Jose Carillo's English Forum

MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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I am inviting Forum members to team up with me in doing My Media English Watch. This way, we can further widen this Forum’s dragnet for bad or questionable English usage in both the print media and broadcast media, thus giving more teeth to our campaign to encourage them to continuously improve their English. All you need to do is pinpoint every serious English misuse you encounter while reading your favorite newspaper or viewing your favorite network or cable TV programs. Just tell me about the English misuse and I will do a grammar critique of it.

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The prospect of grammar-perfect English in the major broadsheets

As I reported with elation last week, I couldn’t find any major English grammar and usage error in the major news and feature stories of the four major Metro Manila broadsheets—not of the serious, instructive kind worth discussing for English learners anyway. With only a hint of levity, I surmised that with their English becoming almost grammar-perfect, the reporters and desk editors of the broadsheets just might put My Media English Watch out of business before long—and make even my short grammar critiques of their less earthshaking stories unnecessary.

My delight over the prospect of grammar-perfect English in Philippine print journalism drew the following response from Mrs. Aurora Riel Grimes, a retired Filipino graduate school teacher in Education who now resides in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, in the United States:

Dear Mr. Carillo,

I am glad to hear such good news. It reminds me of the Polio Foundation, with its major goal to self-destruct.

In the late 1990s when I was there in the Philippines, I was an adviser to graduate students desiring to come up with special research projects relating to their major, namely Education.

Teaching high school English was their concentration. They had difficulty in getting started. As students, they did not learn to ask good questions about any subject that they need to study.

They indicated that they had instructions from their principal to do projects that would help improve instruction in their areas of specialization.

I suggested that they buy three broadsheets for a week—the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippine Star, and the Manila Bulletin. Read in full the stories in the front pages. Find and note the grammatical errors. That ought to help them identify certain areas of improvement in instruction of English for high school students.

Two of my advisees had real problems. They were high school teachers and they found no errors, while three of the better advisees found more than 50 errors in the same broadsheets that they examined. The errors related to (1) gender (“he”/“she”), confusion in relating a pronoun to a husband or a wife; mixing up “she” with “him”/“his” and mixing “he” with “her” in the same sentence/paragraph although referring to the same person; (2) number, confusion in mixing up the usage of “he” with “their”/“them,” “they” with “his”/“him,” and “it”/“he”/“she” with the plural form of verbs; and mixing up “they” and “them” with the singular form of verbs; (3) tenses, confusion in matching the verb forms that should go with “have,” the infinitives, and the passive/active voice; and (4) case, confusion mostly in the objective case.

Anyway, [it is good to know that] the broadsheets now seem to be only a minute part of the problem. The young people are now learning more from TV shows and are getting sold to the style of smart-looking Taglish speaking celebrities. It is amazing how fast the waves of change have influenced global usage and communication.

Soon enough Webster’s and Roget’s and Funk and Wagnalls will be made obsolete by Wowowee and Kris Aquino and the Rap Groups here in the USA.

Any thoughts about this response by Aurora?

Now to my media English critiques for last week:

TWO MAJOR BROADSHEETS SUFFER A MAJOR GRAMMAR RELAPSE:

For almost three weeks now, the four major Metro Manila broadsheets have kept the English of their major news and feature stories almost free of serious grammar and semantic errors—except for the following three big front-page boners:

(1) Manila Bulletin: Muddled, wordy, and structurally defective lead sentence

Bicol jolted by dawn earthquake

“Another tectonic earthquake occurred at the Philippine Sea that sent tremors to several towns in Bicol and Southern Luzon early Thursday morning, seismologists at the Philippine Institute on Volcanology and Seismology said.”

If the sentence above throws you off, it’s because the sentence isn’t only wordy and run-on but also misplaces the relative pronoun “that.” This misplacement causes the relative clause “that sent tremors to several towns…” to wrongly modify “Philippine Sea” instead of “earthquake,” which is the correct antecedent subject. Also, the verb “occurred” is a lame, inappropriate verb for that sentence; “originating from” or simply the preposition “in” can do a much better job.

Here are two suggested reconstructions to clarify what that sentence is saying:

“Bicol jolted by dawn earthquake

“Another tectonic earthquake originating from the Philippine Sea sent tremors to several towns in Bicol and Southern Luzon early Thursday morning, seismologists at the Philippine Institute on Volcanology and Seismology said.”

