Jose Carillo's English Forum - Essays by Jose Carillo

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.

To be fluent in English, you need a wide repertoire of its idioms

So you think you already know your English?

OK, if somebody tells you, “You aren’t my cup of tea,” should you be flattered or be offended? But perhaps that one’s too common and too easy. What about if an acquaintance tells you, “You are the apple of my eye”—are you fit to be eaten or is the speaker smitten by you? And if someone says, “My salad days are gone,” is he or she missing good food or lamenting the loss of happiness?

If you don’t know the answers to the questions above or are totally clueless about them, then perhaps you largely know English only by the surface meanings of its words. In short, you may not be familiar and conversant with its thousands of idioms—those peculiar expressions with meanings that can’t be derived from the conjoined meanings of their component words. When you aren’t somebody’s cup of tea, in particular, you aren’t liked very much by that person; if you are the apple of somebody’s eye, you are cherished highly by that person; and if somebody tells you that his salad days are gone, a particularly happy period of that person’s life is over. In each case, nutrition has got nothing to do with the idea.

So, to really know the English language, you need to acquire a very substantial repertoire of its idioms, and this is what I urged nonnative English speakers to do when I wrote the essay below, “Learning the English Idioms,” almost two years ago for my weekly column in The Manila Times. I am posting it here because I thought that this goal should be part of the New Year’s resolution of everyone who—better late than never—aspires to be truly proficient and fluent in English.

Click on the title below to read the essay.

Learning the English idioms

As every nonnative English learner soon discovers upon acquiring an adequate grasp of the language, many common English expressions don’t have the same meanings as those of their individual words. For instance, the verbal phrase “to ask (someone) over” means to invite someone to come and not to ask that person a question, and the noun phrase “finding a needle in a haystack” means a very difficult task and has nothing to do with actual needles and haystacks. In short, English is highly idiomatic—it often doesn’t mean exactly what it says—so it isn’t enough to simply learn how to string any of its estimated 625,000 words into grammatically and structurally correct sentences. The learner also needs to patiently find out the idioms or implicit meanings built by native English speakers into particular combinations of those words, then be able to use those particular idioms with confidence when the occasion calls for them.

Indeed, acquiring the estimated 20,000-25,000 words needed to be adequately proficient in English is child’s play compared to learning its more than 24,000 idioms. To sound natural when speaking or writing in English, or to be able to read English text well or to listen to spoken English with ease, the serious learner must know at least a sizable number of these idioms, which make so much of the language a dizzying labyrinth of hidden meanings. Not to do so will make the learner forever an outsider to the language, no matter how extensive his or her vocabulary or sentence-making skill becomes.

Idioms are of two basic types: transparent, those whose meanings can often be inferred from their constituent words, and opaque, those whose meanings aren’t as easily apparent. For instance, the idiom “lend a hand (to someone)” is transparent because it’s easily understood to mean to help someone; “walking on thin ice,” which means acting dangerously, is similarly transparent because its imagery can be easily associated with danger. But such an idiomatic expression as “to be wet behind the ears” (inexperienced) is opaque because its motivation or origin isn’t apparent on its face. Some idioms, of course, may fall in-between transparent and opaque, such as “keep a straight face” (pretend to be innocent) and “blow off steam” (release pent-up emotions).

English idioms take any of four grammatical forms: adjective phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and verb phrases.

An adjective phrase idiom is any phrase that modifies a noun or pronoun in a nonliteral way, like “head over heels” (smitten) in the sentence “Paris fell head over heels in love with Helen, triggering a ruinous war,” and “on a roll” (having great success) in “The partners are on a roll in their franchised business.”

A noun phrase idiom is one whose lead word is a noun or pronoun that often comes with a set of modifiers. Typical examples are the idiom “a straw in the wind” (unlikely) in “His winning was a straw in the wind because his opponent had a stronger political machinery,” and the idiom “a square peg in a round hole” (misfit) in “As the feuding family’s arbiter, the veteran prosecutor was a square peg in a round hole.”

A prepositional idiom is one made up of a preposition, its object, and any modifier that comes after them, as the expressions “in the bag” (certain) and “in the nick of time” (a final critical moment), as in “The candidate thought his victory was already in the bag, but the election results proved him wrong” and “As always in Hollywood adventure movies, the hero saves damsel or village in mortal peril just in the nick of time.”

Finally, a verb phrase idiom—otherwise know as a phrasal verb idiom—is an expression whose meaning differs from that of its verb, as “put off” (postpone) and the following three “face” idioms: “face off” (compete), “face up to” (admit responsibility), and “face the music” (deal with an unpleasant situation). I’ll no longer give examples of their usage as I’m sure they are already part of most everybody’s conversational repertoire.

