The Philippines being predominantly Roman Catholic, there’s a tendency for the supposedly English-savvy among us to scoff at people who describe as a “celebrant” someone celebrating a birthday or some other auspicious occasion. “Oh, no, that isn’t right!” they would often cut off and gleefully heckle the speaker. “The right word is ‘celebrator’; ‘celebrant’ means a priest officiating the Holy Mass!”

But are people who use “celebrant” in the context of just anybody celebrating really wrong? Do they really deserve all that heckling?

Although I don’t usually join the wicked ribbing that often follows, I myself used to think that people who call birthday celebrators “birthday celebrants” are—if not actually unsavvy in their English—at least ill-advised in doing so. Indeed, my Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines “celebrant” as “one who celebrates; specifically the priest officiating the Eucharist.” Likewise, the Collins English Dictionary—Complete and Unabridged defines “celebrant” as “a person participating in a religious ceremony” and, in Christianity’s ecclesiastical terms, as “an officiating priest, esp at the Eucharist.”

On the authority of these two dictionaries, I had never really bothered to check the validity of the conventional wisdom that anybody who’s not a priest or cleric should never be called a “celebrant” but only a “celebrator.” “Celebrator,” of course, is used by practically everybody to mean someone observing or taking part in a notable occasion with festivities.

Recently, though, after witnessing yet another savage if good-natured ribbing of someone who used “celebrant” to describe a birthday celebrator, I decided that perhaps the issue was serious enough to look deeper into. I therefore resolved to check the usage with at least two other lexicographic authorities, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD).

The OED gives two definitions of “celebrant,” first as “a person who performs a rite, especially a priest at the Eucharist,” and, second, citing North American usage, as “a person who celebrates something.” For its part, the AHD primarily defines “celebrant” in essentially the same vein as the first OED definition, as (a) “A person who participates in a religious ceremony or rite”; (b) “A person who officiates at a religious or civil ceremony or rite, especially a wedding”; and (c) “In some Christian churches, the cleric officiating at the celebration of the Eucharist.” Like the OED, the AHD also makes a second definition of “celebrant” as “A participant in a celebration.”

Then the AHD goes one step further and makes the following usage note for “celebrant”: “Although ‘celebrant’ is most often used to describe an official participant in a religious ceremony or rite, a majority of the [AHD] Usage Panel accepted the use of ‘celebrant’ to mean ‘a participant in a celebration’ in an earlier survey. Still, while ‘New Year’s Eve celebrants’ may be an acceptable usage, ‘celebrator’ is an uncontroversial alternative in this more general sense.”

This being the case, I think people who use “celebrants” to describe people celebrating birthdays and other special occasions aren’t really wrong, and they certainly don’t deserve to be cut down and needled when using that word. And there’s no need for anyone to get upset either when called a “celebrant”—whether as principal or guest—during such occasions. I dare say that “celebrant” is as good a word as “celebrator” in such contexts, and except perhaps in the company of hidebound Christian fanatics, we need not hold the word “celebrant” in a straitjacket to describe only the Christian clergy doing their rituals.

In short, we can freely use “celebrators” to describe people celebrating or attending a birthday party or any other happy occasion, and I think the English-savvy among us need to get used to the idea that the usage of “celebrants” is actually par for the course and doesn’t deserve all that bashing as if it were bad English. (July 3, 2010)
-----------
From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 3, 2010 © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment

As we learn early about English grammar, intransitive verbs are handicapped by their inability to take a direct object. Another way of saying this is that a subject cannot perform the action of intransitive verbs on a direct object. This is why a sentence construction like the following doesn’t work: “The magician disappeared the rabbit.” Because of its intransitivity, the verb “disappear” simply won’t take “rabbit” or any other object. Only transitive verbs can take objects and act on them, as “feed” in “The magician feeds the rabbit” and “eat” in “The rabbit eats the carrot.”

But this doesn’t mean that when the operative verb is intransitive, the subject cannot ever make an action happen to an object, or make that object perform the action of the verb. We know, for instance, that the verbs “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” enables the intransitive verb “disappear” to cause its action to happen to an object, as in these sentences: “The magician made the rabbit disappear.” “The magician got the rabbit to disappear.” “The magician had the rabbit disappear.” “The magician let the rabbit disappear.” The subject in these sentences is not seen as performing the action itself, but uses some other unstated agency (“magic” or “sleight of hand”?) to perform that action.

We know, too, that “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” can also make objects do the action of intransitive verbs: “She made the dog jump.” “She got the dog to jump.” “She had the dog jump.” “She let the dog jump.” In these three sentences, it’s clear that the “dog” is the object of the verbs “made,” “got,” and “had,” “she” is the agent causing the action, and the action of the intransitive “jump” is what this agent causes the object to perform.

The verbs “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” belong to a class of verbs called causatives. In sentences that use a causative verb, the subject doesn’t perform the action of the operative verb but causes someone or something else to do it. And as we have seen above, causative verbs do very well in enabling intransitive verbs to surmount their handicap of being unable to act on an object.

We mustn’t think, though, that causative verbs are meant only for intransitive verbs. They work as well with transitive ones: “The mother made her child take the medicine.” “The movie director had the leading lady wear a wig.” The big difference is that transitive verbs—working with causative verbs or not—always need an object somewhere in the sentence for the latter to make sense. Drop the objects “medicine” and “wig” from the two sentences given earlier, for instance, and both sentences will collapse.

The English language actually has many more causative verbs of the enabling kind, and to our small inventory so far we will now add these other common ones: “ask,” “allow,” “command,” “compel,” “convince,” “encourage,” “employ,” “entice,” “force,” “hire,” “induce,” “insist,” “motivate,” “permit,” “persuade,” “require,” “suggest,” and “urge.” Each needs to work on an operative verb for the latter’s action to take place at all.

Let’s now examine the ways we can construct sentences using causative verbs.

The most common, of course, is the construction where the causative verb is immediately followed by an object (noun or pronoun), which is followed in turn by an infinitive (“to” + verb stem): “Some countries require foreign visitors to present a visa.” “We hired temporary workers to handle the seasonal demand.” “Our school encouraged us to learn English.”

The causative construction above has a variant specifically for the causatives “let,” “had,” and “made,” which can only take the so-called “bare infinitive” (the infinitive without “to”): “Amanda let her boyfriend kiss her.” “The mayor had the illegal loggers face the irate townsfolk.” “The manager made her pay for the missing goods.” Force-fitting “to” into such constructions results in disconcerting—and unacceptable—sentences like “Amanda let her boyfriend to kiss her.”

The third type of causative construction is for the causative verbs “insist,” “suggest,” “ask,” “demand,” or “recommend,” which can neither take the infinitive nor the bare infinitive form of the operative verb. These causative verbs can work only in “that”-clause constructions like these: “The tour guide suggested that we leave.” “The judge demanded that the accused appear in court.” “The consultant recommended that we divest.”

The second verbs in these sentences are always in the base form, without tense, which differs from non-causative “that”-clause constructions like, say, “The tour guide proved that we took a longer route,” in which the verb in the “that”-clause takes a tense. (December 6, 2004)

-----------
From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, December 6, 2004 © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment