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21
Advice and Dissent / "Did the First Mass historians ever talk to one another?" - Parts 1, 2, and 3
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 25, 2024, 11:08:17 PM »
Advice and Dissent Retrospective:
“DID THE FIRST MASS HISTORIANS EVER TALK TO ONE ANOTHER? - Parts 1, 2, and 3

On the run-up to the coming 503rd anniversary of the very first Holy Mass in the Philippine archipelago that took place on March 31, 1521, the Forum is doing a retrospective of a three-part article, "Did the First Mass historians ever talk to one another?", that I posted on September 16 and 23 and October 27, 2021. The article was in reply to a question raised in an e-mail sent to me by Forum member Miss Mae in early September that same year.

Here's Miss Mae's question: “I wonder if Maximilianus Translyvanus had asked for Antonio Pigafetta’s permission when he wrote a version of the narrative. The problem started with him. He may be a royal courtier and secretary to the king but wasn’t verifying one of his responsibilities? This historical mistake must also be included in the profile of Giovanni Battista Ramusio. I have grown up believing that the First Mass happened in Limasawa and a classmate or two of mine were marked wrong because they didn’t get the spelling of the place correctly.”

She raised that question shortly after the Forum wrapped up on August 18, 2021 its 21-part series on the ages-long controversy over where the first Holy Mass in the Philippines was actually celebrated--was it in the island of Mazaua as recorded in the first-hand account of Antonio Pigafetta, the official chronicler of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition to the Philippine archipelago; or in the island of Limasawa in the Visayas that the Church Historians Association of the Philippines (CHAP) and the pro-Limasawans, against all evidence, have aggressively defended over the years and succeeded in getting officially recognized as the historically correct site of that first Holy Mass?


All those interested are invited to once again review with an open mind the indubitable evidence and historical accounts as well as the pertinent geographical and navigational information regarding this momentous event in Philippine history. 

SUGGESTED READING SEQUENCE OF THE FORUM POSTINGS:
1. "Did the First Mass historians ever talk to one another?"
    Part 1 - https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8451.0
    Part 2 - https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8453.0
    Part 3 - https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8458.0

2. "New history book asserts that the lost island of Mazaua is the true site of the first Holy Mass in the Philippines" 
      https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8315.0

3. "Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years" - Parts 1 to 21
     https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8348.0 ...
     https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8435.0 (Conclusion)
22
Site Announcements / Playlist Update (February 17 - 23, 2024) for the Forum Gateway on Facebook
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 21, 2024, 04:03:33 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR FEBRUARY 17 - 23, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essays by Joe Carillo: “Preventing the word ‘only‘ from going haywire”


                                         
                                     
2. You Asked Me This Question: “What's the correct tense for reporting verbs in reported speech?”




3. Use and Misuse: “A wide-raging potpourri of bad English aired in the Forum 14 years ago”





4. Getting to Know English: “The great importance of parallelism in good writing”




5. Badly Written, Badly Spoken: “Thrown off by the highly officious and bureaucratic ‘regards’ idioms”




6. Essays by Jose Carillo Retrospective: “Dealing with questionable or downright wrong legalese,” Parts 1-3




7. My Media English Watch Retrospective: “Usage of the phrase ‘on the ground’ in official circles getting out of hand”




8. Advice and Dissent: “Did the historians who wrote books about the First Holy Mass celebrated in the Phillippines over 500 years ago ever consult one another precisely where in the archipelago it was celebrated?” - Parts 1-3





9. Language Humor at Its Finest: “Piecès de résistance in Hollywood moviemaking”




10. Notable Works By Our Very Own: “When books and life intersect” by Howie Severino, GMA-7




11. Your Thoughts Exactly: "A Prayer to St. Jude" by Angel Casillan, Forum Contributor



   
12. Readings in Language: “The triumph of English over Babel to become the language of science“




13. Time Out From English Grammar: “Sandro Botticelli's intricate paintings of woman's hair“




14. Essay by Jose Carillo Retrospective: “The grammar of manners”




15. The Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Oodles of reasons to love (or hate) the Philippines!“





23
Getting to Know English / “Preventing the word ‘only’ from going haywire”
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 21, 2024, 09:03:05 AM »
Among nonnative English speakers, easily the most movable and most easily misplaced modifier is the word “only.” In any of its three roles as adjective, adverb, or conjunction, “only” can flit effortlessly from place to place, creating as many meanings as the number of positions it perches upon in the sentence. It is, in a word, the ultimate floating quantifier, either intensifying or diminishing the semantic degree of the nouns or verbs it modifies, at times neatly linking one clause to another of its kind, but in the process baffling linguists and students of the language for the last 200 years.

