Sometime last month, I came across this peculiar headline in the online news website of a local TV network (italicization mine): “Novice cop accidentally shoots dead roommate in Makati.” What struck me about this bit of news was, of course, the utter improbability of it all—something worthy of Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” or some other compendium of the bizarre. For whether cop or noncop, and whether the deed was accidental or intentional, who in his right mind would shoot an already dead person who happens to be his very own roommate? As it turned out, though, the victim was still alive when he was shot. The news report itself said so later in the story: “A new police recruit found himself in hot water* after his service firearm accidentally went off and killed his roommate in Makati City Monday night.”

The culprit behind that misleading news headline is, of course, the improper positioning of the adjective “dead” in the sentence. By sandwiching “dead” between the verb “shoots” and the noun “roommate,” the headline writer conveyed the wrong idea that the roommate was already dead before he was shot. This was because, as what sometimes happens in adjective misuse, the headline writer neglected to take logic and chronology into account in positioning the adjective. Indeed, a more logical position for that adjective—even if the position looks suspicious and sounds questionable itself—is after the noun “roommate,” as in this version: “Novice Makati cop accidentally shoots roommate dead.”

Having been a newspaper journalist myself, however, I know only too well that some news editors and many readers would also frown on that version. To them, the sentence “Novice Makati cop accidentally shoots roommate dead” would be as inexplicably difficult to analyze and defend grammatically as this other alternative, “Novice Makati cop accidentally shoots roommate to death.” They would argue that the former means almost the same thing as the original construction, while the latter creates the false impression that the shooting was done repeatedly until the victim was surely dead.

In fact, I think one of the very few constructions of that headline that could override all objections from the grammar, semantic, and logic standpoints is the following rewrite, which I admittedly arrived at after so many tries: “Novice Makati cop kills roommate in accidental shooting.”

In any case, we need to make ourselves much better equipped to handle adjective placement dilemmas like this by clearly understanding how to position adjectives properly in the English language. To get started, let’s first recall that as a rule, adjectives normally take either of two positions in a sentence: immediately before a noun, or after the main verb in a sentence.

An adjective that precedes the noun it modifies is called an attributive adjective, as the ones used in the following sentences: “Excellent weather is forecast for this weekend.” “The explorers found ancient drawings in the cave.” “We were amazed by his sharp mind.”

On the other hand, an adjective that comes right after the main verb in a sentence is called a predicate adjective, as the ones used in the following sentences: “The weather forecast for this weekend is excellent.” “To the explorers, the cave drawings appeared ancient.” “Despite great fatigue, the professor’s mind remained sharp.”

Note that a predicate adjective is always separated by a verb from the noun it modifies, and that verb is always a linking verb, like “is” (the singular present tense form of “be”), “appeared,” and “remained” in the predicate-adjective-using sentences above. Remember now that a linking verb, unlike, say, the action verb “jump,” doesn’t denote action; it simply connects a subject to additional information about itself.

It would be so simple to use adjectives if they can take only the two normal positions described above, but this, unfortunately, isn’t the case in practice. They can sometimes take various other positions in a sentence—and this is why they can sometimes get misplaced and wreak semantic havoc on sentences.

Here are those other positions in a sentence that can be taken by adjectives:

When they form part of a reduced relative clause, some adjectives can take a position immediately after a noun. Recall now that a relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is introduced by a relative pronoun such as “who,” “that,” and “which,” as in this sentence: “Please summon all the managers who are concerned.” Here, the relative clause “who are concerned” can be reduced by dropping the words “who are,” thus making the adjective “concerned” immediately follow the noun “managers”: “Please summon all the managers concerned.” (We don’t say, “Please summon all the concerned managers,” a form that uses “concerned” as an attributive adjective.)

Another example is when we reduce the relative clause “that is available” in the sentence “Please use all the money that is available.” This makes the adjective “available” immediately follow the noun “money”: “Please use all the money available.” (We don’t normally say, “Please use all the available money.”)

When an adjective modifies an indefinite pronoun, the adjective comes after the pronoun. This rule, which should already be second nature to all of us, applies to the indefinite pronouns “something,” “someone,” “somebody,” “somewhere,” “everyone,” “everybody,” “everything,” “anybody,” and “nobody”—and the adjective placement can’t be done in any other way. Examples: “Something wonderful happened to me last night.” “They went somewhere private.” “Nobody hungry wasn’t given the free meal.”

Note that indefinite pronouns immediately followed by an adjective are actually also reduced relative clauses; “something wonderful,” for instance, is the reduced form of the phrase “something that was wonderful” in the sentence “Something that was wonderful happened to me last night.”

Certain adjectives that describe size or age immediately follow a noun that denotes a unit of measurement. All of us should be thoroughly familiar with this usage, which applies to such sentences as “The Eiffel Tower is 325 meters high,” where the adjective “high” follows the noun form “325 meters”; and to such sentences as “The boxing champion is 29 years old,” where the adjective “old” follows the noun form “29 years.”

In some cases, adjectives can be placed after the noun for emphasis. Just two examples should suffice: “It was a mistake, plain and simple.” “They do all jobs, big and small.”               
Some adjectives can be positioned either before or after a noun, but the position affects their meaning. In the sentence “The responsible professors talked to the dean about the problem,” for instance, the noun phrase “the responsible professors” means “the professors who are trustworthy.” In contrast, in “The professors responsible talked to the dean about the problem,” the noun phrase “the professors responsible” means “the professors who are to blame for something.”

