MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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Deciphering a gobbledygooky lead passage from a news report

Last week, I invited Forum members to help me decipher the following gobbledygooky* lead passage of a news story—evidently a rehashed media release published with hardly any editorial intervention—in one of the major Metro Manila broadsheets:

To the Forum member who comes up with the clearest and most readable rewrite of that problematic passage, I offered an autographed copy of my book English Plain and Simple.

Two Forum members, Miss Mae and Jing Garcia, submitted proposed rewrites of that lead passage.

Here’s Miss Mae’s take on that lead passage:

“At first, I thought the news item was a press release reminding the public that the Aquino government still intends ‘to address the increasing prices of energy sources in the country’ despite the cost of fuel nowadays. Only upon reading the second paragraph did I understand what the lead sentence implied this: that the Aquino government is calling for ‘more studies that will help in mitigating [its] effects to the Filipino people.’

“I didn’t understand the second paragraph, though. It could have just mentioned at once the concept the foreign firm proposed, not how it assumed (there was no proof of it happening in the whole article) it was accepted.”

“Here’s how I would rewrite that piece:

And here’s Jing Garcia’s rewrite of that passage:

Both rewrites are admirable attempts to simplify and clarify the fuzzy original, but I think Miss Mae’s version is more successful in stripping it of its gobbledygooky elements. I particularly salute her for seeing through the utter officiousness and subjectivity of the clause “The Aquino government is focused on coming up with doable solutions and alternative measures” and for her fearless decision to drop the verb phrase “is focused on coming up with doable solutions and alternative measures” altogether. (For really now, from a language standpoint, who’s to say that anybody’s really focused on anything in such situations? It’s simply too judgmental and too unjournalistic so say that.) In its place, Miss Mae sensibly used the matter-of-fact verb phrase “called for studies to address the energy crisis in the country.” That’s honest, truthful, and objective writing, and for that I think Miss Mae truly deserves that autographed copy of my book.

Now, from hindsight and taking the cue from the improved versions submitted by Miss Mae and Jing Garcia, I offer this further improvement of that gobbledygooky passage:

Note that I took the trouble of identifying the company by name in the second paragraph. The original news story made the unseemly decision to defer mentioning the company by name till the third paragraph—by which time the news story had already taken the misleading appearance of a Malacañang press release.
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*For those unfamiliar with the term, “gobbledygook” means wordy and generally unintelligible jargon. As described in my book English Plain and Simple, gobbledygook is an excellent example of what linguists call an echoic word, one that mimics a sound that commonly occurs in nature. The word combines the British slang gob for “mouth,” gobble for “eat greedily,” and gook for “a speaker of gibberish or nonsense,” as with a foreigner clumsily trying to express himself in English. I said that what comes to mind when we try to articulate gobbledygook is inevitably the male turkey, or the turkeycock, and that what follows is the unpleasant memory of the guttural, rasping, and unpleasant cackle of that misshapen fowl.

SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:

(1) GMA News Online: Use of wrong conjunction

The lead sentence above wrongly uses the coordinating conjunction “as” to link the second clause, “state volcanologists recorded seven quakes there in the last 24 hours,” to the first clause, “Taal Volcano showed signs of activity.” This faulty use of “as” gives the false sense that the volcano, as if resenting human intrusion, showed signs of activity when or even because the state volcanologists took the trouble of recording seven quakes in the volcano’s vicinity. The truth of the matter, of course, is that the signs of the volcanic activity shown by Taal volcano were one and the same as the “recorded seven quakes there in the last 24 hours,” and that volcanoes are inanimate entities incapable of acting consciously like humans do.     

The grammatically proper way to describe that situation is therefore as follows:

“State volcanologists recorded seven quakes at Taal Volcano in the last 24 hours.”

or, since news reporters and editors usually prefer to give the subject of the story greater prominence in the lead sentence than the agent reporting the action, this other way:

“Seven quakes were recorded at Taal Volcano in the last 24 hours, state volcanologists reported.”

This misuse of “as” is very common in news reporting so I think it’s high time to clarify its correct usage once and for all. The conjunction “as” in such contexts could only mean “while” or “when” in one sense of that word, and “because” or “since” (“for the reason that”) in another sense. Either way, therefore, “as” is a semantic misfit in constructions like that lead sentence.

(2) The Philippine Daily Inquirer: Semantically questionable sentence

The lead sentence above, “Ever think that the lowly buko juice could fuel a United States professional sport team’s championship drive?”, is grammatically and semantically flawed. It makes the untenable presumption that out of the blue and apropos of nothing, now and anytime in the future, anyone can think of buko juice in that precise and highly specific context and detail given by the reporter. That, of course, is downright impossible; one can only think in those terms in the past tense, not in the continuing sense as the writer of the sentence presumed.

This semantic problem arose because the writer—or perhaps the desk editor—made the wrong assumption that simply using the elliptical form of this sentence would yield the correct, logical sense: “Do you ever think that the lowly buko juice could fuel a United States professional sport team’s championship drive?” That’s an absurd expectation from anyone, of course.

That sentence can be semantically correct and logical only in the past-tense or present-perfect interrogative form, as follows:

“Did you ever think that the lowly buko juice could fuel a United States professional sport team’s championship drive?”

or, even better:  

“Have you ever thought that the lowly buko juice could fuel a United States professional sport team’s championship drive?”

The two sentences above, of course, will have this common elliptical form:

“Ever thought that the lowly buko juice could fuel a United States professional sport team’s championship drive?”

Take note that in the ellliptical form of both sentences, the verb is in the past tense “thought.”

(3) The Manila Times: Unidiomatic usage

The lead sentence above doesn’t read very well because of its unidiomatic use of the verb phrase “has found a probable cause.” The correct, idiomatic usage is “has found probable cause,” without the article “a”—the widely accepted usage in both legal and journalistic circles.

(4) The Philippine Star: Misuse of verb

The headline of the news story above uses the wrong preposition after “flock”; it should be “to” instead of “in,” so that headline should read as follows:

Thousands flock to Iligan City lechon festival

The lead sentence of the story proper likewise misuses the verb “flocked” in the compound verb phrase “flocked and mobbed.” The verb “flocked” needs to be immediately followed by the preposition “to” to work properly in that sentence. Also, it would be semantically better to drop the verb “mobbed”; it sounds like overkill working with “flocked” and with the “lechon festival” as common direct object.

That lead will read much better rewritten as follows:

“ILIGAN CITY, Philippines – Thousands of Iliganons and from other places flocked to the Lechon festival, one of the highlights of Diyandi (gathering) festival Tuesday along Roxas Avenue here.”

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