                   IMAGE CREDIT: WIKIHOW
THE WORD “ONLY” CREATES AS MANY MEANINGS AS THE POSITIONS
IT TAKES IN A SENTENCE, MAKING IT A VERY CONFUSING MODIFIER


Consider, for instance, the different meanings the word “only” creates by virtue of the five positions it takes in the following sentences:

   “Only I think Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“It’s only I that think Jennifer belongs to this league.”)

   “I only think Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“That’s the only thought I have at the moment: that Jennifer belongs to
        this league.”)

   “I think only Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“This is what I think: only Jennifer belongs to this league and no one else
        around here.”

   “I think Jennifer belongs only to this league.” (“This is what I think: Jennifer belongs only to this league and to no other.”)

   “I think Jennifer belongs to this league only.” (“This is what I think: it is only to this league that Jennifer rightfully
        belongs.”)

Then, after these five adjectival or adverbial roles, consider now how “only” works as a conjunction:

   In the role of “but”: “You may vote anyone you like, only vote wisely.”

   In the role of “yet”: “Jennifer looks lovely, only she’s already very much married.”

   In the role of “except” or “were it not that”: “I’d like to bring Jennifer to Baguio, only that she might enjoy the place so much
        and stay there the whole summer.”

Even without its role as a conjunctive, however, “only” would already be capable of creating so much ambiguity and semantic mischief if we are not careful. For instance, when describing a situation when we wanted to talk to a manager but only got as far as talking to his secretary, we probably would say “I saw only his secretary” or “I only saw his secretary,” either of which would adequately convey what happened. Then take note that a rather stilted way to say it, “I saw his secretary only,” even more faithfully describes what happened. Even so, the ambiguity remains.

The situation isn’t that bad in spoken usage, where “only” can be floated more freely without creating ambiguity. This is because a stronger stress can always be given to the word that the speaker wants “only” to modify, thus clearly establishing a clear intent and semantic linkage. We can see how this speech mechanism operates in the following spoken constructions, where the stressed words are shown in all-capital letters:

   “I only saw HIS SECRETARY.” (“I saw nobody else.”)

   “I only SAW his secretary.” (“Yes, I did see her, but I didn’t speak to her.”)   

Taking into account the pitfalls in using “only” as a floating modifier in written prose, language experts have come up with the following recommendation— to be safe, place “only” immediately before the phrase we want it to modify. This means that in the office situation we described earlier, for instance, the safest—but not necessarily the best-written construction to describe what happened is the first version: “I saw only his secretary.” With “only” coming right before the noun phrase it modifies, “his secretary,” the construction poses the least danger of ambiguity. When spoken, however, the most natural and most felicitous version is obviously this other one: “I only saw his secretary.” It’s much closer to the rhythm of speech, and it will be foolhardy for us to tinker with it simply to conform to the norms for edited or more formal prose.

For sure, there will be situations when written and spoken prose will clash head-on as to where to position “only” in a sentence. When this happens, we have to take recourse to what linguists call disambiguating qualifiers, or additional statements designed to clarify our meaning and eliminate ambiguity. This was the purpose of the parenthetical statements that accompanied the five “only”-usage examples that we took up earlier.

Those statements, of course, are not real disambiguating qualifiers because they are not part and parcel of the sentences themselves. A true disambiguating qualifier is integral to the statement, and already anticipates the ambiguity created when the main statement uses “only” as a floating quantifier. A good example is this: “I think only Jennifer belongs to this league; all the others simply fall short of the stringent requirements.”

