Sent in by email by Miss Mae, Forum member (January 16, 2011):Dear Mr. Carillo,
As you know, I’m still working on my English. And as such, I have no right to criticize somebody else’s usage of the global language. But when I saw a local TV network’s advertisement the other day, I really felt something wrong. It bragged about the “concised reporting” of its news and current affairs. But “concise” is an adjective and adjectives do not inflect, right?
I tried to look for a copy of that commercial for your review but was not able to find one. Unfortunately, too, we subscribe to a different cable program so I was not able to make a tape-recording of that TV ad. (I just happened to be in somebody else’s house that day when I saw that ad.)
I’m also aware that your focus is on the English grammar of the daily broadsheets, may it be in our country or overseas. But I still dare to ask you about this since the material in question is a commercial aired internationally. And by our countrymen, for Pete’s sake! Do I stand on a firm grammatical ground on this?
Respectfully,
Miss Mae
My reply to Miss Mae:I’m sorry for this much delayed reply. I overlooked that e-mail of yours because of the heavy volume of e-mails in my Yahoo mailbox in mid-January. Thank you for resending it.
I haven’t seen that in-house TV commercial of GMA 7, but if the voiceover unmistakably bragged about that network’s “concised reporting,” then you stand on firm grammatical ground in saying that something’s wrong with the English grammar of that in-house ad. As you correctly pointed out, the word “concise” is an adjective and adjectives don’t inflect. It’s possible, of course, that the GMA 7 voice talent had simply mispronounced “concise” with the “d”-sound and that the mistake simply went unnoticed by the GMA 7 editors. However, if that TV commercial actually spelled out “concised reporting” onscreen, then we have the smoking gun that the TV copywriter mistakenly thought that “concise” is a verb that can inflect into the past participle “concised” to become a legitimate modifier of the noun “reporting.”
My digital
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary classifies “concise” only as an adjective and as nothing else, and it defines the word as “marked by brevity of expression or statement” and “free from all elaboration and superfluous detail.” The four other dictionaries I checked classify and define “concise” in the same way. We can therefore safely conclude that the contemporary usage of “concise” is indeed only as an adjective and definitely not as a verb.
I must acknowledge, though, that during the 1800s until the early 1900s, the past participle “concised” had been used by some writers to modify nouns, as in the following examples: “concised probation” (1812), “finely concised drug” (1908), “concised with admirable force” (1894), “concised without consent” (1889), and “concised shortness of my style” (1816)
(Literary usage of "Concised"). From then onwards, however, this usage appears to have been completely abandoned. I searched long and hard for citations of “concised” in Google and found that it has virtually vanished from modern usage.
So the big question is this: Can GMA 7 invoke the evidently archaic use of “concised” as a past participle to justify the use of the phrase “concised reporting” in that in-house TV commercial? Frankly, I think GMA 7 will be terribly ill-advised to do so.
