Things My English Teacher Never Taught Me

[Joe Carillo]

Things My English Teacher Never Taught Me
By Jose A. Carillo

Through all these years, I thought I had already acquired enough proficiency in English that I can afford to be smug about it. Oh, yes, I can spin write-ups of the sort that the English literary greats had disdainfully termed “entertainments” to describe their lesser works, and can put polish to other people’s writings and speeches so that they are not entirely grammatical or rhetorical embarrassments. As friends would coarsely say in the vernacular when they have had a beer or gin tonic too many, by fiddling too much with English I seem to have acquired the knack to bounce it off effortlessly against the wall or to twirl it around my fingers. But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it’s really no big deal. Jai alai and basketball players can do much better than that with a Voit or Molten or a wicker pelota. So much so that just a few days ago, dejected over a major grammar lapse that gave me and my staff editors a slip, I declared to them, not entirely in jest, that if I won the lotto that very day, I would give up editing altogether and get into paleontology, like what the legendary explorer Roy Chapman Andrews had done in the 1920s, the anthropologist Loren Eiseley in the 1940s, or the paleontologist Stephen J. Gould in the past three decades or two.

Misty eyed I told my staff that I would promptly fly to Tanzania and importune Richard Leakey at his camp in Olduvai Gorge to take me in as an understudy. I would gladly volunteer my services to look for the definitive first human skull that had so far eluded his and his parents’ lifelong search as well as that of Andrews’ before them. That should nicely put some zing to a life that had been largely devoted to straightening out grammar, syntax, and logic in errant prose. In my waning years, I said, I could cap my new career by writing books about my adventures and possible discoveries in the desert wastes, like what Andrews, Eiseley, and Gould had done with admirable success.

Perhaps I should tell you a little bit about these three gentlemen for you to feel at least some sympathy for my wayward enthusiasms. Andrews it was who, searching in the Gobi Desert in southern Mongolia for the prehistoric human ancestor, found instead the skeleton of a small theropod dinosaur that had lived more than 100,000,000 years ago. That momentous find created a fascinating enigma about nature and the mother instinct that was to be solved only many decades later. But the adventures of Andrews during his widely publicized expeditions, recounted in his books On the Trail of Ancient Man and All About Dinosaurs, would inspire the fictional Indiana Jones that Steven Spielberg made a lot of money from in his blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark and its similarly successful sequels. Eiseley, of course, is my hands-down favorite English-language essayist; an evolutionary biologist, he wrote hauntingly beautiful meditations on man and dinosaurs in The Immense Journey, Darwin’s Century, and in his other essays and books. And Gould—all ten books by this outspoken Harvard professor, including Bully for Brontosaurus and The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History, that lay fallow in the home library of a brother-in-law dying of leukemia in the same plains in North America where dinosaurs once ruled like kings—became my emotional anchor as I watched the patient’s life ebb away in a blue haze that devastating autumn five years ago.

But now, going deeper into English grammar to do research on prepositional idioms and prepositional phrases for my column, I find a universe of English so totally new to me that I am beginning to change my mind again about my paleontologic dreams. In the quiet rush of my largely uneventful life in journalism and communication, I had only heard sound bites or seen snatches of this universe. It was a universe that my English teachers had only vaguely hinted at, so engrossed were they in their own rush to, say, get foreign fellowships or to earn a law degree to become a judge in some backwater town. It was the very same universe of Demosthenes the stuttering Greek, who, before becoming the greatest orator the world had ever known, would fill his mouth with pebbles and, racing with himself in Athens, attempt oratory at the top of his voice to cure his speech impediment. Today, his heroic efforts to fathom the wellsprings of words, along with his relentless pursuit of compelling writing and speech, have grown into the multifaceted universe of English linguistics and rhetoric. How I would have devoted my life to them had I discovered early enough their depth and breadth as intellectual disciplines!

In high school, my creative writing teacher taught me that there were 18 figures of speech, from alliteration and allusion down in the alpha list to the hyperbole, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, simile, and synecdoche. Now, I find to my great surprise that the ancient Greeks had in fact meticulously identified and catalogued no less than 80 of them—what they called the “flowers of rhetoric”—in much the same way that the Swedish Carolus Linnaeus had made sense of life’s diversity by giving each living thing a scientific name, and in much the same way that the Russian Dmitri Mendeleyev had classified the known basic substances and divined the existence of many others by painstakingly coming up with the periodic table of the elements. The pragmatics list of the ancient Greeks, or their choices of words and phrases to fit every conceivable speech or social situation, covered not only the 18 that I knew but also an astounding wealth of other figures of speech, like the agnomination, litote, ploce, preterition, polysendeton, similitude, syllepsis, and zeugma. It was this very same art and passion that the Greeks lavished on their language that not only gave fire to the timeless orations of Demosthenes but, for the most part, shaped both English and civilization as we know them today.

So now, just when I am about to sit back and take it easy with the thought that I have been there, done this, done that, I find that I have barely scratched the surface of the English that I was getting too familiar with to actually dream of trading it off with paleontology. (circa 2002)

This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times in 2002 and subsequently appeared in Jose Carillo’s book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language. Copyright © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.