In written prose, that use of the disambiguating qualifier “all the others simply fall short of the stringent requirements” is actually the surest, most elegant way of preventing the “only”-modified statement from going haywire.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
When the word “only” goes haywire

This essay appeared as Chapter 118 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

(Next: When educators befuddle with their English)          February 29, 2024                                                                                              

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
24
Site Announcements / The Forum's Intensive 6-Part Review of the 3 Major Types of English Connectives
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 19, 2024, 08:32:07 PM »
February 19, 2024, 8:00 P.M. Manila Time

Dear Forum Member and Friend,

The Forum has put together an intensive six-part review of the three major types of grammar connectives—the coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, and conjunctive adverbs—so you can more confidently and clearly establish as well as better navigate the sense and logic of what you are writing or talking about.




The six-part intensive review consists of the following:

Part 1 - THE COORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS
                https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8204.0
           The 7 “fanboys”—“and,” ‘nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so”—are the most basic conjunctions for creating what’s known as a
                compound element, which can be a compound subject, compound predicate, or compound sentence.

Part 2 - THE SUBORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS
           https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8206.0
           The 32 subordinating conjunctions are the connectives for functionally linking a dependent idea to the independent or main 
                idea of the sentence.

Part 3 - THE CONJUNCTIVE ADVERBS
                https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8208.0
                The 51 most common conjunctive adverbs more strongly establish the logical relationship and provide transition between two
                independent clauses, across sentence boundaries, or between paragraphs.

Part 4 - MASTERY OF THE CONNECTIVES IS A MAJOR KEY TO BETTER ENGLISH 
                https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8209.0   
                The coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, and conjunctive adverbs are the primary logical operators of the
                English language.

Part 5– THE CHOICE OF CONNECTIVES IS CRUCIAL TO ESTABLISHING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IDEAS IN DIFFERENT
                CLAUSES
                https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8212.0
                The three major types of connectives explicitly signal the logical relations between clauses, between sentences, and between
                or across sentences and paragraphs.

Part 6 - CHOOSING THE RIGHT CONNECTIVES FOR OUR IDEAS - 1 and 2
                https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8215.0
                Conjunctive adverbs provide a much more forceful transition than their equivalent coordinating conjunctions, and the choice
                between them largely sets the tone or language register of your writing or speech.

With this intensive six-part review, you definitely can become much more confident in using the three primary connectives for conveying the sense and logic of your written and spoken English.

You can directly access this intensive six-part review of the Englush connectives from the Homepage of Jose Carillo's English Forum by simply clicking this link: https://josecarilloforum.com/.

With my best wishes,
Joe Carillo
25
Site Announcements / Playlist Update (February 10 - 16, 2024) for the Forum Gateway on Facebook
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 14, 2024, 02:26:54 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR FEBRUARY 10 - 16, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essays by Joe Carillo: “How to form our negative sentences correctly”


                                         
                                     
2. Use and Misuse: “Avoiding awful misuses of the English possessive”




3. Going Deeper Into Language: “Subordinate clauses don't always play second fiddle to main clauses”




4. Use and Misuse: “Why legal documents are not in plain and simple English”

           


5. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “The pause that refreshes”




6. Advocacy: “Bill Gates advocates environment-friendly subtitutes for animal fats in our food intake”




7. Your Thoughts Exactly: “The two hemispheres of me,” personal essay by Antonio Calipjo Go, Forum Contributor]




8. Essays by Joe Carillo: “The germ of a great idea remembered”




9. Getting to Know English Better: “Why some intransitive verbs appear to take an object”





10. Language Humor at Its Finest: “A great stand-up comic’s thoughts about life and sundry things”




11. The Forum Lounge: “'Pun-ography' is wordplay to make you smile"



   
12. Time Out From English Grammar: “Even before the Enlightenment, Shakespeare already embraced science in his plays“




13. Advice and Dissent: “The Middle Ages weren’t just a time of long religious delirium and hysteria“




14. Students’ Sounding Board: “Dropping the introductory word 'that' in indirect speech”




15. Readings in Language: “Travails with learning just a smattering of Latin” with a posting by Tonybau, Forum Member and Contributor





26
Advocacies / Bill Gates advocates environment-friendly subtitutes for animal fat in our diet
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 14, 2024, 01:09:22 PM »
In Bill Gates' latest GatesNotes blog yesterday (Febrary 13), "I’m making big bets on novel fats and oils," the Microsoft founder and entrepreneur makes a strong advocacy for the commercial development of environment-friendly substitutes for animal fats and oils in the human food intake.

