Truth to tell, I had intended to begin this column with a scathing diatribe against the massacre of English during most graduation ceremonies in our English-speaking part of the world. That urge welled up in me a few weeks ago when my wife Leonor and I attended the high school graduation of our eldest son. I knew that if I didn’t watch out, the urge would burst forth as deadly spleen, and that I would be hard put to collect and whip it up into a civilized column. So unbearably morbid was my discomfort with the subject that I thought I couldn’t trust myself to ever write about it with grace and equanimity.

But even in this jaded day and age, miracles still happen, even if not of the religious sort. What forestalled my feared uncontrolled exercise in cruelty was finding good, no-nonsense English by example: Philippine businessman John Gokongwei Jr.’s address to the 2004 Ateneo de Manila graduating class. Serendipitously, the text of his eminently readable speech appeared right beside the print edition of this column morning of the other day. There, by the grace of God and Mr. John Gokongwei’s nonpontificating good sense, was English plain and simple—the kind of English I had long been laboring to promote, the unassuming, unpretentious English I had wanted to hear during my son’s graduation rites but didn’t.

From now on, when asked for a yardstick for plain and simple English, I would simply point to Mr. Gokongwei’s commencement prose as an exemplar. Look at how delightfully homespun and self-effacing he begins: “I wish I were one of you today, instead of a 77-year-old man, giving a speech you will probably forget when you wake up from your hangover tomorrow.” And look at this gem of irony in his account of his transition from market vendor to viajero (traveling trader): “When I had enough money and more confidence, I decided to travel to Manila from Cebu to sell all kinds of goods, like rubber tires. Instead of my bike, I now traveled on a batel—a boat so small that on windless days, we would just float there...During one trip, our batel sank! We would have all perished in the sea if it were not for my inventory of tires. The viajeros were happy because my tires saved their lives, and I was happy because the viajeros, by hanging on to them, saved my tires.”

I know only one business tycoon of a stature comparable to Mr. Gokongwei’s who speaks and writes like this—Mr. Warren Buffett, the multibillionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the large US-based financial services and investment company. Months ago I had quoted him in my column to illustrate the great semantic power of plain and simple English when used by those who really know and passionately believe in what they are talking about. The disarming clarity and frankness of Mr. Buffett’s 2001 annual report should, like Mr. Gokongwei’s, be a good model for our own efforts at using English.

Here’s a passage from Mr. Buffett’s annual report that shows his remarkably simple, no-nonsense English:

“Though our corporate performance last year was satisfactory, my performance was anything but. I manage most of Berkshire’s equity portfolio, and my results were poor, just as they have been for several years. Of even more importance, I allowed General Re [his reinsurance company] to take on business without a safeguard I knew was important, and on September 11th, this error caught up with us. I’ll tell you more about my mistake later and what we are doing to correct it…Another of my 1956 Ground Rules remains applicable: ‘I cannot promise results to partners.’ But Charlie [Mr. Munger, his vice chair] and I can promise that your economic result from Berkshire will parallel ours during the period of your ownership: We will not take cash compensation, restricted stock or option grants that would make our results superior to yours. Additionally, I will keep well over 99% of my net worth in Berkshire…Charlie and I are disgusted by the situation…in which shareholders have suffered billions in losses while the CEOs, promoters, and other higher-ups who fathered these disasters have walked away with extraordinary wealth… urging investors to buy shares while concurrently dumping their own, sometimes using methods that hid their actions. To their shame, these business leaders view shareholders as patsies, not partners.”

(Click to read Chapter 21 – Part I of my book English Plain and Simple, where this passage is discussed as the antithesis of corporatese.)

Does this mean that we should become business tycoons first to achieve plain and simple English? Must we first make a big mark in the world to begin speaking without pretension and artifice, and not to always angle for big words to compensate for lack of substance? I don’t think so.

But we have to begin somewhere. Ideally, we should teach our children the art of using plain and simple English as early as preschool, then pursue the effort relentlessly all through primary school, high school, and college. We should encourage students to write clear, simple, and logical prose instead of rewarding their semantically convoluted essays and term papers with unmerited A+s. We should encourage clear, logical, and rational speech instead of lionizing young orators with a gift for bombast, but whose semantic repertoire consists of nothing more than memorized phrases that could not have conceivably sprung from their own minds.

