MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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Flawed sentence from newsstory about gays, lesbians in US military

This week, I’m presenting in My Media English Watch a very instructive exchange of views I had with Forum member Menie about a grammatically flawed lead sentence from a recent international wire service story. It’s about the ongoing controversy in the United States over its current policy preventing gays and lesbians from serving in the military.

Here’s Menie’s posting about the lead sentence in question:

“I came across this lead sentence in a GMA News Online report:

“From reading just this sentence, one would be tempted to ask: ‘But can gays and lesbians serve in a more discrete manner, such as by being undercover agents or informants?’ Of course, we know that what the writer meant to say was that ‘openly gay’ and ‘openly lesbian’ (are there such terms?) persons were prevented from serving in the US military prior to the reversal of that policy.

“Would the following rewrite of that sentence be correct, and if not, how would you rewrite that sentence?

“I also watched a Malacañang news conference about Zaldy Ampatuan last July 13 where Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda kept saying ‘...testimonies provided for in court.’ Were those who gave the testimonies the beneficiaries of some largesse from the court? To ‘provide for’ means to give someone what they need (e.g., ‘Usually, a father provides for his family’) or to make some law or regulation carry a particular provision (e.g., ‘The RH bill provides for mandatory sex education’). He should not have included the preposition ‘for’ and just said ‘testimonies provided in court.’

“Thanks!”

 My reply to Menie:

You’re absolutely right! I’ve done some back-checking and it does look like Reuters, the international news agency, had goofed grammatically in this lead sentence of their news dispatch from San Francisco datelined July 15, 2011 (underscoring mine):

As with several other news outlets in various parts of the world, GMA News Online simply carried the grammatically flawed Reuters news dispatch verbatim. We therefore can’t fault our friends in GMA News Online for that flaw, as it’s my understanding that unless the error in a syndicated news dispatch is grievously or ruinously wrong, news outlets are not at liberty to make unilateral changes in grammar and fact in a news dispatch. Of course, they have the alternative of rewriting the whole story to fix the error and just attribute it to the news agency as source, but that would be so much trouble in the white-hot grind of daily journalism.

So precisely what’s the grammar error in that lead sentence? The adverb “openly” is a misplaced modifier—shall we call it a “loose cannon”?—in that sentence. It’s wrongly modifying the verb “serving” when it should be modifying “gays and lesbians” instead. The absurd impression created by this grammatical error is that under the court order being appealed, gays and lesbians can only work in clandestine or covert operations while serving in the US military. Obviously, though, the intended meaning is that “openly gay individuals” and “openly lesbian individuals” shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the US military—the meaning expressed accurately by your proposed rewrite that I’m repeating below (underscoring mine):

Now, an interesting corollary question is why Reuters would make that big grammar mistake in such a socially and politically sensitive news story involving the third sex. I think it’s because the Reuters reporter (and presumably also the Reuters desk editors) decided—and rightly so—that the phrases “openly gays” and “openly lesbians” would be grammatically wrong following the rule that an adverb can’t modify a noun. Indeed, by definition, an adverb typically serves “as a modifier of a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a preposition, a phrase, a clause, or a sentence.” In the phrases “openly gays” and “openly lesbians,” however, the words “gays” and “lesbians” would be obviously nouns in the plural form, so those phrases would be grammatically anomalous. The Reuters guys obviously didn’t want to be caught committing this basic error in English grammar, but in the process of avoiding it, they misplaced the adverb “openly” and made their lead sentence jump from the frying pan to the fire.

Your proposed reconstruction of their sentence neatly solved the problem, of course. With the noun “persons” added to those problematic phrases, they are now scrupulously correct as follows: “openly gay persons” and “openly lesbian persons.” This time the operative nouns are “persons” in each case, correctly modified by the adjectives “gay” and “lesbian,” respectively, which in turn are both modified by the adverb “openly.”  

Well done, Menie!

As to Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda’s repeated use of the phrase “testimonies provided for in court,” you are correct in your observation that his use of the preposition “for” is grammatically faulty. I would even venture to suggest that his use of the verb “provide” is also grammatically off-key in that context; I would have used the plainer and more semantically accurate “given” and simply said “testimonies given in court.” At any rate, Menie, I think we have to be more forgiving of the grammar of high-level spokespersons in situations like that. From personal experience, I know that getting peppered with so many questions amid all those TV and digital cameras and flashing lights can be very distracting indeed!

SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:

(1) Manila Bulletin: Badly constructed, disorganized, and incoherent lead passage

We have here a very badly constructed and incoherent lead sentence, followed by a seriously convoluted, disorganized, and mixed up run-on sentence that borders on incomprehensibility. It’s evident that the writer of that news story is not knowledgeable with the mechanics of English phrasing and sentence construction, and that the paper’s desk editor had allowed the error-laden manuscript to pass without any editing at all.

As practically all parts of the passage are grammatically faulty, I’ll dissect only one part of it for instruction purposes: the noun clause “around 56 ships worth $4.8 billion in total has been ordered,” which suffers from a subject-verb disagreement error. The operative subject of that clause is, of course, the nominal phrase “around 56 ships worth $4.8 billion in total.” Now the question is: Is that nominal phrase singular or plural? That will depend on whether its head noun is singular or plural, which in turn will determine whether the verb in that clause should be singular or plural. By inspection, we find that the head noun of that nominal phrase is not “$4.8 billion” nor “total” but “56 ships,” which is obviously plural. This means that the verb shouldn’t be in the singular form “has been ordered” but in the plural form “have been ordered” instead. 

Now let me attempt to reorganize and fine-tune that seriously troubled news passage to make sense of it:

(2) GMA News Online: Dangling modifying phrase; rickety story development

The above passage is very badly written and badly edited, one that suffers from a dangling modifying phrase right at the outset; a grammatical disconnect in the first sentence between the main clause and its “because” clause; a faulty relative clause in the second paragraph; and a lurching narrative discontinuity between the second and third paragraphs.