He himself admits his fondness for cheeseburgers but wishes this weren't the case considering the impact on the environment of their high animal fat content: "It's what gives so many foods their richness, juiciness, meltability, unique 'mouthfeel' and overall flavor. It’s what distinguishes butter from margarine, dairy ice cream from a plant-based frozen dessert, and a great burger from one made of soy protein or peas.


But Bill Gates says that this high consumption of food with high animal fat content is unfortunately a disaster for the Earth's climate: "Each year, the world emits 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases—and the production of fats and oils from animals and plants makes up seven percent of that. To combat climate change, we need to get the number to zero."

The course of action he is pursuing: "Find new ways of generating the same fat molecules found in animal products, but without greenhouse gas emissions, animal suffering, or dangerous chemicals. And they have to be affordable for everyone. It might sound like a pipe dream, but a company called Savor (which I’m invested in) is in the process of doing it... The result [of Savor's development efforts] is real fat molecules like the ones we get from milk, cheese, beef, and vegetable oils. [But] the process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does. And most important, it tastes really good—like the real thing, because chemically it is."

Read Bill Gates' "Greasy—and good for the planet" blog in full by clicking this link!

RELATED EARLIER READING IN THE FORUM:
Bill Gates funds developer of feed additive that reduces cow burps and farts


27
Getting to Know English / How to form our negative sentences correctly
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 14, 2024, 08:53:11 AM »
Let’s revisit the very important matter of negation in English.

We all know that the adjective “no”—as do its semantic cousins “not” and “never”—undermines and negates every single thought and idea to which it latches on: “No, I don’t like you.” “No, I have never loved you.” Doubtless the most subversive single word in English, “no” when placed right before an assertion negates it with brutal efficiency: “No parking.” “No swerving.” “No overloading.” “No election cheating.”

   
And when the negating job has to be done within a statement, “no” often takes the form of “not,” commanders the auxiliary verb “do” (in the required tense) and positions itself right between it and the action verb’s bare infinitive form: “The woman did not resist.” “The felon did not hesitate.” “The three computer engineers did not migrate.”

The pattern of negation is slightly different in the perfect tenses. The adverb “not” simply inserts itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, which remains in the past participle form even as the negation is consummated: “The woman has driven.” “The woman has not driven.” Always, “not” positions itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb.

In contrast to the other “no” variants, the word “never” is a movable negator, certainly much more versatile than “not.” Look at how freely it positions itself: “That woman never drives.” “Never does the woman drive.” “The woman has never driven.” “Never has the woman driven.” “The woman never has driven.”

The adjective “no,” of course, can routinely negate any element by denoting its absence, contradiction, denial, or refusal: “Under no circumstances will Claudia’s offer be accepted.” “I see no sign of reconciliation.” The adverbs “not” and “never” work in much the same way: “Not a single drop of rain fell last summer.” “She will always be a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

But there’s one major caveat on “not”: it’s wrong to use it in statements that have an “all…not” form (to mean “to the degree expected”). Take this sentence: “Not all of the women in the district did not vote for the lone female candidate.” That sentence is semantically problematic and confusing; it could be interpreted that “Some of the women did not vote for the lone female candidate,” or that “None of the women voted for the lone female candidate.”

Better to remove the ambiguity by fine-tuning the negation to yield the desired meaning. The first option: “Not all of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.” The second option: “None of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.”   

The same caveat should be observed by not using “not” with the adjective “every,” as in this ambiguous sentence: “Every candidate did not meet the voters’ expectations.” Better: “None of the candidates met the voters’ expectations.” “All of the candidates failed to meet the voters’ expectations.”

Apart from using “no,” “not,” and “never,” we can also use the lexical semantics of negation and affixal negation to reverse the sense of things. Lexical negation is simply the negative structuring of sentences by using words with negative denotations, such as “neither,” “nor,” “rarely,” “hardly,” and “seldom.” Affixal negation, on the other hand, negates positive words through the use of the affixes “un-”, “im-”/“in-”/“il-”, “dis-”, “de-”, and “-less,” as in “unnecessary,” “imperfect,” “ineffective,” “illegal,” “disregard,” “decamp,” and “useless.”

