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.

The problem with words without sound semantic underpinnings

Recently, in My Media English Watch, I made a passing comment about “coopetation,” a strange-sounding new word proudly coined by Mr. Andre Kahn, chair of the Advertising Board of the Philippines, during the recent Philippine Advertising Congress held in the recently renamed province of CamSur (it used to be “Camarines Sur”) in the Bicol Region. According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer news story that even used “coopetation” in its headline, Mr. Kahn was inspired to coin that word to describe the spirit that should prevail among rival advertising agencies. “Coopetition means that even though we compete within the industry we can cooperate for the common good of our members like what we have done here,” Mr. Kahn said. In short, he meant “coopetation” to be a happy fusion of the words “cooperation” and “competition.”

Today, I finally found the time to check “coopetation” with Google and found that it’s not new coinage at all. From what I can gather, that neologism as well as its variants “coopertition” or “co-opertition” has actually been recoined several times since 1913 to yield the sense of “cooperative competition.” But it looks like it didn’t get much traction outside business circles, even if it finally made it to the Oxford Dictionary after the 1980s as a mass noun denoting “collaboration between business competitors, in the hope of mutually beneficial results.” Surprisingly, though, my Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary hasn’t officially recognized “coopetation” yet as a legitimate English word. Indeed, despite being recoined in earnest several times, “coopetition” definitely had not captured the public imagination over the years in the same way as, say, Sarah Palin’s misshapen “refudiate.” That shoddy neologism of hers has already been cited 284,000 times in Google since she inadvertently coined it on Twitter sometime in July 2010; in fact, “refudiate” even made it to the New Oxford American Dictionary less than four months later.

So, the question now is: Will Mr. Kahn’s purposively coined “coopetation” do better than its predecessor neologisms and fare as well in usage as “refudiate”? We really can’t tell. But way back in 2006, in an essay about the noun “racket” that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times, I had tossed around some thoughts about word creation and the unilateral changing of word meanings. It floored me then that the noun “racket” was suddenly being used in the positive sense as an “an easy and lucrative—but legitimate—means of livelihood,” in contrast to its widely accepted negative sense as “a fraudulent scheme, enterprise, or activity” or “a usually illegitimate enterprise made workable by bribery or intimidation.” I’m now posting that essay in this week’s edition of the Forum as a cautionary tale against word misuse in general and, well, against coinage of English words without sound semantic underpinnings. (November 27, 2011)

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When wordplay goes overboard

Going by its dictionary definition, the noun “racket” means “a fraudulent scheme, enterprise, or activity” or “a usually illegitimate enterprise made workable by bribery or intimidation.” More loosely, it means “an easy and lucrative means of livelihood” and is slang for “occupation or business” (Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary). In whatever sense, though, I have always thought of the word as denoting something socially abhorrent—perhaps even illegal or criminal.

Sometime in September, however, a fellow English-language editor sent me e-mail that disquietingly turned the word “racket” on its head, so to speak. “May bago po akong raket (I have a new racket),” he said, then proceeded to describe the new enterprise he was engaged in. What he really meant was a new “sideline” that was not even remotely illegal or illegitimate, so I found it disturbing that he should use a normally distasteful word for it. Perhaps such loose usage would be acceptable in informal, face-to-face conversations, but it was very unbecoming to be put in writing by someone who should have more respect for language and its nuances.

I had already forgotten that incident but recently, during lunch with a former associate in the English-language editing business, the peculiar usage popped out again when she asked me this question: “Ano ho ba ang raket ninyo ngayon? (What is your racket at present?).” I almost choked on my drink hearing that nasty word again! How could such a serious distortion of meaning gain wide currency in our language? What is it that makes even intelligent, discerning people view illicit, aberrant things as perfectly acceptable?

It didn’t take long for me to find possible answers to these questions. Driving through a main thoroughfare to meet a client sometime later, I came across scores of product streamers that posed the following question (or words to this effect) in big, bold letters: “Ano ba ang raket ninyo ngayong summer? (What’s your racket this summer?).” It appears that the use of “raket” with a positive spin had been legitimized by mass advertising. For shock value and recall, the word had been appropriated to mean “any business” or “gimik” (gimmick)—one that’s easy and pleasurable to do. In the process, of course, the fraudulent and illegitimate aspects of the word had been glossed over (or shall we say even glamorized?)

In this sense, “racket” joins the word “salvage” in having been corrupted in Philippine usage to mean its opposite. The first is from a grim, derogatory word into a respectable, fun word; and the other from a respectable, positive word into an unpleasant, derogatory word. Some of us will probably recall that the verb “salvage” means “to rescue or save [something] especially from wreckage or ruin,” but in the Philippine context, it has become a euphemism for “to kill or assassinate” or “to execute or dispose of a person summarily and secretly.” This usage grew out from a government task force report that inadvertently used the word to describe the extra-legal executions of thousands of Filipinos between 1975 and 1983 during martial law.

