On any given day and in practically all of the Metro Manila broadsheets, it’s usually in the sports pages that I find the best-written, most interesting, and most readable stories. Of course, many sports writers often take so many liberties with their verbs and idioms to the point of downright exaggeration, but they can often carry out their harmless semantic transgressions with grammatically flawless chutzpah. For instance, many readers (and that includes me) don’t really mind if, say, a sports writer describes the New Zealand softball team as “gunning for its fourth consecutive crown and first overall” against the Philippine team—when, in fact, no guns and no shooting are involved at all in softball and the winner doesn’t really get crowned but only gets a trophy or even a paltry pennant. Lofty, soaring figurative language is, after all, par for the course—or is it “par for the bourse”?—in sports writing, so there’s really no point in faulting sports writers for their often overly profuse usage of their stock in trade.
But I thought that editors should draw the line when the sports writer makes a seriously flawed and rickety sentence construction like the one below, which I quote verbatim from the sports page of a recent issue of one of the major broadsheets. Look at it:
“SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—The Philippine contingent found an unlikely savior in a California migrant no taller than a regular putter in Arlene Salvador after the breaks went against three of its title-chasing bets Thursday (Friday in Manila) at the Callaway Junior World golf championship here.”
Not being familiar with the names of the Filipino golf players, I thought after my first reading of that sentence that “Arlene Salvador” was a town or city in South America, and that the “regular putter” referred to in the sentence hails from that faraway place. And as you yourself must have felt when you read it, that sentence seemed to have several other mind-bending but hard-to-describe peculiarities besides.
FILIPINA MIGRANT ARLENE SALVADOR, JUNIOR GOLFER IN CALIFORNIA
It turns out, of course, that Arlene Salvador is our very own 16-year-old golf hopeful whose sterling performance won the game for the Philippine team. But why had you and I gotten the wrong impression—and an acute sense of discomfort—from reading that sentence to begin with?
MY CRITIQUE AND SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS:Here’s that problematic sentence again:
“SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—The Philippine contingent found an unlikely savior in a California migrant no taller than a regular putter in Arlene Salvador after the breaks went against three of its title-chasing bets Thursday (Friday in Manila) at the Callaway Junior World golf championship here.”
On inspection, I found that the sports writer had used as the object of the verb “found” a 16-word noun phrase, “an unlikely savior in a California migrant no taller than a regular putter in Arlene Salvador,” whose nominal subject—“Arlene Salvador”—is identified only at the very tail end of the phrase. Even worse, that nominal subject is not even presented as such but as part of another prepositional phrase, “in Arlene Salvador.” The result is a case of the cart being placed ahead of the horse, so to speak, or, in grammatical terms, an ill-phrased and badly misplaced modifier.
The problem could have been easily avoided, of course, had the nominal subject of that noun phrase, “Arlene Salvador,” been placed at the very beginning of that prepositional phrase. That would have made it clear to the reader at the outset precisely what noun was being modified by the phrase “an unlikely savior in a California migrant no taller than a regular putter.”
Look what happens when we do that:
“SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—The Philippine contingent found an unlikely savior
in Arlene Salvador, a California migrant no taller than a regular putter, after the breaks went against three of its title-chasing bets Thursday (Friday in Manila) at the Callaway Junior World golf championship here.”
In this new sentence construction, it’s now very clear that the verb “found” is acting on “Arlene Salvador” as the object of the preposition “in,” and that “a California migrant no taller than a regular putter” is an appositive phrase modifying--or describing--“Arlene Salvador.” This simpler construction not only puts the misplaced prepositional phrase where it should be but also automatically irons out the other subtle but nevertheless bothersome semantic kinks of the original construction.
To avoid misplaced modifiers of this kind, we need to always remember this rule of thumb:
as much as possible, mention first the subject to be modified, then position the word or phrase that will modify that subject as close as possible to it. The greater the distance between the subject and its modifying phrase, the greater the risk of the modifier getting misplaced and of the sentence getting incoherent or illogical.
LAST WEEK’S SELF-TEST:Last week, I asked readers to try analyzing the following problematic lead sentence from a news story in a recent issue of a broadsheet:
“As promised, electricity being a basic commodity for human existence must reach far-flung communities.”
Nobody sent in an analysis, so I guess I have to do the analysis and critique myself.
MY CRITIQUE AND SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS:I really can’t fault the Forum members for not attempting to analyze and critique the sentence in question here. That sentence actually defies analysis. It is a very serious case of an incoherent and illogical sentence that’s also fused or run-on, and the problem is further compounded by flighty phrasing or what people would usually call highfalutin words. It’s really a wonder how and why it got published at all.
The flighty phrasing is, of course, “electricity being a basic commodity for human existence”—a false, illogical claim because humans can actually live without electricity and had done so for tens of thousands of years before electricity was discovered. Another thing: “commodity” looks like a very bad word choice in that sentence. The word “need” might be close to what was meant, but not quite; “convenience” probably would be a little closer. It’s really so difficult to pin down precisely what the writer wants to say with that sentence.
We really can only guess what the writer had in mind, and the following rewrite constitutes my best guess: “Electricity is such a great convenience to modern life, so as we promised, we are making it available even to far-flung communities.”
Can anybody do better than that?
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What do you think of the state of English usage in the Philippine media today? Has it improved or has it worsened? Why do you think so? Click the Reply button to post your thoughts on Jose Carillo’s English Forum.