When using these negative affixes, however, we must firmly keep in mind to drop the “no,” “not,” or “never” in the sentence if our true intention is to negate the statement. Failure to do so will result in a grammatically incorrect double negative. “It is not illegal to steal,” for instance, will mean exactly its opposite, “It is legal to steal”—with all its dire consequences to civilized society.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
How to form our negative sentences correctly

This essay appeared as Chapter 151 of  my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

(Next: When the word “only” goes haywire)          February 22, 2024                                                                                              

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
28
Site Announcements / February 2024 roundup of 12 major perplexing English grammar aspects
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 12, 2024, 10:25:12 AM »
February 12, 2024

Dear Forum Member and Friend,

For its regular monthly edition this February, Jose Carillo's English Forum presents a roundup of 12 of my major essays over the years on the most challenging aspects of English grammar. I strongly suggest that you review them thoroughly to fortify your proficiency in both written and spoken English.


The 12 essays that were posted in the Forum from 2003 onwards are as follows:

1. Dealing with those baffling subject-verb disagreements
2. When notional agreement prevails over plain grammatical agreement
3. Coping with the vexing inverted syntax of passive-voice sentences
4. Fused sentences indicate failure to grammatically link ideas
5. Common pitfalls when a pronoun and noun form a compound subject
6. Dealing with sentence constructions that seem to defy grammar rules
7. Shedding off the active-voice straitjacket from our written and spoken English
8. So which should we use: a gerund, a full infinitive, or a bare infinitive?
9. An effective tool for whittling down complex sentences into simple ones
10. Grappling with the grammar of the indefinite pronouns
11. How to avoid semantic bedlam in the usage of the word "only"
12. The pronoun “none” can mean either “not one” or “not any”

You will  be able to access all these 12 essays directly from the Homepage of Jose Carillo's English Forum. Simply click this link: https://josecarilloforum.com/.

Please don't hesitate to send to the Forum (jcarilloforum@gmail.com) comments, suggestions, or clarificatory questions regarding the grammar topics taken up in these essays. I will make every effort to answer them in the discussion board where each particular essay is posted.

With my best wishes,
Joe Carillo
29
Site Announcements / Playlist Update (February 3 - 9, 2024) for the Forum Gateway on Facebook
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 06, 2024, 01:10:24 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR FEBRUARY 3 - 9, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essays by Joe Carillo: “Tales of perdition and destruction”

                                         
                                     
2. Getting to Know English: “A devilishly equivocal English grammar question”




3. Going Deeper Into Language: “When faulty logic overrides good grammar and semantics”




4. Students’ Sounding Board: "Differentiating the use of ‘than’ and ‘than that of’"




5. Advice and Dissent “Looking deeply into religious belief as a problem in international affairs”




6. Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Even in the TV reality-show era, our ticket to fame is really making things”




7. Views and Commentaries: “Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love” by Maximo Tumbali, Forum Contributor




8. Your Thoughts Exactly: “One final autumn: A Retrospective” by Fred Natividad, Forum Contributor




9. Language Humor at Its Finest: “20 highbrow jokes to wrack our brains and tickle our funnybones”




10. You Asked Me This Question: “Differentiation between misinformation and disinformation”



   
11. Students’ Sounding Board Retrospective: "Confusion over the use of ‘due to’ and ‘owing to’”




12. Advice and Dissent Retrlospective: “To survive, democracy needs to find a way to break its confidence trap”




13. Readings in Language: “Bridging the disconnect between simplistic and real, live English”




14. My Media English Watch: “Let’s be firm on whether the name ‘Philippines’ is singular or plural”




15. The Forum Lounge: U.S. radio-TV writer Andy Rooney's “33 golden nuggets of inspiration”





30
Essays by Joe Carillo / Tales of perdition and destruction
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 06, 2024, 07:38:37 AM »
Our country’s politically disturbing situation today has impelled me to hark back to this cautionary essay that I wrote in the early 2000s bewailing our tendency as a people “to consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but terribly bad decisions that make life so miserable for many of us.”

