MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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When sunset comes and evening ends really depend on location

Here’s a very intriguing question about language usage that was e-mailed to me by Mark Llacuna early in January:

Here’s my reply to Mark last January 19 that I’m belatedly posting here only now:

Yes, you’re right, Mark; “evening” does refer to the early part of the night, typically between sunset and bedtime. But this definition of “evening” allows for some latitude as to when it begins and when it ends. In some parts of the world, “evening” is taken to mean the period from sunset or the evening meal to bedtime, but we know that the times of sunset vary widely depending on a country’s location on the globe, and that the precise times of the evening meal and bedtime also vary widely from person to person. 

As to Ms. Korina Sanchez’s use of the word “evening,” I think her first usage of it in the phrase “6:10 in the evening” is absolutely correct, but her second usage of “evening” in the phrase “11:20 in the evening” does sound iffy from the standpoint of Philippine time. I would say that in the Philippines, “evening” ends by 9:00 p.m. or thereabouts, so “11:20” would actually be “late at night.” But as to her second sentence, “They boarded their flight at around 11:20 in the evening,” I disagree with you that it’s unnecessary. Even if the first sentence had already implied it, that second sentence is actually a perfectly valid form of constructive reiteration both for emphasis and for clarity. However, it would have been much better if the second use of the phrase “in the evening” after “11:20” was knocked off to avoid sounding repetitive; after all, the previous sentence had already made it clear what part of the day—“in the evening”—is being referred to.

I must also disagree with your observation that “the second sentence contradicts the first because 11:20 is a little over 5 hours, not ‘almost five hours’ since 6:10.” Column writing allows for much more leeway in the matter of mathematical precision than news writing, so the few minutes’ difference between “almost five hours” and “a little over 5 hours” is practically insignificant from a feature writer’s point of view—and more so from the standpoint of a columnist like Ms. Sanchez who writes to meet a daily newspaper’s deadline of on top of her even more demanding duties as a TV news anchor. In fairness to columnists, I do think we should cut them some slack in that respect.

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SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:

1. Yahoo! Southeast Asia Newsroom: Misuse of the verb “depose”

In the last sentence of the news passage above, either the reporter misheard and misquoted Senator Sotto or the latter mistakenly used the verb “depose” for the correct “dispose.”

In the context of that sentence, “depose” means to remove from a throne or other high position (which is what the House prosecutors want to do to Chief Justice Corona), an act that couldn’t really be done to a motion in the impeachment proceedings. The correct word for that context is “dispose,” which means to settle a matter with finality.

That quoted statement should therefore be corrected as follows:

“The idea is to resolve all of them so that when the impeachment court convenes we are ready to dispose of the motion,” he said.

One more thought about this state of affairs: If indeed a speaker has uttered a wrong word choice, and assuming that the reporter recognizes the error and knows the correct word, the SOP in news reporting is to just paraphrase the statement so the correct word can be used, as follows:

2. The Philippine Star: Improperly constructed, unparallel, emantically faulty sentence

Because of the improper, unparallel, and semantically faulty construction of the lead sentence above, the false impression is created that 150 people were missing for a reason different and distinct from the landslide that killed at least 25 people in the mining site.

This serious semantic problem can be remedied by reconstructing that sentence such that the two outcomes are in parallel, as follows:

“At least 25 people were killed and 150 others remained missing when a predawn landslide struck a mining site in Compostela Valley today.”

Note that this construction uses the additive conjunction “and” instead of the subordinating conjunction “while” for the two outcomes of the landslide, thus clearly showing that they were results of the same cause. Also, in the second sentence, the adjective “dead” was dropped from the phrase “dead bodies” because it’s clear and understood that bodies recovered in such a manner are already dead.

3. Philippine Daily Inquirer: Reckless reporting and bad editing

Breaking news stories about crime normally make sure that they don't impute guilt to the alleged perpetrator, but through reckless reporting and bad editing, the news story above has practically pronounced the wife of the victim guilty of the crime. This breach of a very basic journalistic rule could have been avoided had the reporter and desk editor been language-savvy enough to construct that passage this way:

“A woman in Quezon City faces a charge of parricide for allegedly shooting her husband to death during a marital spat at their home early Thursday.

“The victim, Parmindel Singh, 43, an Indian national, died of gunshot wounds in the abdomen and the buttocks. Singh died on arrival at the General Malvar Hospital at 3:02 a.m.

“The suspect, Emelyn, 38…”

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