I really have nothing against newspaper writers and desk editors doing verbal somersaults every now and then to come up with arresting and provocative headlines, but I do think they should observe a decent limit to their travesties of English grammar and semantics—no matter how well-meaning their intentions might be. At the very least, even if they have to go for contrived or facetious headlines, they shouldn’t deliberately mislead or violate good taste and common sense.
Take a look at this headline and the first paragraphs of a feature story in one of the Metro Manila broadsheets:
Manila Bulletin: Shameless use of the fallacy of equivocation Malay: Are You Still a Virgin?
As a voter, that is!
If yes, you are one of the 5 million first-timers who will troop to 75,471 precincts clustered all over the country come May 10.
With other 50,086,054 registered ones, we will try and test if we ourselves are compatible with the Precinct Count Optical Scan machine in choosing our leaders.
We will be selecting our 15th president, among others, during this first national computerized elections in the country.
Indeed, we are dealing with our future, rather futuristically, but not in the Marinetti* tradition!
Figures show that 70 percent of the voting population are below 39 years old.
Last month, we got an invitation from Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA)’s executive director, Melvin Lee, through Jennifer Bautista, the program coordinator of Casting Call: The Virgin’s Voters’ Campaign I Want My Vote to Count.
We were tasked to speak in a forum on The Role of Language, Media and Education in Cultural and Social Transformation towards Responsible Voting.
My beef with that headline and story is that it deliberately gives a shamelessly crass, direct, unequivocal, and misleading denotation of sexuality to the question: “Are You Still a Virgin?” It would have been different and forgivable if the headline was “Are You Still a Virgin Voter,” in which case the figurative sense of the adjective “virgin” would have been clear and unmistakable—even pleasant, in the same way that “virgin coconut oil” or “virgin olive oil” doesn’t leave a bad aftertaste in the mouth.
But to ask a newspaper reader point-blank if he or she is still a virgin, then say in the next breath that it’s not really what was meant? It’s definitely in bad taste and it smacks of cheap and petty deception! Such irresponsible use of the language would probably be permissible in advertising streamers for a Barnum and Bailey sexology tent, but in the Arts and Living section of a national newspaper? Indeed, the writer or headline writer’s effrontery or semantic cluelessness in using that headline is nothing less than unforgivable!
Let’s take a look at what my digital
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary says about that word:
Main Entry:
virginFunction: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French
virgine, from Latin
virgin-,
virgo young woman, virgin
Date: 13th century
1 a : an unmarried woman devoted to religion b capitalized : VIRGO
2 a : an absolutely chaste young woman b : an unmarried girl or woman
3 capitalized : VIRGIN MARY
4 a : a person who has not had sexual intercourse b : a person who is inexperienced in a usually specified sphere of activity <a
virgin in politics>
5 : a female animal that has never copulated
Main Entry:
virginFunction: adjective
Date: 14th century
1 : free of impurity or stain : UNSULLIED
2 : CHASTE
3 : characteristic of or befitting a virgin : MODEST
4 : FRESH, UNSPOILED; specifically : not altered by human activity <a
virgin forest>
5 a (1) : being used or worked for the first time (2) of a metal : produced directly from ore by primary smelting b : INITIAL, FIRST
6 of a vegetable oil : obtained from the first light pressing and without heating
7 : containing no alcohol <a
virgin daiquiri>
Now, by using only the noun “virgin” in that headline, the writer obviously intended to trick the reader to think that the story would be about the noun sense of it, which is that “of a person who has not had sexual intercourse.” As it turns out, however, what was meant was the adjective sense, in which case that word should have been used to modify the noun “voter” instead. So what we have here is clearly a case of the
fallacy of equivocation, or the loose use of a word—in this case shamelessly deliberate—in a sense other than its true and legitimate one. (
Click to read my three-part series of logical fallacies in the Forum.)
I can see that the author of the article has a flair for dramatics, and is most likely very conversant with language as well, having been one of the speakers of the forum on “The Role of Language, Media and Education in Cultural and Social Transformation towards Responsible Voting.” But I submit that his (or the deskperson's) having taken extreme liberties with English by coming up with the headline “Malay: Are You Still a Virgin?”—then following through with the wrongheaded line about “virgin voters” in the story—is itself a blatant act of irresponsibility towards the use of language. As the slogan of one of my favorite English-language websites says, “A society is generally as lax as its language.”
More than most people, newspaper writers and editors as well as language experts should not only resist the temptation to fudge their headlines but also exercise greater vigilance against the fallacy of equivocation in their journalistic reporting.
-------
*Marinetti tradition – This is my other beef with this news story. It had the gall to expect me to know who Marinetti is and what his tradition is all about. How many readers do you think knew or bothered to check? I did, and all that I had the patience to find out is that Marinetti is an Italian poet by the name of (Emilio) Filippo Tommaso (1876-1944).
The moral of this: Don’t drop obscure names in your story to show how art-literate you are; hardly anybody will understand what you are saying.
SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH: (1) Philippine Daily Inquirer: Utterly misleading choice of wordFood lack forces ‘lumad’ to eat poison crop
KIDAPAWAN CITY, Philippines—Food has become so scarce again in the hinterlands of North Cotabato that members of the province’s indigenous communities have turned to poison anew to survive the dry spell.
In previous years, when the El Niño phenomenon also destroyed crops and killed animals, at least a dozen lumad, including children, died from eating wild yam or kayos.
For the lumad, dying on an empty stomach was more painful, says Dulfo Kabengo, a leader of the Protestant Church in Matalam, North Cotabato.
Kabengo said the dry spell that communities are experiencing in the hinterlands of the town since January has forced starving lumad to dig wild yam and cook them for meals.
Wild yam, or kayos, is edible if cooked well but is highly poisonous when ill-prepared.
What’s the most charitable thing we can say about the statement here that North Cotabato’s indigenous communities “have turned to poison anew to survive the dry spell”? It’s probably that the reporter or the desk editor wasn’t thinking properly when he or she phrased that statement. It smacks of gross sensationalism and heartlessness. The fact is that the lumad of North Cotabato definitely have not “turned to poison anew” whether in the literal or figurative sense. Over the centuries, they have been eating wild yam or “kayos” as part of their diet, knowing fully well that it’s perfectly edible when cooked properly—in the same way, I might add, that the “
botete” or pufferfish can be a delectable dish if prepared and cooked properly (its sac that holds deadly poison needs to be removed).*
So what’s a more accurate, responsible, and semantically correct way to phrase that lead statement? I would suggest this:
“KIDAPAWAN CITY, Philippines—Food has become so scarce again in the hinterlands of North Cotabato that members of the province’s indigenous communities
have turned to eating a potentially poisonous rootcrop to survive the dry spell.”
*ADDENDUM:
I invite readers to check the following sites about the “kayos” or wild yam to see how tendentious and unfounded the Inquirer’s reporting about this root crop is:
1. Wild Yam: An Alternative Food in Time of Famine
2. Detoxification processes for wild yam (Dioscorea hispdeda Dennst.)
Both of the information materials above are provided by the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCCARD) of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
(2) Manila Bulletin: Fused or run-on sentenceA Peso for a Future
These days, one peso can no longer buy your child a decent snack, much less a full meal but when pooled together with other people’s contribution, that one-peso can buy a street child a decent future.
If you had a problem reading and understanding the lead sentence above, it’s because it is a classic fused or run-on sentence. It is formed when two or more clauses are improperly linked or wrong punctuated, resulting in a poorly articulated and confusing statement. As in this case, it often gives readers the sense that the writer had tried to cram and deliver too much information in just one long, nonstop burst.
One way to fix a fused sentence is to boil it down into two or more sentences, as the case may be. Let’s do that now to that problematic sentence:
“These days, one peso can no longer buy your child a decent snack, much less a full meal. When pooled with other people’s contributions, however, that one peso and others like it can buy a street child a decent future.”
(3) Manila Bulletin: Wrong choice of prepositionsEssentializing design
With the dime-a-dozen furniture shows held annually in the country, nothing quite compares to Manila Now, the design extravaganza organized by the Chamber of Furniture Industries of the Philippines. For this year, the show will be held on March 3 to 7 at the SMX Convention Center, forming part of the ASEAN furniture circuit that draws thousands of international buyers to the region.
We’ll be quick about this:
To make the comparison in that sentence valid, the preposition “with” in the phrase “with the dime-a-dozen furniture shows” should be changed to “among” instead; this will establish that the design extravaganza is among or part of the set of furniture shows being compared.
Then the preposition “to” in the phrase “nothing quite compares to Manila Now” should be changed to “with” instead. The rule is this: To identify either the similarities or the differences between two things, use “compare to.” To identify both the similarities and the differences, use “compare with.” In the sentence in question here, it’s evident that the comparison is being made for both things alike and things different.
That first sentence should therefore be corrected as follows:
“
Among the dime-a-dozen furniture shows held annually in the country,
nothing quite compares with Manila Now, the design extravaganza organized by the Chamber of Furniture Industries of the Philippines.”
(4) Manila Bulletin: Awkward phrasingEchiverri orders strict inspection of old buildings
The government of Caloocan will conduct intensive and thorough inspections of old buildings and concrete structures in the city as a precautionary measure in case of a strong earthquake hitting the metropolis.
Mayor Enrico “Recom” Echiverri said Thursday that he has directed local building officials to conduct the inspections focusing on structures that are two or more decades old.
He said the buildings will be checked for their structural integrity to find out if they can withstand strong tremors and protect residents from possible building collapses.
In the first sentence of the news story, the phrasing of “as a precautionary measure in case of a strong earthquake hitting the metropolis” is awkward. By definition, a precaution is “a measure taken beforehand to prevent harm or secure good.” The conditional aspect denoted by the phrase “in case of” is therefore already subsumed by this definition, so that phrase is redundant to the phrase.
A better phrasing of the sentence is therefore as follows:
“The government of Caloocan will conduct intensive and thorough inspections of old buildings and concrete structures in the city
as a precautionary measure against a strong earthquake hitting the metropolis.”
Note that “against” has taken the place of “in case of.”