For this year’s graduates and graduation ceremonies, of course, my prescriptions come too late. But it is never too early for the next ones in 2005. Whether graduate or guest speaker, we must curb our profound tendency to embellish speeches with worn-out words or words that don’t befit us, like “endeavor” and “crossroads,” “embark,” “momentous,” and particularly the treacherous adverb “indeed,” which only a very few semantically capable people can use with justice. Then, as parents, we must fight the temptation to ghostwrite our preschoolers’ valedictory speeches, and spare them the trauma of gabbling with adult concepts and salutations they don’t understand, and which make them sound like short-circuited robots. We must, for God’s sake, make our graduation rites the exemplar for good, plain, and simple English as Mr. Gokongwei’s in his compelling address to the Ateneo graduating class. (April 8, 2004)

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A few Sundays ago, my two sons and I attended Holy Mass in one of those improvised worship halls put up inside Metro Manila malls. The priest, in his late thirties or early forties, read the opening lines of the Eucharist in pleasantly modulated English, his voice rippling the familiar words and phrases like the chords of a well-tuned piano. His cadence and pronunciation reminded me of the late Fr. James Donelan, S.J., then chaplain of the Asian Institute of Management, who used to say morning mass at the institute in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He would regale the middle-aged management students with English-language homilies of simple beauty and depth, and then, in his formal humanities class, he would lecture them with delicious erudition about the cultural wealth of Western civilization. Now, listening to the young priest at the mall, I thought that here at last was one more man of the cloth of possibly the same weave. I thus settled down on my chair confident of hearing a well-delivered homily to strengthen my resolve as a believer for the week ahead.

That expectation was soon dashed to pieces, however, for as soon as the priest no longer read from the book and started speaking extemporaneously, it became clear that his command of English left a lot to be desired. He could not even make the form of his verbs agree with the number of his nouns and pronouns, and his grammar was so gender-blind as to be irritating (“The woman walked in the storm and go under the tree to deliver his baby.”). His command of the prepositions was likewise disturbingly inadequate, and he stumbled on his English phrases and idioms far too often for comfort.

I therefore listened to the rest of his homily with increasing distress. Of course, I couldn’t presume that the rest of the congregation shared my discomfort; perhaps I was just too exacting in my English grammar that I tended to magnify what could really be minor mistakes. But two weeks later, I asked one of my sons—then a high school senior—to validate my impressions of that homily. Having attended grade school in a Jesuit-run university, he would normally be squeamish about criticizing priests about anything, but he told me without batting an eyelash that he thought the priest’s English grammar was bad because he kept on messing up his noun-verb agreement and gender usage. I really needed no better confirmation of my impressions than that.

Looking back to that incident, I think that the country’s priests and preachers—more than anybody else in our highly Anglicized society—need better than just average English-language skills to effectively practice their vocation. We expect TV and radio broadcasters to have good English so they can properly report or interpret the news for us; we expect classroom teachers to have good English so they can effectively instruct our children on well-established, often doctrinaire areas of learning; and we expect lawyers to have good English to ably defend us in our mundane civil entanglements or prosecute those who have criminally acted against us and against society. But priests and preachers have a much more difficult job than all of them, for their goal is to teach us modes of belief and behavior that are matters not of fact but of faith. They ask us to believe with hardly any proof. And whatever doctrine they espouse, their mission is to help us experience the sublime, to make us shape our lives according to the hallowed precepts of prophets or sages of a bygone age. This is a definitely a tall order even for one with the gift of tongue, for it demands not only the fire of belief but also good or excellent command of whatever language he or she uses to preach.

Since I was a child, my impression has always been that priests and preachers stay in school the longest—ten to eleven years if my memory serves me well—because they have to master the craft of language, suasion, and persuasion better than most everybody else. My understanding is that this is why seminarians study for the priesthood far longer than students pursuing a degree in medicine or law. I would think that those years of long study could give them a truly strong foundation in English grammar and usage, in listening skills, and in reading skills, then imbue them with a facility with the language that couldn’t be matched by lesser mortals. However, as shown by the fractured English of that priest delivering that homily at the mall and of so many other priests I have listened to over the years, that foundation has been resting on shaky ground indeed.

I therefore think it’s high time that the church hierarchy took steps to remedy this problem. This might be a tall order, but if nothing is done about this, I’m afraid that the established religious faiths would lose more and more of their flock to less virtuous but more English-savvy preachers—preachers who may have rickety or dubious religious platforms but who have honed their gift of tongue and powers of elocution to a much higher degree. I therefore suggest, for their own sake and for the long-term survival of the faith, that all seminarians and even full-fledged priests be given a much more rigorous grounding in English grammar and usage. They need to effectively smoothen out the grammatical and semantic kinks in their English to become more able promoters and defenders of the faith.

As the old saying goes, God helps only those who help themselves. (May 23, 2003)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 23, 2003, © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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