No matter what grammatical form they take, idioms make their component words transcend their dictionary meanings, and every new idiom learned brings the learner in closer touch with the heart and sinew of the English language. (February, 2 2007)

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Previously Featured Essay:

The parenthesis and its uses

Part I

We are all familiar with the two curved marks that we know as the parenthesis ( ), but what some of us may not know is that in English grammar, the parenthesis is actually any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence or passage by some form of punctuation. That punctuation can be those two curved marks, of course, but depending on the importance of the inserted information and the writer’s intention, it can also be a pair of enclosing commas or a pair of enclosing dashes.

Let’s take a look at the following examples:

(1) Parenthesis by comma: (a) “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” (b) “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

(2) Parenthesis by dashes: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.”

(3) Parenthesis by parentheses: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.”

In each of the three examples above, the information set off by the punctuation marks—whether by commas, dashes, or parentheses—is called a parenthetical, and its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically and semantically correct even without it. A parenthetical is basically added information; however, it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. It may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, to establish the logic of the sentence, or to convey a particular tone or mood for the statement. In fact, the punctuation chosen for a parenthetical largely determines its optionality or importance to the statement.

So the big question about parentheticals is really this: Under what circumstances do we use commas, dashes, or parentheses to punctuate or set off a parenthetical from a sentence?

In Example 1(a) above, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” is what’s known as a nonrestrictive relative clause. A nonrestrictive relative clause is a parenthetical that provides information that’s not absolutely needed to understand the sentence; in other words, it is nondefining information. The sentence will remain grammatically and semantically intact without it: “Ferdinand Magellan was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Without the nonrestrictive relative clause, however, the sentence loses a lot of valuable information about its subject, “Ferdinand Magellan”; in fact, the intended context for the statement disappears completely.

For such type of parenthetical, the most appropriate choice of punctuation is a pair of enclosing commas, as was used in the original sentence. It won’t do to punctuate a nonrestrictive relative clause with dashes or parentheses, for either of them would render the information optional, as we can see in these two versions of that sentence: “Ferdinand Magellan—who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521—was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” “Ferdinand Magellan (who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521) was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Both of these sentence constructions run counter to the writer’s original intention.

We must keep in mind, though, that the same parenthetical—“who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521”—would have become a restrictive relative clause had the subject been a generic noun like, say, “the explorer,” in which case the pair of enclosing commas would have been rendered unnecessary: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

We will continue this discussion in the next essay. (January 12, 2008)

Part II

In the preceding essay, I pointed out that if we substitute a generic noun for a proper noun that’s being modified by a nonrestrictive relative clause, the pair of commas enclosing that clause would be rendered unnecessary. Thus, the sentence “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães” takes the following form when its subject is replaced with the generic noun “the explorer”: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The absence of the enclosing commas indicates that the nonrestrictive relative clause has become a restrictive one.

Obviously, the following questions will come to mind when that happens: Why not leave those enclosing commas alone? What difference does it make if we let those commas stay even after changing “Ferdinand Magellan” to “the explorer”?

The reason lies in the basic grammatical difference between a proper noun and a generic noun. We will recall that a proper noun is one that designates a particular being or thing, and that as a rule in English, it is capitalized to indicate this fact. A proper noun, moreover, has this important characteristic: as a rule, it won’t accept a limiting or restrictive relative modifier to define it. By its very name, a proper noun is supposed to have already defined itself, making it one of a kind.

Now, we need to recall at this point that a relative clause or a “who”-parenthetical that comes after a proper noun—“Ferdinand Magellan” in this case—becomes a restrictive clause or limiting modifier when it’s not enclosed by a pair of commas. It is therefore grammatically incorrect for the subject “Ferdinand Magellan” to be followed by a relative clause that’s not enclosed by commas: “Ferdinand Magellan who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” will always need the pair of enclosing commas in such cases: “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

It’s an altogether different thing when we replace a proper noun with a generic noun in such sentence constructions. We will then have two grammatical choices. If our intention is to, say, make “the explorer” specifically refer to “Ferdinand Magellan” and to no other person, then we need to modify it with a restrictive relative clause—one without the enclosing commas, as was done previously: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

On the other hand, if by “the explorer” we mean any explorer at all who had claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown, we would need to modify that generic noun with a nonrestrictive clause or nonlimiting modifier instead: “The explorer, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The enclosing commas indicate that the person referred to isn’t unique; he might not have been Ferdinand Magellan.

Now let’s evaluate the second sentence that I gave in last Saturday’s column as an example of parenthesis by comma: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” Here, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” is what is known as the appositive phrase. It is a statement that serves to explain or identify the noun or pronoun that comes before or after it.

