clause—the unstated “she.” This triggers the grammar malfunction in that wardrobe malfunction.

The simple fix for that grammar malfunction should be obvious by now. It is to restore the subject “she” and the verb “was” to the the subordinate clause that has been improperly reduced into an adverbial phrase:  “A part of her nude-colored underwear was exposed while she was performing songs from her album ‘I Am Alex G.’”

Now everything is decently in its proper place.

This essay first appeared under the title “A serious grammar malfunction about a wardrobe malfunction” in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 2, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

Tough grammar question at the end of a litany of proofreading woes

The essay below is the last of a trilogy of essays that I wrote based on a well-meaning, constructive letter sent to me by a staffer of the Philippine Supreme Court who asked if he could consult me once in a while when he’s in doubt about his work. He said that part of his job is to proofread court decisions and resolutions drafted by a ponente or the designated writer from among the justices.

The letter-writer—I will keep him nameless for obvious reasons—told me he’s neither a lawyer nor an English major, so his proofreading is confined to just typos and grammar. “I used to be very strict,” he said. “I’d correct ‘back wages’ or ‘in so far’ into one word, and put a comma or period where I think it’s needed. This is because my idea of proofreading is that it’s for publication purposes; when the document gets printed, you can no longer correct it.” He then shared with me very instructive proofreading predicaments that constrained him from doing his correcting job thoroughly.

In my third essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times, I answer this devilishly equivocal grammar question that the letter-writer posed at the end of his litany of woes over grammar “wormholes” in Supreme Court rulings: “What should the verb be in this sentence: ‘He insisted that she (stay, stays or stayed) in the house’?” (April 26, 2015)

A devilishly equivocal English grammar question

Last week, towards the end of my essay about wormholes in certain Supreme Court rulings and correspondence, I said that the unnamed letter-writer who brought them to my attention asked this devilishly equivocal grammar question: “What should the verb be in this sentence: ‘He insisted that she (stay, stays or stayed) in the house’?”

I replied that the answer could be the subjunctive “stay,” the indicative present-tense “stays,” or the indicative past-tense “stayed.”  Since the explanation would involve some grammatical complexities, however, I decided to devote a separate column to it.

Let me start by rearranging the answer choices for that sentence: “He insisted that she (stays or stayed, stay) in the house.” This will allow us to discuss the more familiar grammar concepts first and work our way to the more complicated ones.

Recall now that there are three moods of verbs in English, mood being that aspect of the verb that expresses the speaker’s state of mind or attitude toward what he or she is saying. These moods are the indicative, the imperative, and the subjunctive. The indicative and imperative both deal with actions or states in factual or real-world situations; in contrast, the subjunctive deals with actions or states as possible, contingent, or conditional outcomes of a want, wish, preference, or uncertainty expressed by the speaker.

The most common and familiar of the three moods is, as we know, the indicative. It conveys the idea that an act or condition is (1) an objective fact, (2) an opinion, or (3) the subject of a question. Indicative statements seek to give the impression that the speaker is talking about real-world situations in a straightforward, truthful manner; their operative verbs take their normal inflections in all the tenses and they follow the subject-verb agreement rule religiously.

Now let’s closely examine the sentence in question when it uses the first answer choice: “He insisted that she stays in the house.” This sentence is perfectly grammatical when it is said or understood as an indicative statement, where the speaker declares in a persistent but straightforward and truthful manner what he believes is an objective fact: that the female referred to currently stays—that’s the verb “stay” taking its normal present-tense inflection—in that particular house.

That sentence is also perfectly grammatical when said or understood as an indicative statement when the verb in the “that”-clause is in the past tense: “He insisted that she stayed in the house.” Here, the speaker declares in a persistent but straightforward and truthful manner what he believes is an objective fact: that the female being referred to stayed for sometime—that’s the verb “stay” taking its normal past-tense inflection—in that particular house.

Finally, let’s closely examine the sentence in question when it uses the third answer choice: “He insisted that she stay in the house.” There’s now an apparent subject-verb disagreement in the “that”-clause between the singular “she” and the plural-form “stay.” However, if that sentence is said or understood to be subjunctive, it would be grammatically and semantically correct. Indeed, one of the uses of the subjunctive is to denote a speaker’s insistence that a particular action be taken, not that it’s true or factual. 

So then, always keep in mind this rule for subjunctive sentences with a “demand,” “require,” or “insist” main clause followed by a “that”-clause indicating the action to be taken: the operative verb of that clause always takes the subjunctive plural present tense (without the suffix “-s”) whether the doer of the action is singular or plural: “I demand that all of you leave right now.” “The company requires that all job applicants take an IQ test.” And, in the same token, “He insisted that she stay in the house.”

I trust that I have adequately clarified this particular form of the subjunctive.

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 11, 2015 issue © 2015 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.