1. Dangling  modifying phrase – In the first sentence, the participial modifying phrase “taking a cue from the Disney animated movie ‘Tangled’” dangles because it couldn’t logically modify any subject in the main clause. The writer evidently thought that the noun “lanterns” is that subject, but this isn’t logically and semantically possible because being inanimate, “lanterns” couldn’t possibly take a cue from anything; only humans and trained animals could do that, and there’s no indication in the sentence that there were any of them to do that.
2. Grammatical disconnect – The subordinate clause “because of ‘Feu de Sororite: Lantern for a Cause,’ an event organized by the UP Phi Delta Alpha Sorority” doesn’t connect logically with the main clause in that first sentence. That event did not cause the lanterns to illuminate the night sky over UP on that day; the lanterns rising to and illuminating the night sky over UP on that day was the event itself.
3. Faulty relative clause – Because of faulty sentence construction, the relative clause “where they would release 54 lanterns to mark their 54th anniversary” modifies  a wrong subject (“sorority members”) instead of the correct one (“low-key event”). The use of the relative pronoun “where” is also erroneous; the grammatically correct linkage is “in which.”
4. Lurching narrative discontinuities – The narrative is that passage is marked by lurching discontinuities. New ideas with no correlation with the preceding sentences just pop out of the blue, like the idea in the third paragraph that “Facebook had a different plan,” which in itself is an absurd idea even as a figurative statement. As every Facebook denizen knows, Facebook absolutely doesn’t and can’t do any event planning of that sort for its members. 

Here’s my attempt to straighten out that passage and infuse narrative continuity into it:

(3) ABS-CBN News Online: Semantically defective phrase

The noun phrase “the rising population of the country’s elderly” is semantically defective. The noun “population” means “the total of individuals occupying an area or making up a whole” or “a body of persons or individuals having a quality or characteristic in common.” For this reason, it is incorrect to use the word “population” in the sense of being possessed by the “country’s elderly,” for the simple reason that they are the ones that comprise that “population.” The grammatically and semantically correct phrasing is “the country’s rising elderly population,” where “population” is qualified by “rising elderly” as an adjective.

Here then is that problematic lead sentence as corrected:

“There is a demand in some parts of Germany for nurses and caretakers because of the country’s rising elderly population.”

(4) The Manila Times: Vague, slippery phrasing

The expression “money sent home…continued to improve” in the lead sentence above sounds inappropriate or at least semantically slippery. It might be deep jargon in financial circles, one that I think most newspaper readers would find baffling. It would be much clearer and accurate to say “money sent home…continued to increase.”

It’s evident, of course, that the reporter used that expression by way of paraphrase because she didn’t want to preempt the wording used by the BSP governor’s statement in the next paragraph. However, a paraphrase would be called for only if it simplifies or clarifies the statement, not becloud it.

With simplicity and clarity in mind, here’s how I would have rendered that lead sentence:

“Even more money was sent home in May by Filipinos working abroad despite the uncertainties overseas, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said Friday.”

Here’s an even better version:

“Filipinos working abroad sent home even more money in May despite the uncertainties overseas, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said Friday.”

(5) The Manila Times: Wrong tense usage

The lead sentence above misuses the past tense “broke out.” Following the normal sequence of tenses rule for reported speech, that verb should be in the past-perfect tense “had broken out” instead. We will recall that the rule provides that if the reporting verb is in the past tense (“announced” in this case), the operative verb in the reported statement moves one tense back (from “broke out” to “had broken out”). That lead sentence should therefore be corrected as follows:

“The Department of Health on Friday announced that a new strain of leptospirosis had broken out in a town in Zamboanga.”

Here’s another version that neatly skirts the normal sequence of tenses rule by nominalizing (converting to a noun) the verb “break out”:

“The Department of Health on Friday announced a breakout of a new strain of leptospirosis in a town in Zamboanga.”

(6) The Philippine Star: Misuse of coordinating conjunction

Because it misuses the coordinating conjunction “as” in the phrase “as it is expected,” the lead sentence above creates the eerie feeling that tropical depression “Hanna” is capable of rational thought like a human being, so keen on not missing a rendezvous with a fellow typhoon in Japan that it leaves the Philippine area of responsibility right on the appointed time. That flawed sentence will yield the correct sense of a typhoon as an unthinking natural phenomenon by simply replacing the coordinating phrase “as it” with “and,” as follows:

“Tropical depression ‘Hanna’ has left the Philippine area of responsibility and is expected to merge with another typhoon in Japan, the state of the weather bureau said.”  

(7) Manila Bulletin: Factually wrong headline

The headline of the story above is factually wrong. As the lead sentence itself shows, there was severe damage to the fourth floor of the central postal office, but this is certainly not the same as the post office building being destroyed by the fire. A more factual, truthful word for what happened to it is “damaged,” as follows:

Fire damages post office building

(8) Manila Bulletin: Dangerously wrong choice of noun

The noun phrase “their continued effort to stamp out criminals” is sure to send shivers down the spine of criminals and raise a howl among human rights activists. This is because “to stamp out” means “to extinguish or destroy by or as if by stamping with the foot.” In civilized societies, however, police are mandated to stamp out criminality, not the criminals themselves. Criminals, even if caught in the act, are supposed to be given due process and are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty by the courts.

That sentence should therefore be corrected as follows:

“Northern Police District (NPD) director Chief Supt. Antonio L. Decano urged Friday the four police station chiefs in his jurisdiction to intensify the Police Integrated Patrol System (PIPS) in their continued effort to stamp out criminality.”

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