In the engineering discipline there’s this thing they call the strength of materials, or the ability of substances to withstand stress and strain. The maximum stress a material can sustain and still be able to return to its original form is called the elastic limit, and engineers designing structures—bridges and buildings, for instance—savagely subject them to forces beyond their ultimate strengths. For safety’s sake, they have models of the structures “tested to destruction.”

The closest popular expression of this that I can think of is the English idiomatic expression “the last straw that broke the camel’s back.” The allusion is, of course, not only to the danger of overloading beasts of burden but also to the perils of blind, unconditional trust in the capacity of things and people to perform beyond their natural, God-given limits. The folly of such behavior is captured chillingly in this haunting English lullaby familiar to most of us:

Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Down will come baby, cradle, and all. 

That humorous English poet-mathematical logician Lewis Carroll (1832-1868) also captured this logic of destruction in the following rhyme about the fallen Humpty Dumpty’s fate in Alice in Wonderland:

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

     
                                          IMAGE CREDITS: (LEFT) FLORENCE MARY ANDERSON, PINTEREST.COM,  (RIGHT) PINTEREST.COM)

Literature and history are, in fact, replete with accounts of tragedies resulting from a failure to recognize the limits to the strength of materials. For instance, in the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey by the American playwright-novelist Thornton Wilder ((1897-1975), five apparently morally faultless people on religious pilgrimage plunge to their death when a suspension bridge over a deep canyon snaps. Afterwards, a cleric investigates if there was anything bad or evil the victims had done in their lives for them to deserve such apparently senseless deaths.

Little attention was given to the state of the bridging materials and to their possible deterioration over time, nor to the possibility that the victims might have been, say, excessively overweight, that they may have clustered too close to one another at a weak spot, or that they might have gone into such religious frenzies—as in the Mardi Gras or our very own Ati-Atihan—for the bridge to snap in sympathetic vibration. Any of these circumstances might have been “the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” so to speak.

                                           IMAGE CREDIT: ELITEREADERS.COM

A parallel incident with similar religious overtones happened in Naga City in the Philippines way back in September of 1972. Right after a fluvial procession in honor of the Bicol Region’s religious patroness, Our Lady of Peñafrancia, had passed underneath an old wooden bridge over the Bicol River, the bridge collapsed. Several dozen devotees and onlookers, most of them boys and girls, were crushed to death or drowned.

To my knowledge, no religious investigation was done to connect their tragic fate to possible moral or reprehensible misdeeds in their life, as was done by the cleric who investigated “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” tragedy. However, just a few hours after the Bicol River bridge collapsed, I personally went to the scene and this was what I saw—the wooden rafters and railings were severely rotted, split, or cracked after years of exposure to sun, wind, rain, and termites. To my mind, there was no way the badly decayed wood could have held the weight of those hundreds of people jostling one another in religious frenzy on the bridge or hanging from its rafters. The faith of the devotees was incredibly strong, but the materials of the bridge simply had become so weak for carry their mortal weight.

In shipping as well, even the “battleship quality” steel of the ocean liner RMS Titanic fractured and broke that fateful night on April 14, 1912 when the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, killing over 1,500 passengers aboard. The ship’s hull, although made of what was touted as the best plain carbon ship-plate material available during the time, was damaged by the iceberg, and the rivet heads in the areas of contact simply popped off because of the tremendous forces created by the collision. This caused several seams in the hull to open up, flooding the ship’s watertight compartments. Because of their ductility, the rivets normally should have deformed first before failing, but according to some strength of materials analysts who examined materials from the wreckage many years later, they must have become so brittle in below-freezing water temperature. Their safety factor was thus breached and they failed.

As in these tales of perdition and destruction, the danger to all of us is that we have been so mercilessly conditioned by our contemporary culture, religion, and media to believe that everything is possible. We hardly put any safety factor in our personal, social, and political affairs. We thrive and even revel in blind faith and wishful thinking. We observe no minimum nor maximum measures, no standards, no limits to anything—be it a dream, a plan, a product, a support system, a mode of conveyance, an advocacy, or a vote or aspiration to an elective post. In sum, we don’t think logically and rationally. We consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Tales of perdition and destruction

This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 151 in my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

RELATED RECENT TRAGEDY (February 14,2024):
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