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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!
Three not very serious but instructive lapses in grammar and usage
The good news is that the four major Metro Manila broadsheets have been remarkably free of serious English grammar and usage errors during the last few days. All I could find worthy of a formal critique are these three not-so-serious but instructive grammatical lapses:
(1) Philippine Daily Inquirer: Redundancy
2 RM awardees from China cancel trip
The annual Ramon Magsaysay Awards rites have become another unfortunate casualty of the botched hostage-rescue fiasco.
Two of the three Chinese recipients of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards for 2010, both government bureaucrats, will not be coming to receive the honors on Aug. 31.
The noun phrase “the botched hostage-rescue fiasco” is a glaring redundancy. A “fiasco” is by definition “a complete failure.” The adjective “botched,” on the other hand, means “hopelessly fouled up,” a sense that’s obviously already subsumed by “fiasco.” This makes “botched” redundant in that noun phrase.
So here’s that sentence without the redundancy:
“The annual Ramon Magsaysay Awards rites have become another unfortunate casualty of the hostage-rescue fiasco.”
(2) Manila Bulletin: Grammatically abstruse verb phrase
Army claims more gains against rebels
The Philippine Army on Friday claimed to continue gaining headway in the fight against insurgency with the surrender of 25 New People’s Army (NPA) members, the capture of 15 others, and the killing of five in various operations last month.
The verb phrase “claimed to continue gaining headway” is a grammatically abstruse and extremely awkward construction. Here’s a more precise wording of that phrase that makes the sentence read much more smoothly and effortlessly:
“The Philippine Army on Friday claimed that it had gained further headway in the fight against insurgency with the surrender of 25 New People’s Army (NPA) members, the capture of 15 others, and the killing of five in various operations last month.”
(3) Manila Bulletin: Badly constructed phrase
C.D.O. eyes P200-M traffic system
CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY – The local government unit here plans to borrow as much as P200 million next year to replace the city’s ageing traffic lights, officials said, amid caution from an opposition official that it may strain the city’s finances. Councilor Roger Abaday acknowledged the importance of overhauling the city’s traffic system but urged City Hall to “think twice because this may add up again to the pile of debts accumulated throughout the years.”
The phrasing of “to borrow as much as P200 million next year to replace the city’s ageing traffic lights” is grammatically and semantically flawed. It creates the wrong impression that the amount of “as much as P200 million” will directly replace the city’s ageing traffic lights. The correct sense will come through when we replace the phrase “to replace the city’s ageing traffic lights” with “for the purchase of replacements for the city’s ageing traffic lights.” That sentence will then read much more clearly as follows:
“The local government unit here plans to borrow as much as P200 million next year for the purchase of replacements for the city’s ageing traffic lights, officials said, amid caution from an opposition official that it may strain the city’s finances.”
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RELATED READING:
In a column he wrote for the August 28, 2010 issue of The New York Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, the paper’s public editor, discusses his role as its “scold, scourge, wreaker of cold justice.” He says that the job bears little resemblance to the roles he had previously played as newspaper reporter, columnist, editor, publisher, corporate manager. He sums it up as follows: “The public editor deals with problems in the aftermath. It’s forensic, a kind of journalistic ‘CSI.’”
Read Arthur S. Brisbane’s “Why I Would Do This” in The New York Times now!
