MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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A major broadsheet is making serious slips in its semantics

Last week, with hardly any notable grammar error to be found in the four major Metro Manila broadsheets, I said that it looked like the end of the road for My Media English Watch. With material for my grammar critiques of media’s English getting harder and harder to come by (I must hasten to add that this was a most welcome thing), I suggested to those following my media watch to set their sights elsewhere in the Forum for continuing fresh lessons in English grammar and usage.

The good news is that during the last few days, the four major broadsheets were able to keep their grammar and usage errors remarkably scarce, but I couldn’t help but notice that one of them was seriously slipping in its semantics. It tended to be loose in its choice of words, phrasing, and modifiers to the point of distorting what its sentences were meant to say. The sentence might be grammar-perfect, but the message would be fuzzy, garbled, or inaccurate.

Let’s take a look at some cases in point (all underlining mine):

(1) Philippine Daily Inquirer (print edition): Highly gratuitous figurative expression for a lead sentence

5 Arroyo Cabinet execs finally resign

“MANILA, Philippines—It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.

“Five members of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s Cabinet have tendered their courtesy resignations to prepare for the May 10 elections.

“Leading the way was Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, who said he filed his resignation on Tuesday, a day after the Supreme Court ruled that appointed officials running in the elections were deemed resigned.”

I don’t want to be a semantic spoilsport, but I wonder how many readers were sent scampering to Wikipedia or some book of idiomatic expressions when they read that lead sentence: “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

It’s not good to underestimate the intelligence of newspaper readers, of course, but I do think that it isn’t the job of a newspaper either to make them wonder what a sentence is saying. Its job is to make the reader get its message right away. In fact, although I’ve come across the expression “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” many times in other contexts, I wasn’t sure what the writer was driving at by using it in that story. I therefore had to do some quick research, and this is what I found:

“It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” means this: “You don’t know how this is going to end until the final minute.” So, if you were expecting some fat lady and some singing in that news story, banish the thought. There’s none of the sort. And come to think of it, that story could have done very well without that expression to confound us. Indeed, it’s a highly gratuitous figurative expression that seems to have been designed not to deliver information but to heap insult—and this in a front-page headline story!

(2) Philippine Daily Inquirer (Internet edition): Misleading modifier

Aquino, Villar rock to People Power politics

“MANILA, Philippines—The top two rivals in the May presidential race hosted star-powered gatherings that ostensibly marked the anniversary of EDSA I but were suspiciously political.

“One showered a packed coliseum with yellow confetti, the other drew orange-shirted followers to a mall for a rock concert.”

Frankly, I’m highly suspicious of the modifier “suspiciously political” in that lead sentence. For two hugely public events covered live by the national TV networks, it seems to me that only the deaf and blind couldn’t have figured out that those star-powered gatherings were out-and-out partisan and downright political. I therefore think that the reporter and desk editor either had made a very bad adverb choice in “suspiciously,” or they were mocking the two presidential rivals for false pretenses in commemorating EDSA I with ostensibly the noblest of motives. Either way, this kind of reporting is inaccurate and smacks of bias, even of outright contempt towards the organizers of the two events.

I would rather that that broadsheet had been scrupulously honest, calling a spade a spade by, say, using the adverb “downright”:

“MANILA, Philippines—The top two rivals in the May presidential race hosted star-powered gatherings that ostensibly marked the anniversary of EDSA I but were downright political.”

(2) Philippine Daily Inquirer (print edition): Semantically, historically flawed caption

METRO LOOP  Finally, a mass transit system has become reality for Metro Manila commuters as President Arroyo and Vice President Noli de Castro inaugurate the new rail line from North Avenue in Quezon City to Monumento in Caloocan City on Thursday.

Mmm…This broadsheet’s photo-caption writer has bungled its front-page caption again, this time semantically and historically (the same thing happened the other week, but the errors were largely grammatical). It certainly isn’t true that “finally, a mass transit system has become (a) reality for Metro Manila commuters” after last Thursday! That mass transit system became a reality way back in 1984, when then Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos inaugurated the 15-km LRT Line 1 from Monumento to Baclaran. What happened last Thursday was that the Metro rail system was finally looped, such that you can now travel around Metro Manila all throughout by commuter train.

I do hope that this broadsheet would take more pains in ensuring the accuracy of its photo captions as it does with its news and feature stories. Its front page would be much nicer reading!

SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH:   

(1) Manila Daily Bulletin: Wrong conjunction

Visayas turns to prayers to battle El Niño

“Like in Biblical times where Moses cried out to God for water to fill the thirst of the Israelites, Catholic faithful were asked to pray for the rain as the El Niño phenomenon starts to dry wells and affect water supply in Iloilo City.

“In Cebu, the Catholic Church is resorting to prayer to battle the dry spell.

“‘This coming Sunday we will be coming out with an Oratio Imperata,’ said Msgr. Achilles Dakay, spokesman of the Cebu archdiocese in an interview with Radio Veritas.”

In English, there’s the time conjunction “when” and there’s the place conjunction “where.” They have to match the antecedent time noun or place noun in a sentence. In the case of the lead sentence above, “Like in Biblical times where Moses cried out to God,” the antecedent of the conjunction is “Biblical times,” a period of time, so that conjunction shouldn’t be “where” but “when.”

Also, the correct infinitive phrase is “to dry up wells,” not “to dry wells,” and the phrase “affect water supply” is better said as “affect the water supply” (with the article “the”).

Here’s the sentence as corrected:

“Like in Biblical times when Moses cried out to God for water to fill the thirst of the Israelites, Catholic faithful were asked to pray for rain as the El Niño phenomenon starts to dry up wells and affect the water supply in Iloilo City.”

Changing “like” to “as” would make it even better:

“As in Biblical times when Moses cried out to God for water to fill the thirst of the Israelites, Catholic faithful were asked to pray for rain as the El Niño phenomenon starts to dry up wells and affect the water supply in Iloilo City.”

(1) Manila Daily Bulletin: Mix-up of pronoun and antecedent noun

Mindanao power woes surge

“The power deficiency in Mindanao has doubled in just one day as two hydro-electric power plants in the island have reduced its capabilities by almost 80 percent and two more power plants have become unavailable.

“In a power system update as of February 23 by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), it said that the generation deficiency in Mindanao as of Tuesday is now at 358 MW, a marked increase from Monday’s deficit of 183 MW.”

There’s a serious antecedent-cum-pronoun mix-up in that lead sentence, resulting in as serious a subject-verb disagreement. What happened here is that the writer mistook an intervening singular-form noun as the antecedent of the possessive pronoun. In the phrase “as two hydro-electric power plants in the island have reduced its capabilities,” the antecedent is actually the plural noun phrase “two hydro-electric plants in the island,” so the possessive pronoun for the noun “capabilities” should be the plural “their,” not the singular “its”:

“The power deficiency in Mindanao has doubled in just one day as two hydro-electric power plants in the island have reduced their capabilities by almost 80 percent and two more power plants have become unavailable.”

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