The appositive phrase is an extremely useful grammatical device for giving context and texture to what otherwise might be very bland or uninformative sentences. We will discuss it in detail in the next essay. (January 19, 2008)

Part III

We will now discuss the appositive phrase found in the following sentence that I presented for evaluation in the preceding essay: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” The appositive phrase here is, of course, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” It’s an added statement that gives context and texture to this vague, bare-bones sentence: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

On closer scrutiny, we will find that the appositive phrase is actually a simplified form of the nonrestrictive relative clause in this sentence: “Cleopatra, who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” It is, in fact, the relative clause “who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” with both the relative pronoun “who” and the linking verb “was” taken out.

That grammatical streamlining process produces a modifier in noun form—“the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later”—that is in apposition or equivalent to the noun form it modifies—“Cleopatra.” Indeed, appositive phrases are a compact and concise way of describing people, places, and things or of qualifying ideas within the same sentence. They allow us to provide more details about a subject without having to start another sentence—a process that sometimes undesirably slows down the pace of an unfolding exposition or narrative.

The use of appositive phrases, we now will probably recall, is also one of the most efficient ways of combining sentences. It allows a related statement from another sentence to be folded into the sentence that precedes it. The sentence that we are evaluating now, for instance, has combined these two sentences: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire. She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” By making the statement in the second sentence an appositive in the first, we get a sentence that’s richer in texture and more interesting to read: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

Such constructions also have the added virtue of allowing us to develop the basic statement of a sentence unimpeded. Assume that we have already written this basic statement: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” If we use the appositive phrase “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” to form a new sentence after it, that new sentence would often become a stumbling block to developing the basic statement. Indeed, with a powerful statement like “She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” getting in the way, it won’t be an easy task to go back to the thread of our basic statement and develop it. In contrast, folding that powerful statement into an appositive phrase in the first sentence neatly sidesteps the potential continuity problem while making that first sentence much more readable and interesting.

The appositive phrase we have discussed above is of the nonrestrictive type, which means that it isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence even if it adds important additional information to it. Nonrestrictive appositive phrases are parentheticals that, like nonrestrictive relative clauses, need a pair of enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence.

But some appositive phrases are of the restrictive type and they don’t need those commas. We will take them up in the next essay. (January 26, 2008)

Part IV

We already know that a parenthesis or parenthetical is basically added information whose distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. So far, however, we have taken up only its first two types, the nonrestrictive relative clause and the nonrestrictive appositive phrase, both of which require enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence. We have also taken up the restrictive relative clause and the restrictive appositive phrase, but we have seen that they aren’t really true parentheticals because they are not expendable—we don’t really have the option to drop them from the sentence.

This time we’ll take up the two other kinds of parentheticals: the parenthesis by dashes, and the parenthesis by parentheses. They differ from the parenthesis by comma in that neither of them can be punctuated properly by a pair of enclosing commas. In their case, though, the use of dashes or parentheses is generally interchangeable and is often a matter of stylistic choice. This choice largely depends on whether the parenthetical is really optional or contextually necessary, perhaps simply an aside; in any case, however, using enclosing commas to set it off is out of the question.

Parenthesis by dashes. This kind of parenthetical normally folds another sentence into a sentence, as in this example: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” What sets off the parenthetical “they said they didn’t know it then” from the main sentence is a pair of double dashes, which indicates a much stronger break in the thought or structure of the sentence than what a pair of enclosing commas can provide.

See what happens when we use commas instead to punctuate that kind of parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill, they said they didn’t know it then, but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” The pauses provided by the two commas are much too brief to indicate the sudden shift from the major developing thought to the subordinate idea; structurally, they also truncate the sentence.

If the writer so chooses, however, parentheses may also be used for that same parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill (they said they didn’t know it then) but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” When parentheses are used, however, the implication is that the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he or she would when using double dashes instead.

Parenthesis by parentheses. This is the preferred punctuation when the writer wants to convey to the reader that the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to his exposition, as in this example: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.” However, if the writer intends to take up the dealer’s apparently false assurance in some detail later in the exposition, the parenthesis by dashes would be a good foreshadowing device: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan—the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled—busted one of its pistons.”

Parentheticals enclosed by parentheses need not be complete sentences, of course. They can be simple qualifying phrases within or at the tail end of sentences: “Many elective officials (of the dynastic kind, particularly) sometimes forget that they don’t own those positions.” “The disgruntled cashier took the day off (without even filing a leave).”

Even more commonly, parentheses are used to add a fact—maybe a name or number—that’s subordinate or tangential to the rest of the sentence, as in this example: “Recent geologic research (Alvarez, Alvarez et al, 1980) indicates that the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid some 10 km in diameter smashed on present-day Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago.” (February 9, 2008)

NOTE: In the four essays above, the italicization of the parenthetical in the sentence given as example is done for emphasis only. Parentheticals are normally written or printed in the same Roman typeface as the rest of the sentence.

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