I was making notes for a possible non-English-language topic for this column, thinking that grammar wouldn’t be right for Holy Wednesday, when my nine-year-old tapped my shoulder and asked: “Dad, why is Holy Week from April 13 to 20 this year? Last year, it was from March 24 to 31.* Why not hold it on the same date like that of Christmas Day so it doesn’t get confusing?”

Talk about deja vu! I had wanted to ask my own father that same question when I was about the same age as my son now, but never got to ask. Now I am a father myself—three times over, in fact—and yet could only give a stock answer to veil my continuing ignorance: “It’s because the days of the Holy Week are movable feasts, son. They base it on a religious calendar—you know, that kind where there are names of one or two saints for every day of the year.”

“But why, Dad? They could do the same to every other religious holiday, but they don’t. And another question: Why is Easter Sunday called ‘Easter’? This celebration came from the West, so wouldn’t it make more sense to call it ‘Wester’? And one last thing: Why is the bunny a symbol for Easter? It looks funny and doesn’t seem right.”

Those questions stumped me even more, so I told him: “I really don’t know the answers, son, but tonight I’ll get them for you. Go to sleep now and tomorrow we’ll talk again.”

My little research to answer my son’s questions, I must say, yielded more fascinating answers than I expected. To begin with, it turns out that the movable Holy Week schedules are not totally arbitrary at all. They are always exactly timed in relation to the natural, once-a-year occurrence called the vernal equinox. The equinoxes—there are only two of them—are those times in the year when day is precisely as long as night. The vernal equinox comes in March, marking the end of winter and the beginning of spring, while the autumnal equinox comes in September, marking the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.

The advent of spring was, of course, always a cause for great celebration in the ancient world. The Anglo-Saxons welcomed it with a rousing spring festival in honor of Eoastre, their goddess of springtime and fertility. The Scandinavians called her Ostra and the Teutons, Ostern, but they honored her in much the same way. The importance of this festival to the early Europeans was not lost on the second-century Christians, who wanted to convert them to Christianity. They therefore made their own observance of Christ’s Resurrection coincide exactly with the festival. Then they gradually made it a Christian celebration, even appropriating the name “Eoastre” for it. Thus, contrary to what my son thought, the later use of the term “Easter” for the high point of the Holy Week had absolutely nothing to do with global geography.

People in those early times, however, celebrated the spring festival on different days, mostly on Sundays but often also on Fridays and Saturdays. This became a thorny issue. To resolve it, the Roman Emperor Constantine—who had by then become a supporter of the Christian faith—convened the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. This council came up with the Easter Rule, decreeing that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday that occurs after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. The “full moon” of this rule, however, does not always occur on the same date as the full moon that we actually see; it is the full moon after the ecclesiastical “vernal equinox,” which always falls on March 21. By this reckoning, Easter will always fall on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25. This rule has withstood the test of time, remaining unchanged exactly 1,682 years later to this day.

As to the Easter Bunny, it may be natural for us to think that it is simply a modern-day contrivance to liven up Easter Sunday. It isn’t. Its provenance is even older than that of Easter itself. The prolific rabbit, whose reappearance in spring unerringly marked the end of the brutal winters of those days, actually was the earthly symbol of the goddess Eoastre. Along with the Easter Egg, itself a symbol of rebirth in many cultures, the Easter Bunny was, in fact, a powerful ancient symbol for activity after inaction, for life after death.

In the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Roman Catholics and the rest of the Christian faithful have similarly found such an enduring symbol. They have thus consecrated the Lenten Season in His Name as their holiest of days, ending it on Easter Sunday in a feast where church tradition and ancient belief find joyful convergence.

These are the things I’ll tell my nine-year-old when he wakes up today and reminds me of what I promised him. (April 15, 2003)
--------
*In 2010, of course, we are celebrating Easter on Sunday, April 4—the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the ecclesiastical “vernal equinox,” which in turn always falls on March 21. This really sounds complicated and rather arbitrary, but there it is.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 15, 2003 © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click to The Lounge for a related reading

Click here to discuss/comment

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)

Click here to discuss/comment