I am delighted to report that the four major Metro Manila broadsheets continued to keep the English of their major stories free of major grammar and usage errors during the past week. It’s evident that their writers and editors are now taking a much tighter rein on their English, a development that, of course, makes critiquing their journalistic output a much easier task for me. In fact, I found only one fly in the ointment, so to speak—a spectacularly wrong word choice in a feature story in one of the broadsheets last October 20. This is actually not the first time I encountered the flawed word choice, “coed,” and I’m pretty sure that many of you have had the same experience. This should therefore be a good opportunity to correct once and for all the apparently widespread wrong perception of what the term “coed” means.
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Here’s the feature story in the
Manila Bulletin last October 20:
The New Colegialas
MANILA, Philippines – Not too long ago, coeds from exclusive girls’ schools would just keep to themselves. Called colegialas, these young women were cooped up in their own little world, mostly made up of elite social affairs, without caring much for what was happening outside the convent walls or beyond their fancy soirees.
But this image of the sheltered colegiala is now gone. About two decades ago, a generation of socially-aware and empowered young woman leaders quietly emerged.
Today, many of them are successful professionals and exemplary change agents in their communities. They have become more active in national affairs, more vocal of their stand on issues, and more involved in worthy social causes.
1. A serious contradiction of termsI would say that the feature story is competently written, with an engaging narrative that flows quite well. The problem, though, is that its lead sentence harbors a fatal semantic error. The phrase “coeds from exclusive girls’ schools” is a serious contradiction in terms.
The fact is that coeds can’t logically be students of exclusive girls’ schools. The word “coed” is short for “coeducational student,” which means “a female student in a coeducational institution.” In turn, a coeducational institution is one where students of both sexes can enroll and study. It is therefore semantically erroneous to call students from exclusive girls’ schools “coeds.” Indeed, what should be called “coeds” are students from coeducational schools. Logically, a “coed” could even be either female or male, but in actual usage, the term “coed” has come to be limited in sense to “a female student at a coeducational college or university.”
I thus wonder why many journalists and writers in general have come to think of “coeds” in terms of its exact opposite meaning—that they are females studying in exclusive girls’ schools. They are obviously perpetuating a mistake committed by some English grammar authority in recent years. In any case, it’s not too late for them to rectify the misconception, in the same way that I am now correcting the fatal error in that problematic lead paragraph by rewriting it as follows:
“Not too long ago,
young women from exclusive girls’ schools would just keep to themselves. Called colegialas,
they were cooped up in their own little world, mostly made up of elite social affairs, without caring much for what was happening outside the convent walls or beyond their fancy soirees.”
2. Unnecessary hyphenation of a compound wordYou must have noticed that in the second paragraph of the original passage, I underlined the phrase “socially-aware and empowered young woman leaders.” I did so to call attention to the fact that when an adjective is modified by an adverb ending in “-ly,” the compounded words shouldn’t be hyphenated. That phrase should therefore be written simply as “socially aware and empowered young woman leaders.” It’s different when the adjective ends not in “-ly,” as in “good” in “good-looking actor”; this time the hyphen is absolutely necessary to indicate that in that compound word, “good-looking” is modifying the noun “actor,” not “good” modifying the phrase “looking actor.”
3. Wrong preposition usageIn the third paragraph of the original passage, the phrase “vocal of their stand” uses the wrong preposition “of.” The correct preposition is “in,” so that phrase should read as “vocal in their stand.”
FORUM READER’S FEEDBACK ON MEDIA REPORTING:I received the e-mail below from Mr. Juanito T. Fuerte, a longtime US resident who recently came back to the Philippines for good as a balikbayan:
Hi, Joe,
Here’s another one for your English Forum taken from the October 21, 2010 issue of The Philippine Star:
“Investigators said Cueva tied one end of the cord to the lavatory ceiling then dropped himself from a standing position on the toilet bowl.”
Wow! The only thing the guy did was to tie one end of the cord to the ceiling, drop himself from the toilet bowl that couldn’t be more than two feet high, and he’s dead!
The above quote is, of course, describing how that OFW who was found dead in the plane that landed from overseas at the NAIA yesterday [October 20], committed suicide with the use of a cord from his jacket.
Since the story had earlier mentioned that he “hanged himself” to death, we can only assume from this sentence that Cueva tied the other end of the cord around his neck, which then caused his death when he dropped himself from the toilet bowl (the report is silent on that, though).
But, then again, maybe he didn’t tie that cord around his neck, and what probably killed him was “dropping himself from a standing position on the toilet bowl”! But, how did that kill him? His head, face down, hit the wash bowl full of water, which made him lose consciousness and drown? Or, perhaps, as he dropped himself, his windpipe hit a blunt object that then broke it, causing asphyxiation?
This makes me wonder if he would have met the same fate had he “dropped himself” not from a standing position but from a sitting position on the toilet bowl. Ah, maybe! He did tie that cord around his neck, then drop only his upper body while his feet remained on the toilet bowl, leading to strangulation as the cord around his neck bore the weight of his upper body. Still… Oh, shucks! So many other possibilities!
Anyway, I notice that this type of reporting seems common among Manila’s newspapers. They leave you assuming things, which makes you feel cheated and wondering whether you got the story right or not.
Comments from Forum members?