Postpositive or post-nominal adjectives always come after the noun they modify. These are adjectives like “royal” in “battle royal” (“The five friends fought and got themselves into a battle royal.”), “apparent” in “heir apparent” (“The heir apparent to the political dynasty refused to run for prime minister.”), “politic” in “body politic” (“The strongman’s reign was anathema to the body politic.”), and “immemorial” in “time immemorial” (The pyramids of Egypt have been there since time immemorial.”).

There are but a few postpositive adjectives in English—they are mostly name suffixes (like “incarnate” in “the devil incarnate”) and traditional expressions (like “aplenty” in “food aplenty”)—but it’s important to recognize them to avoid the embarrassment of misplacing them in our sentences. (December 6 and 12, 2009)

*I find the “found himself in hot water” metaphor in this news story bizarre, terribly inappropriate, and self-indulgent on the part of the reporter or editor. It gives the wrong impression that the gunshot must have also punctured a hot-water pipe, which then spung a leak on the gunman. This is language that I think should be absolutely avoided in journalism, but let’s reserve discussion of this for some other day. Your own thoughts about this would be most welcome, of course.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, December 6 and 12, 2009 issues © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that “with all due respect” ranked third and “to be (completely) honest (with you)” fourth in a 1994 worldwide survey among the most irritating phrases in the English language.¹ These two phrases are obviously battered from severe overuse, and the Plain English Campaign survey of 5,000 respondents in 70 countries simply reflected this fact.

We can get an even clearer picture of this overuse by skimming the written and spoken usage of these two phrases that have made it to the World Wide Web. In a check I made with Google at about this time in 2005, there were 1,720,000 hits for “with all due respect” and 592,000 hits for “to be honest with you” (this dropped to 14,700 hits for usage that adds “completely” to the phrase).² There is compelling evidence on the Web that lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, religious leaders, and broadcast talk-show hosts and guests are writing and uttering these two phrases so indiscriminately as to make them downright annoying to their readers or listeners.

In the Philippines, of course, we know very well that “with all due respect” is the preferred prefatory phrase of lawyers and bureaucrats—a disconcerting form of legalese or bureau­cratese—when contradicting someone of higher authority or social station or when about to present an offensive statement. Take the following court pleading: “With all due respect [italicization mine], the prosecution submits that the initial presentation of defense evidence in the plunder case may push through on 30 June 2004 notwithstanding the pendency of incidents, if any, before the Honorable Court…” The phrase can grate on the layman’s ears, but as a code of lawyerly manners or politesse, it helps temper the unpleasantness of the typically adversarial language used in court. Also, its use in judicial proceedings has been hallowed by time, so it would be foolhardy to ask lawyers to consider stripping it from their language.

But using “with all due respect” could be very annoying or insulting when the phrase is appropriated by non-lawyers addressing fellow laymen, as in this complaint by a frustrated advocate: “Why is the government not paying attention? With all due respect [italicization mine], surely an economist like yourself can see the potential of such an innovation that could turn the Philippines into a superpower overnight.” Or in this remark by a feminist: “With all due respect [italicization mine], I do not know the level of pain that fathers go through after having his wife and the courts take his children away.” Here, “with all due respect” appears not to serve any useful purpose; in fact, omitting it makes the statement better-sounding and more forceful.

As to the phrase “to be (completely) honest (with you),” prefacing statements with it is often harmless in intimate or private conversations, but it can be very annoying when done publicly by politicians, public officials, and TV or radio talk-show hosts and guests. Consider the following remark by a public official in a TV interview in early 2005: “It’s [the bill’s] a little convoluted. To be honest with you [italicization mine], I could not sufficiently explain it at this point. But what was approved in principle last night is that there will be no pass-on insofar as the household consumers are concerned.” Or this remark by an information-systems sales manager in a newspaper interview: “[The competitor] can do what they want. And we don’t worry about market share. To be honest with you [italicization mine], it doesn’t make any difference to a customer.”

Speakers who habitually use “to be honest with you” obviously don’t realize it, but prefacing a statement with this phrase doesn’t enhance but actually detracts from the credibility of the statement. This is because although unintended, the phrase leads to the sneaking suspicion that the speaker is honest only in that particular instance and is generally dishonest at other times. And qualifying that phrase with “completely” only makes that impression stronger. In contrast, pruning out “to be honest with you” from such statements, or perhaps replacing it with the more concise “frankly,” can make the statements much more pleasant and convincing. 

The Plain English Campaign survey pinpointed 32 other very irritating English phrases, among them “24/7” (for “non-stop”) and such business and academic buzzwords as “address the issue,” “ballpark figure,” and “thinking outside the box,” but we need not discuss them in detail here. They are not that endemic in the Philippines anyway, and taking them up might only encourage the cliché fanciers in our midst to mindlessly spread their use through the broadcast media.³ (October 31, 2005)
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 31, 2005 issue © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

¹The most irritating phrase as determined by the Plain English Campaign survey in 1994 was, of course, “at the end of the day,” with “at this moment in time” as first runner-up. For the details, click this link to my essay “Doing battle with the most irritating phrases in English” that I posted earlier in the Forum.

²Here, as reported by Google, is an update of the usage incidence of these clichés as of October 28, 2010 vs. the October 2005 figures: “with all due respect,” 3,890,000 hits vs. 1,720,000; “to be honest with you,” 2,210,000 vs. 592,000; and “to be completely honest with you,” 42,000 vs. 902,000. This is a worrisome growth in the usage of these irritating clichés.

³I’ll admit that I was too optimistic at the time that “24/7,” “address the issue,” “ballpark figure,” and “thinking outside the box” won’t attain annoying cliché status in the Philippines. However, we all know how indiscriminately these expressions have since been bandied about in academe, the corporate world, the mass media, and, of course, the web. We really need to firm up our individual resolve not to abet the use of these irritating clichés.

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