Jose Carillo's Forum

MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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Team up with me in My Media English Watch!

I am inviting Forum members to team up with me in doing My Media English Watch. This way, we can further widen this Forum’s dragnet for bad or questionable English usage in both the print media and broadcast media, thus giving more teeth to our campaign to encourage them to continuously improve their English. All you need to do is pinpoint every serious English misuse you encounter while reading your favorite newspaper or viewing your favorite network or cable TV programs. Just tell me about the English misuse and I will do a grammar critique of it.

Read the guidelines and house rules for joining My Media English Watch!

The Forum will no longer do its weekly critiques of media English

For two years and nine months now, My Media English Watch has been the Forum’s pièce de résistance, offering weekly critiques of faulty English grammar and usage in the four major Philippine broadsheets; later, in April of 2011, it expanded its coverage to the news websites of two of the country’s major TV networks. Its objective has been two-fold: to encourage media people to be correct and precise in their use of English in news and feature stories, and to provide Forum members with a continuing stream of topical, real-life lessons in English grammar and usage. As can be seen in the accumulated postings of grammar critiques in this section, the target media outlets had kept the media watch rather busy dissecting all sorts of grammar and usage errors from week to week during the first two years or so. But eventually, perhaps owing to greater grammar awareness engendered by the critiques, the usually sizable stream of errors being committed by the target media outlets steadily diminished until it became just a trickle in recent months.

This week, for the simple reason that the target media outlets are now able to keep themselves practically free of serious grammar and usage errors, I would like to announce that the Forum will no longer be doing its weekly critiques of media English. However, the My Media English Watch section will continue to entertain feedback from Forum members and guests about their personal encounters with bad English in the Philippine print, broadcast, or social media. The section will also maintain its library of accumulated critiques of faulty media grammar and keep it open 24/7 to English-language learners and researchers. (March 11, 2012)

FEEDBACK FROM FORUM MEMBER:
“Speaking in tongues” isn’t “speaking with a forked tongue”

Better late than never.

The very instructive case of English misuse below was e-mailed to me in mid-February by my friend Ed Maranan, a Hall of Famer of the Palanca Awards for Literature. I actually posted it along my reply in this section’s discussion board last February 18 but missed giving it the frontline prominence it deserves in My Media English Watch, so here goes…

In the February 10, 2012 editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, “Hollow Victory,” the last sentence of the third paragraph reads: “Add speaking in forked tongues to the serious character flaws the country’s highest magistrate seems to be afflicted with.”

In the phrase “speaking in forked tongues,” the editorial writer combined or conflated two well-known expressions, “speaking with a forked tongue”—which, in Native American folklore, means “telling lies”—and “speaking in tongues” or glossolalia, which is the uttering of words or phrases from foreign languages previously unknown to the speaker (this is a supposedly Christian phenomenon characteristic of religious or mystical possession). But even if one speaks an unlimited number of foreign languages when religiously or mystically possessed, it can only be with just one “forked tongue.” In relation to Chief Justice Renato Corona, though, the editorial writer got it wrong. That sentence in question obviously called for “speaking with a forked tongue,” the Native American expression for the White Man’s wily ways of using stealth and falsehood to conquer the natives.

My open reply to Ed:

You’re correct in your analysis of the mistaken use of “speaking in forked tongues” by that Inquirer editorial. The preposition “in” and the plural “tongues” are both incorrect, so that phrase couldn’t be just a copyediting or proofreading error. Quite simply, it’s a “slip of the tongue,” or, more aptly (since it’s written and not spoken), a “slip of the mind.” The phrase “speaking in forked tongues” is, in fact, an egregious example of a “mixed metaphor,” a figure of speech that combines an inconsistent or incongruous figurative analogy. You will recall that mixed metaphors are such a big no-no in formal English writing that a student who deliberately or unwittingly uses one in an essay or term paper risks getting a reprimand or even a failing grade for it.

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