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When media stories mix tenses and construct sentences badly

The four major Metro Manila broadsheets have kept their English admirably airtight despite their bruising news coverage of the recently concluded national elections in the Philippines. They remained as vigilant with their grammar and usage as with their handling of the evolving numbers of the election results, so that towards the end of election week today (May 14), I could find only three serious grammatical and semantic flaws in their news and feature stories that are worthy of being critiqued here.

Let’s start with the contradictory handling of the tenses in the following homepage caption of the Philippine Daily Inquirer in its May 14 Internet edition:

Let’s first take up the usual stylebook assumptions for newspaper photo captions of this kind. First, the capitalization of the start-up noun phrase GIFTS OF FILIPINOS is to be construed as the same as enclosing it with quotation marks, “Gifts of Filipinos,” thus making this noun phrase singular in number. Second, following a long journalistic tradition, news captions are rendered in the present tense although the situation or event in the photo obviously happened in the past.

The operative verb for that photo-caption sentence in the Inquirer should therefore be the present-tense “is” instead of the past-tense “was.” Even if we assume that the Inquirer has no such present-tense stylebook rule and that the caption writer had the choice of rendering that verb in the past tense “was,” the subsequent verb “describes”—the action of Cardinal Rosales—should have been rendered in the past-tense “described” for consistency.

Here, then, are the grammatically correct renditions of that caption:

(1) Consistent present tense

“GIFTS OF FILIPINOS is how Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales describes the May 10 polls during a thanksgiving Mass at the Manila Cathedral Thursday attended by military chief Gen. Delfin Bangit and Comelec Commissioner Rene Sarmiento.”

(2) Consistent past tense

“GIFTS OF FILIPINOS was how Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales described the May 10 polls during a thanksgiving Mass at the Manila Cathedral Thursday attended by military chief Gen. Delfin Bangit and Comelec Commissioner Rene Sarmiento.”

We could assume, of course, that Inquirer would have preferred the consistently present-tense rendition above.

Now let’s take a look at the fourth paragraph of the following news story in the May 14 issue of the Manila Bulletin (Internet edition):

There are two serious grammar problems in the two paragraphs above—faulty sentence construction in the first, and wrong choice of word in the second:

(1) Faulty sentence construction

“[Senator Benigno III] Aquino pointed out that should he and running mate Senator Manuel ‘Mar’ Roxas II both come out victorious in last Monday’s elections, his vice president will not able to take over his post, should something happen to him, since he has not yet been proclaimed as the new president.”

The positioning of the phrase “should something happen to him” is a case of putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, thus ruining the entire logic of the sentence. For that phrase to properly do its semantic job, it should be moved out of its position to become the second conditionality pointed out by Sen. Aquino. Then the outcomes Sen. Aquino cites will fall neatly into place both grammatically and semantically.

Also, the verb “be” is missing in the verb phrase “will not able,” thus badly truncating the sentence.

Here’s how that properly constructed sentence will look:

“[Senator Benigno III] Aquino pointed out that should he and running mate Senator Manuel ‘Mar’ Roxas II both come out victorious in last Monday’s elections and should something happen to him, his vice president will not be able to take over his post since he (Aquino) has not yet been proclaimed as the new president.”

It’s still a confusing, cumbersome sentence that I think needs a total rewrite, but I won’t attempt to do it here. To minimize the confusion, however, I supplied the parenthetical “Aquino” after the last pronoun “he” to properly identify who’s who in the welter of pronouns that have no clear antecedents in that sentence.

(2) Misuse of the verb phrase “lay low” for “lie low”

“‘You well know that other candidates have their rabid supporters who might think bad things, so my security staff advised me to lay low for a while until my formal proclamation.’”

That sentence wrongly uses the verb phrase “lay low”; the correct one is “lie low,” which means “to stay in hiding and strive to avoid notice” or “to bide one’s time and remain secretly ready for action.” In contrast, to “lay low” means “to put or set something down in a low position,” which, of course, is an entirely different idea.

Here’s that sentence as corrected:

“‘You well know that other candidates have their rabid supporters who might think bad things, so my security staff advised me to lie low for a while until my formal proclamation.’”

Finally, I came across the following highly convoluted lead passage of a feature article in the lifestyle section of the Philippine Star’s May 14 Internet edition:

Frankly, I couldn’t make heads and tails of these two highly convoluted sentences, and I wouldn’t even attempt a rewrite. I get the impression that the writer got so enamored or intoxicated with his words that he simply didn’t try hard enough to make the readers understand what he was saying. In the first sentence, it’s insufferably difficult to figure out what the subject is and what the predicate is because of the profuse bedlam of modifying phrases. It gets even worse in the second sentence, where the reader has to first wade through no less than 38 words before finding out what the subject of the sentence is and what the writer wants to tell us about it. By then, however, the reader’s head is already spinning—as was mine.

I wish newspaper feature writing wouldn’t be as bad as this even during a writer’s bad days.

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