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Misplaced modifying phrase fractures Bohol earthquake news

In my column in The Manila Times on October 26, 2013, I critiqued the shock-and-awe English of the Bohol earthquake news reportage by two major Metro Manila dailies. I took issue with their directly equating the 7.2-magnitude earthquake with 32 Hiroshima atomic-bomb explosions. I do think that like comparing apples and pears, it’s logically untenable to draw equivalence between an earthquake’s seismic energy and the power of so many nuclear blasts.

Actually, I also spotted a jaw-dropping grammar fault in another earthquake story of one of those dailies, but I didn’t have enough column space to discuss it then. I’m therefore taking this opportunity now to analyze that problematic sentence for the benefit of the many readers and English learners who must have been confounded by it. 

Here’s the sentence:

Let’s grant that a proofreader had inadvertently dropped the word “earthquakes” from the main clause. That sentence should then have read as follows: “Barely recovering from Tuesday’s earthquake, two consecutive 5.1 magnitude earthquakes struck Bohol Wednesday morning, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said.”

Even as corrected, though, that sentence remains a nonsensical mindbender. Which of these subjects was “barely recovering from Tuesday’s earthquake”—the “two consecutive 5.1 earthquakes,” “Bohol,” or “Wednesday morning”? What does that frontline phrase intend to modify in the main clause, and what, in fact, is the true subject or doer of the action in that sentence?

From the fractured syntax of the statement, we can deduce that what we have here is a carelessly misplaced modifying phrase. Indeed, “barely recovering from Tuesday’s earthquake” logically shouldn’t modify “two consecutive 5.1 magnitude earthquakes” but “Bohol” instead. 

But how do we reconstruct that sentence to reflect this sense?

Recall that the general rule for avoiding misplaced modifiers is this: position the modifying word or phrase as close as possible to the noun or subject it ought to modify. By applying this rule along with elementary logic, we should be able to come up with this grammatically unassailable sentence:

“Barely recovering from Tuesday’s earthquake, Bohol was struck by two consecutive 5.1-magnitude earthquakes Wednesday morning, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said.”

To bring “Bohol” as close as possible to the modifying phrase (in fact, they are adjacent now), all we had to do was to render the active-voice main clause in the passive voice. The problem is that this simple expedient for avoiding misplaced modifying phrases is often shunned by some newspaper writers and editors with a profound bias for the active voice—with semantically disastrous results, of course.
***

Still on the Bohol earthquake, I had a discussion with a friend about the October 17 briefing led by Dr. Renato Solidum, Phivolcs chief, during which the forecast was made that a 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Manila and nearby provinces would kill at least 37,000 persons and injure 604,000, seriously for 16,000 of them.

My friend and I agreed that a scary prediction like that is needed to heighten public awareness and preparedness for such catastrophic events. I told him though that it was rather odd for Dr. Solidum to conclude his presentation with this self-composed verse:

Buildings will not crumble
and people inside will not stumble; 
in the very near future all the communities are resilient
and they will say that they are ready to rumble with the temblors 
but we’re ready to deal with Metro Manila’s concrete jungle.

My friend admonished me to be more tolerant of such exuberance—after all, he said, many eminent scientists from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein had this or that eccentricity—but I wondered if it wasn’t terribly out of place nevertheless, and that perhaps that newspaper should have been prudent enough to exclude that verse from the news story.

This essay originally appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 26, 2013 issue © 2013 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

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Shock-and-awe English in Bohol earthquake reportage

There’s no doubt that the Bohol killer earthquake last October 15, 2013 was a horrendous cataclysm, but I think some of the media reportage about it has been terribly amateurish and, at worst, misleading. I’ll analyze from a language standpoint just two descriptions of that earthquake by two major Metro Manila dailies.

Here’s Description #1:

That description is actually a paraphrase of this generic statement of Dr. Renato Solidum, Phivolcs executive director, in a televised briefing: “A magnitude 7 earthquake has an energy equivalent to around 32 Hiroshima atomic bombs.” What that newspaper did was to directly equate Dr. Solidum’s estimate of the seismic energy theoretically released by a magnitude 7 earthquake with the real-life destructive power of the Bohol earthquake.

I’m sure that Dr. Solidum meant well in trying to give media and laymen a sense of the immense energy unleashed by that earthquake. I must say though that his comparative mathematics just evoked sensational but misleading imagery that some media people were only too glad to latch their news stories on. Indeed, I think that although his natural science and mathematics are beyond reproach, it was most unfortunate for him to make that comparison in his briefing.

The most problematic aspect of Dr. Solidum’s comparison is that the energy released by the Bohol earthquake was largely in the form of seismic waves that caused the ground to shake perilously, thus demolishing or damaging so many infrastructures, killing over 150 people, and injuring hundreds of others over a wide swath in the Visayas; in contrast, the Hiroshima bombing was a massive explosion and firestorm in just one city. Specifically, based on historical accounts, that blast was equivalent to 16,000 tons of TNT with an estimated total destruction radius of 1 mile or 1.6 kilometers, killing 70,000–80,000 people and injuring 70,000 others. 

So, although ostensibly of the same magnitude, the forms of energy released by the two cataclysmic events—one seismic and the other atomic—are different and therefore not comparable at all. We can readily see the fallacy of making them equivalent by imagining 32 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs simultaneously detonating on Bohol and its adjoining islands. The destruction would be unimaginably horrific—truly the end of the world for that part of the Philippine archipelago!

This kind of misleading mathematical analogy reminds me of a factoid about the energy produced every second by the sun—our sun. It’s about a trillion 1-megaton bombs, or, in Dr. Solidum’s mathematics, the energy equivalent of 50 billion Hiroshima atomic-bomb explosions. Yet, despite all that energy unleashed by the sun on Earth and the rest of the planets, humanity has survived over the millennia and has been none the worse for it. (The reason, of course, is that it’s neither seismic nor explosive but radiant energy that reaches us.)

Now here’s Description #2: 

I won’t even bother to analyze this grossly erroneous paraphrase of Dr. Solidum’s comparative imagery. I’ll just point out that historically, only two atomic bombs—not dozens—were used in World War II, one each in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

This is really the problem with esoteric comparative mathematics that experts glibly provide as sound bites for mass media. As in this case, they can lead to all sorts of misinterpretations that only serve to confound or alarm the public.

This essay originally appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 19, 2013 issue © 2013 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.

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Logic and language

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