(The Filipino writer Jose F. Lacaba, in a note to the Double-Tongued Word Wrester, a website that records old and new words from the fringes of English, makes this observation about this inversion of “salvage”: “It began as an anglicization or Englishing of the Tagalog word ‘salbahe,’ whose meaning ranges from mischievous or abusive (adj.) and a notoriously abusive person (noun). ‘Salbahe,’ in turn, is derived from the Spanish word ‘salvaje,’ wild, undomesticated, savage.”)

It is normal for a society to do all sorts of wordplay, of course, but I think the Philippine use of “racket” and “salvage” to denote their opposite sense has gone dangerously overboard. We must draw the line somewhere to safeguard language and our value systems. As the slogan of my favorite English-language website, Vocabula.com, sagely warns, “A society is generally as lax as its language.” (April 24, 2006)
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 24, 2006 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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Previously Featured Essay:

The emphatic forms and inverted sentences

Every language develops modes not just to share information but to convey thoughts and ideas more forcefully. In English, verbs evolved two special forms—the emphatic tenses—to provide emphasis to the actions they describe. The present emphatic emphasizes actions or conditions happening in the present, and the past emphatic emphasizes those that occurred in the past. More commonly, however, the emphatic forms are used in two types of sentence constructions where emphasis is not intended: to work with the adverb “not” in negative sentences, and to form questions or the interrogative mode, in which the normal sentence construction is inverted. We must understand this distinction clearly to avoid mistakes in using the emphatic tenses.

The present emphatic tense of verbs is formed by putting the present-tense verb “do” or “does” ahead of their basic present form. Here are examples of the present emphatic tense used for emphasis: “I do like apples.” “She does think fast.” “They do act slowly.” The intent is to express the action or state more forcefully. In contrast, here are examples when emphasis is not intended: “The group does not agree.” (forming a negative sentence) “Does the jury have a verdict?” (forming a question).

The past emphatic tense of verbs is formed by putting the past-tense “did” ahead of their basic present form. Examples of the past emphatic tense used for emphasis: “I did write that letter.” “She did come as expected.” “They did pay on schedule.” Examples when emphasis is not intended: “He did not deliver as promised.” “Didn’t you finish the work last night?”

Sentences that use the emphatic tense for emphasis are either affirmative or negative responses to an apparently persistent question, whether stated or only implied. See what happens when this question is asked: “Did you really write that letter?” The emphatic answer would either be “I did write that letter” or “No, I didn’t write that letter.” This is the situational context for using the emphatic forms. It conveys the sense of the speaker either explicitly owning or denying an act, or claiming to be correct in his or her belief regarding the action of others.

Another device for emphasis in the English language, one that is often misunderstood and much maligned, is the inverted sentence. This grammatical form, in which the verb comes ahead the subject, does present agreement problems and possible confusion when used too often. Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “Away from light steals home my heavy son /And private in his chamber pens himself...

Note that it is the verb “away” that starts the sentence, with the subject “son” far detached from it. The normal-order sentence would go as follows: “My heavy son steals home away from light...” A heightened emotional state can be felt in the first, a dry forthrightness in the second. That difference comes from the change in the form, order, and rhythm of the language itself.

It is, of course, not only in poetry where inverted sentences find excellent use. They can give prose much-welcome variety and punch when used judiciously in a sea of normal-order sentences. Feel the emotional difference between the following normal-order sentences and their corresponding inverted sentences: (1) “Her behavior could be explained in no other way.” “In no other way could her behavior be explained.” (2) “I saw only then the possibilities of the new business.” “Only then did I see the possibilities of the new business.” (3) “She didn’t realize that he had deceived her till she got the letter from a total stranger.” “Not until she got the letter from a total stranger did she realize that he had deceived her.”

When using inverted sentences, however, we must make an extra effort to double-check agreement of the verb with the subject. This subject always follows the number of the verb and not of the nouns or pronouns that come before it: “In the grassy plains lives the last antelope.” It would seem that the singular verb “lives” should be the plural “live” instead to agree with “grassy plains,” but this proves to be not the case; the true subject is not “the grassy plains” but the singular “the last antelope.” See also what happens if the sentence were written another way: “In the grassy plain live the last antelopes.” In this case, the subject “the last antelopes” is plural, so the verb must also take the plural form “live” to agree with it.

Take note, too, that sentences beginning with “there” or “here” are actually in the inverted form: “There is a can of corned beef in the cupboard.” “Here comes the parade.” “There” and “here” are, of course, not the subjects. It is “corned beef” in the first, and “parade” in the second. The two sentences are actually emphatic forms of the normal-order “A can of corned beef is in the cupboard” and “The parade comes.”
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From the book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn the Global Language by Jose A. Carillo © 2004 by the author © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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