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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!
Two more for the road about subjunctive misuse by media
My one-time reprise last September 5, 2012 of my discontinued media English watch, “Tricky subjunctive sentences trip both academic cleric and reporter alike,” drew a spirited response from a Forum member in faraway Tanzania. The issue at hand was the twin misuse of the subjunctive by a university president and a newspaper reporter as reflected in the following passage from a newspaper story (italicizations mine):
“As there is a spectrum of views on this ethical and public policy issue, I ask all those who are engaged in the Christian formation of our students to ensure that the Catholic position on this matter continues to be taught in our classes, as we have always done,” Villarin said.
The university will also support the Church in its future actions should the bill is passed by Congress, Villarin said.
Here now are Forum member Mwita Chacha’s comments on these misuses of the subjunctive:
Even though I’m still struggling to make my English perfect, I can’t be so careless as to commit such serious grammar bloopers. It’s indeed baffling that newspaper and broadcast reporters, who are expected to be more meticulous in their English than perhaps any other person, are the ones taking the lead in making grave grammar errors—haphazard errors at that. And that seems to be a problem not only in the Philippines but also in many other many places. Almost always, I encounter one or two of the same mistaken use of the subjunctive when I visit the news websites of CNN and BBC, which are considered to be among the first-rate English-language media companies on the planet. This, of course, is to say nothing about the perpetual gaffes committed by Tanzania’s domestic print and broadcast media; from the grammar errors that sprinkle their stories, one can safely conclude that those media outlets are either staffed with writers who are extremely inadequately trained in English or are led by editors who are so derelict in accomplishing their tasks.
And in a posting last September 16, 2012, Forum member maria balina sought clarification about a certain aspect of subjunctive usage that was baffling her:
Hi, Mr. Carillo!
I’ve been taught that verbs and phrases that indicate a sense of importance or urgency are followed by:
1. The word that and the subjunctive (or base form) of the verb, as in “It is essential that she come to class early.”
2. The infinitive and often an object, as in “It is imperative to be on time” and “It is essential to come to class early.”
However, I saw the following sentences in a grammar book and I couldn’t understand why the second sentence with the verb “suggest” has a different form:
1. “It is essential that no authorized persons be admitted into the building once it has been locked by the security personnel.”
2. “Financial advisers suggest that setting aside cash for emergencies makes it easier for the first-time investor to recover from losses.”
Is it possible that the subjunctive is now being supplanted by the indicative?
Here’s my reply to maria balina:
The first four of the sentences you presented are indeed in the subjunctive mood, but as I will explain very shortly, the fifth isn’t.
The first sentence, “It is essential that she come to class early,” is the so-called parliamentary motion or jussive form of the subjunctive, which denotes an indirect demand, a strong suggestion, or a pointed request; the seemingly impersonal tone of the jussive form makes the speaker’s personal preference sound imperative and stately as well as more convincing. On the other hand, the second and third sentences—“It is imperative to be on time” and “It is essential to come to class early”—are stronger but impersonally stated demands in the subjunctive form, in which the words “imperative” and “essential” take the place of the “that”-form, followed by the infinitive “to be,” to denote the importance of complying with the demand.
The fourth sentence—“It is essential that no authorized persons be admitted into the building once it has been locked by the security personnel”—is also in the jussive form of the subjunctive, but this time using “that” and the uninflected verb “be” in the present-tense subjunctive.
Now, in the case of the fifth sentence—“Financial advisers suggest that setting aside cash for emergencies makes it easier for the first-time investor to recover from losses”—what we have here is a sentence not in the subjunctive but in the indicative, which we will recall denote acts and states in real-world situations. The entire subordinate “that” clause functions as the direct object of the verb “suggest,” and in this clause, “makes” functions normally as an operative verb in the indicative mood.
In contrast, however, that sentence would be in the subjunctive if it were constructed this way: “Financial advisers suggest that the first-time investor set aside cash for emergencies to make it easier for him or her to recover from losses.”
To this clarification, maria balina posted this rejoinder:
Thank you so much!
I was too focused on the verbs that are usually listed as indicating a sense of importance. I didn’t even consider the construction of the sentence and totally forgot the mood of the sentence. Now, I know better.
