Jose Carillo's Forum

ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO

On this webpage, Jose A. Carillo shares with English users, learners, and teachers a representative selection of his essays on the English language, particularly on its uses and misuses. One essay will be featured every week, and previously featured essays will be archived in the forum.

Yielding to the great temptation of resurrecting an old essay

Each year, when Holy Week comes, I’m always tempted to resurrect an essay that I wrote way back on April 15, 2003 for my English-usage column in The Manila Times. Indeed, those who have been regularly following the essays featured in this section will recall that I yielded to that temptation last year by posting that essay in the Forum on Black Saturday (which at that time fell on April 3), prefacing it with an introductory note entitled “Looking back to Easter Sunday’s earthly and celestial foundations.” Today, Easter Sunday of 2011, I yield to that temptation again.

So, once more, here’s that essay, “Matters of faith,” which I wrote eight years ago after doing some research to answer a question of my then eight-year-old son—in the process curing my own abysmal ignorance of the foundations of Holy Week as celebrated by Roman Catholics all over the world. Happy Easter! (April 24, 2011)

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Matters of faith

I was making notes for a possible non-English-language topic for my 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 [in the Northern Hemisphere] 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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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.

*This year of 2011, of course, we are celebrating Easter on Sunday, April 24—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.

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Previously Featured Essay:

The grammar of indefinite pronouns

It is a long-established and utterly predictable aspect of English grammar that (1) the verb must always agree with the number—either singular or plural—of the noun or pronoun that does or states the action, and that (2) the pronoun or its possessive form must always agree with the gender—male, female, or neuter—of its antecedent noun. Thus, we routinely make verbs perfectly agree with the number of the noun or pronoun doing or stating them: “Eve loves apples straight from the tree.” “Eve and Adam love apples straight from the tree.” And we also take it for granted that the pronoun and possessive pronoun must perfectly agree with the gender of their respective antecedent nouns: “Eve loves applesher friend Adam also loves them.” The possessive pronoun “her,” of course, has the female noun “Eve” as antecedent, while the pronoun “them” has the neuter noun “apples” as antecedent.

Problems arise, however, when we start using indefinite pronouns—those words that, without specific antecedent nouns, we use as doers or receivers of the action. It is often obvious whether an indefinite pronoun is singular or plural, but there is often no way of knowing what gender to use for its possessive form. Take, for instance, the indefinite pronouns “all” and “somebody” in this sentence: “All of us [is, are] agreed that the task must be done, but somebody who has [his, her] personal interests foremost in [his, her] mind must inhibit [himself, herself] from doing it.”

That we should use the verb “are” for the pronoun “all” is clear, of course, but whether to use “his” or “her” as the possessive of the pronoun “somebody,” and whether to use “himself” or “herself” as its reflexive pronoun, are very thorny choices indeed! This ambiguity has given rise to certain conventions—some self-evident and some rather arbitrary—to make sure that our grammar of the indefinite pronouns remains beyond reproach.

Before discussing these conventions, though, let us make a quick review of the indefinite pronouns. We have to be doubly sure which of them are notionally singular, plural, or can be either way depending on how they are used.

The definitely singular indefinite pronouns: “another,” “anybody,” “anyone,” “anything,” “each,” “either,” “everybody,” “everyone,” “everything,” “little,” “much,” “neither,” “nobody,” “no one,” “nothing,” “one,” “other,” “somebody,” “someone,” and “something.” As proof that each of them is singular, we can use practically all of them to fill in the blank in the following sentence with no trouble at all: “________ is to blame for what happened.” (The exceptions are “little,” “much,” and “other,” which can be used in more limited ways: “Little is done by people who only talk.” “Much is accomplished through hard work.” “Other than him, who is to blame?”) All of them also take singular possessive pronouns and singular reflexive pronouns. The only problem is that their gender is indeterminate.

The definitely plural indefinite pronouns: “both,” “few,” “many,” “others,” and “several.” All five, of course, are no-brainers as to their number: they are plural through and through any which way we put them. Each can take the plural possessive pronoun “their” and the reflexive “themselves,” and we don’t even have to think about gender at all when using them.

Indefinite pronouns that are either singular or plural: “all,” “any,” “more,” “most,” “none,” and “some.” They are singular or plural depending on what they refer to. Singular: “All of that book is pure, unmitigated thrash.” Plural: “The singers are at the studio; all are rehearsing their songs.”

Now, let us go back to the dilemma of what gender to use for the singular indefinite possessives. As we all know, the standard practice in English is to use the possessive pronoun “his” when no information is available about the antecedent noun’s gender: “Everybody must give his share to this noble cause.” Only in one instance can we ignore this generic way of putting the indefinite singular possessive pronoun and still be grammatically correct—when the statement refers to a known all-female group, as in: “Everybody in this women’s league must give her share to this noble cause.”

This male bias in the English language obviously has rankled among women for hundreds of years, so users of the indefinite possessive have come up with two effective schemes to avoid the problem altogether. One way is to consistently use the phrase “his or her” when the indefinite possessive is required: “Everybody must give his or her share to this cause.” This becomes very awkward with repeated use, however, so that many writers and speakers would rather rewrite entire sentences so they could use a plural antecedent indefinite pronoun and do away with the need to establish gender: “All must give their share to this noble cause.” “All of us must give our share to this cause.”

By making this the norm, English is actually taking one major step toward establishing equality of the sexes in the language.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, December 17, 2003 © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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