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MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH
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Team up with me in My Media English Watch!
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.
Read the guidelines and house rules for joining My Media English Watch!
Basic lessons from slim pickings of print media’s grammar errors
All four of the major Metro Manila broadsheets are admirably keeping a tight watch on their English grammar and usage these days, so I’m glad to report that I only have slim pickings of grammatical errors for this week’s edition of my media English watch. Here they are with my usual critiques:
(1) Philippine Inquirer: Badly worded modifier, use of improper conjunction
Lightning kills 2 in Quezon City
MANILA, Philippines—Two people were killed, including an eight-months pregnant woman, while another person was injured when they were struck by lightning during a heavy downpour on Tuesday afternoon in Quezon City, police said.
In the lead sentence above, the modifier “an eight-months pregnant” for the noun “woman” makes for awkward reading; also, the word “eight” should have been the ordinal “eighth” (with an extra “h” at the tail end to signify that it’s not the cardinal “8” but the position “8th”), and “months” should have been without “s.” That front-end modifier would have been acceptable, though, in this form, “an eighth-month pregnant woman,” where “month” is in the singular form. But putting the modifier after the noun would have read much better: “a woman who was eight months pregnant.”
Then, since the two fatalities and the casualty were victims of the same lightning bolt, the use of the subordinating conjunction “while” in that sentence is also erroneous because “while” denotes simultaneity of separate events. A more appropriate, logical function word in this case is the preposition “and.”
The corrected lead sentence will then read as follows:
“Two people were killed, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, and another person was injured when they were struck by lightning during a heavy downpour on Tuesday afternoon in Quezon City, police said.”
(2) Manila Bulletin: Subject-verb agreement error
Pesticide use may contaminate environment, says UP scientist
Pesticides may kill pests but it may also contaminate water, infect animals, and pose some health risks.
This was revealed by a professor from the University of the Philippines-Los Baños, on Thursday during the 10th Science Council of Asia Conference, conducted by the Department of Science and Technology-National Research Council of the Philippines (DoST-NRCP).
The grammatical flaw in that lead sentence is, of course, the classic subject-verb agreement error. The singular neuter pronoun “it” should be in the plural form “they” because its antecedent noun is the plural “pesticides.”
That sentence should therefore read as follows:
“Pesticides may kill pests but they may also contaminate water, infect animals, and pose some health risks.”
(3) Manila Bulletin: Wrong choice of verb (“reduced”)
BoC fights corruption by automating transactions
DAVAO CITY – The tainted image of the Bureau of Customs (BoC) would likely be reduced in the coming years as the bureau implements the automated customs transaction environment in several ports of the country.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday afternoon, Customs Commissioner Napoleon L. Morales said the BoC is pinning its hopes on their now-automated transactions as these would reduce human intervention.
The problem with the lead sentence above is its illogical use of the verb phrase “would likely be reduced” to apply to the noun form “tainted image.” Conceptually, a “tainted image” can’t be reduced; it’s only the “taint” in that image that can be reduced. On the other hand, a “tainted image” conceptually can be “cleansed” or perhaps “rehabilitated.”
Grammatically, that sentence should read as follows:
“The taint in the image of the Bureau of Customs (BoC) would likely be reduced in the coming years as the bureau implements the automated customs transaction environment in several ports of the country.”
The phrase “taint in the image,” though, looks and sounds like a very fastidious, almost literary way of saying it. To retain the flavor of the sentence while rectifying its semantics, I would suggest retaining the noun form “tainted image” but changing the verb phrase to, say, “would likely be cleansed” sentence, as follows:
“The tainted image of the Bureau of Customs (BoC) would likely be cleansed in the coming years as the bureau implements the automated customs transaction environment in several ports of the country.”