“Another tectonic earthquake in the Philippine Sea sent tremors to several towns in Bicol and Southern Luzon early Thursday morning, seismologists at the Philippine Institute on Volcanology and Seismology said.”

Note that both versions above neatly eliminate the cumbersome “that”-clause in the original sentence, thus greatly simplifying its grammar and structure.

(2) Manila Bulletin: Double-whammy wordiness

SC shuts door on 10 party-list groups

“The Supreme Court has slammed the door shut on at least 10 groups earlier disqualified by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) from joining the party-list elections in May.

“The groups include the controversial ‘Alyansa Sabungero’ and Filipinos for Peace, Justice and Progress Movement (FPJPM).”

The idiom “to slam the door” means to shut that door forcibly and noisily; obviously, then, the phrase “slammed the door shut” is a tautology or a needless repetition of the idea. The adjective “shut” should therefore be dropped like a hot potato.

Better:

“The Supreme Court has slammed the door on at least 10 groups earlier disqualified by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) from joining the party-list elections in May.

“The groups include the controversial ‘Alyansa Sabungero’ and Filipinos for Peace, Justice and Progress Movement (FPJPM).”

Alternatively:

“The Supreme Court has shut the door on at least 10 groups earlier disqualified by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) from joining the party-list elections in May.

“The groups include the controversial ‘Alyansa Sabungero’ and Filipinos for Peace, Justice and Progress Movement (FPJPM).”

(3) Philippine Inquirer: Misuse of a plural noun

“Fatality in plane crash had just finished law—kin

“CEBU CITY, Philippines - A female Air Force personnel from Cebu was among the casualties in the Cotabato city plane crash, according to the military in Cebu City.

“Maj. Wilson Feria, spokesman of the AFP Central Command (Centcom), identified the Cebuana fatality as Ian Christy Marose ‘Jingle’ Llamera.”

By definition, the noun “personnel” means “a body of persons usually employed (as in a factory, office, or organization),” and is always plural in sense. It therefore can’t be used to refer to a single person, as was erroneously done in the sentence above. A well-accepted term for “personnel” to refer to a single person is “staff.”

That problematic sentence as corrected:

“CEBU CITY, Philippines - A female Air Force staff from Cebu was among the casualties in the Cotabato city plane crash, according to the military in Cebu City.

“Maj. Wilson Feria, spokesman of the AFP Central Command (Centcom), identified the Cebuana fatality as Ian Christy Marose ‘Jingle’ Llamera.”

SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:

(1) Philippine Star: Problematic compound modifier

Power woes may worsen

“MANILA, Philippines - The power supply problem in the country may worsen because of the El Niño phenomenon, Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes warned yesterday.

“Because of below normal rainfall, hydroelectric plants, which generate most of the country’s power requirement, are suffering outages.”

The phrase “because of below normal rainfall” is badly constructed and confusing because of the improper layering of the two adjectives “below” and “normal” to modify the noun “rainfall.” That improper layering can be rectified by hyphenating the two adjectives: “below-normal.”

The problematic sentence as corrected:

“Because of below-normal rainfall, hydroelectric plants, which generate most of the country’s power requirement, are suffering outages.”

(2) The Manila Times: Wrong word choice; wrong tense of verb

Selection process on but no one lining up for Puno’s post

“Ten days after it opened the selection process, the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) was yet to accept an application for the post to be vacated by Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno on May 17 amid controversy on the legality of President Gloria Arroyo appointing the country’s top magistrate.

“Lawyer Jose Midas Marquez, the High Court’s spokesman and concurrent court administrator, on Thursday disclosed that the JBC would be meeting again on Monday to discuss its next step in case nobody applied for the position after the 15-day deadline.”

In the first sentence, the verb phrase “was yet to accept an application” is semantically erroneous; it gives the wrong idea that the JBC doesn’t want to accept any applications yet. What is really meant is that it “has not received any application yet.”

In the second sentence, the verb “applied” should be in the present-tense form “applies” instead. This is the correct form considering the conditionality of the phrase “in case” that precedes that verb.

That problematic passage as corrected:

“Ten days after it opened the selection process, the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) has not received any application yet for the post to be vacated by Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno on May 17 amid controversy on the legality of President Gloria Arroyo appointing the country’s top magistrate.

Another correct construction for the original problematic first sentence:

“Ten days after it opened the selection process, the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) has yet to receive an application for the post to be vacated by Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno on May 17 amid controversy on the legality of President Gloria Arroyo appointing the country’s top magistrate.”

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