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Site Announcements / Playlist Update (May 18 - 24, 2024) Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« Last post by Joe Carillo on Today at 02:04:18 PM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MAY 18 - 24, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “At a loss for words”

2. Use and Misuse: “A recurrent misuse of 'between' when setting a range”

SO WHY SHOULD WE EVER BE CAUGHT
SAYING “BETWEEN 8:00 A.M. TO 4:00 P.M.”?

3. You Asked Me This Question: “'Bring' or 'take' and 'come' or 'go'?”

4. My Media English Watch Retrospective: “The rightful place for a headline modifier”

IMAGE CREDIT: X.COM

5. Students’ Sounding Board: “When is sentence inversion a matter of grammar or style?”

6. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Critique of the Catholic clergy’s English by a former university professor”

7. Going Deeper Into Language: “33 modern English essays”

8. Advice and Dissent: “194 cutting-edge readings about recent scientific news”

“DOUBLE TULIPS 2016” BY KATINKA MATSON, EDGE.ORG

9. Language Humor at its Finest:“A Cavalcade of Palindromes”

10. Time Out From English Grammar Retrospective: “Renaissance painter goes all the way glorifying women's hair to debunk a prevailing religious notion”

11. The Forum Lounge: “Book publishing's broken blurb system 'a plague on the industry'”

12. Readings in Language: “Style as pleasurable mastery rather than minefield of grievous errors” by Steven Pinker

13. A Forum Lounge Retrospective: "Close encounters with enigmatic English syntax”

14. A Forum Lounge Pictorial: "Manila at the turn of the 20th Century”

15. Time Has Indeed Gone By: "Charles Aznavour sings a classic!"

Click this link to earlier Playdate features!

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language

Essays by Joe Carillo / At a loss for words

« Last post by Joe Carillo on Today at 10:10:36 AM »

A great disappointment in our country’s politics is that it doesn’t require a requisite depth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom from those who consider themselves worthy of election to public office. For so many years now, we have chosen to lead us not just a few men and women whose only claim to ascendancy over us is popularity not from achievement but from media exposure, and whose strongest virtue is distracting us from the harsh realities of life, making us laugh, or simply being electronically seen or heard from day to day reading the news, spouting some half-baked opinion, or hawking consumer items for precious extra media mileage. Like chronic sleepwalkers, we have been substituting media-induced perception for reality, glitz and noise for intellect and moral rectitude, and the phantom figures of pollsters-for-hire and audience-ratings meters for the true worth of individuals.

IMAGE CREDIT: PHOTO BY ALFREDHOOK3 IN THE PROPROFS.COM WEBSITE

The point has been reached, in fact, where we no longer demand that those aspiring for high public office at least define themselves, tell us their political ideal, mission, or vision, or assure us that they have a clear idea of what they are doing in the first place. Gone indeed are the days when people who sought elective office could at least talk to us convincingly straight from their own minds and hearts, without the benefit of script or idiot board. Most of the electorate has become so painfully blasé and inept that those touted by self-serving statistics as surefire bets could forever be at a loss for words, yet still get themselves elected handily.

The tragedy of it all is that this is happening at this very time that we need mature, intelligent, and enlightened leadership to turn the nation around. More than ever before, we need men and women not only of action but of words—words to tell us in the most precise terms why this country hasn’t moved forward that much, words to spell out concretely the crucial things to be done or undone to get us out of the hole we are in, and words to inspire us to close ranks and propel this archipelago to the greatness that has eluded it for more than half a millennium now.

We need thinking leaders with the priceless gift of language, not necessarily stentorian, but leaders who can define, articulate, and pursue the national agenda intelligently and purposively, with words that ring true whether spoken off the cuff or clothed with the rhetoric that important state occasions demand. For these big tasks, our country can ill afford any more individuals with very scant vocabulary—whether in Filipino, English, or any other language—and much less those with no experience whatsoever in governance and public affairs. To do so would be like appointing someone who can’t even compute and had not even run a sari-sari store or much less a sizeable manufacturing firm like San Miguel Corporation, or allowing a tricycle driver without flight training and only a smattering of English to pilot a Boeing 747 over the Pacific Ocean from Manila to Los Angeles.

How perilous it is that for the sake of political expediency, this country’s electorate is repeatedly prodded every election season to gloss over the importance of intelligence and good grasp of language in the art of leadership! All the more disturbing that our supposedly more intelligent political leaders and opinion-makers could tell us without mincing words that popularity and perceived honesty is a fair tradeoff for ineptitude. When are we going to learn that the most powerful determinant of intellect is the breadth and depth of one’s vocabulary, and that the higher one’s responsibility, the wider and deeper the vocabulary needed to be effective on the job? One could not even name things in context—much less frame a decent sentence or meaningfully analyze or conclude about anything—if one didn’t have at least a decent grasp and understanding of the totally new activity or enterprise one ventures into.

In his 1993 collection of essays, The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, the well-regarded American economist and writer clearly captured the importance of vocabulary in good thinking in these words:

“A vocabulary increases and sharpens our observation, as sharp observation in turn leads us to increase our vocabulary. The student of nature who is learning to recognize bushes and trees finds his observation increasingly sharpened as he is told how to identify respectively an oak, maple, elm, beech, pine, spruce, or hemlock. The name both fastens down the results of observation and tells him what distinguishing traits to look for. As a result of his knowledge, a countryman very seldom calls a specific tree simply a tree. The professional forester or nurseryman habitually makes even finer distinctions, such as that between red oaks, black oaks, and white oaks, or between Norway maples, Schwedler maples, and sugar maples.”

Had the nation’s electorate been more keenly aware of this important requisite of leadership, our country could have avoided repeatedly making the terrible mistake of electing not just a few ineffectual or paltry aspirants to crucial national positions during the past several decades.

This essay first appeared in my “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times and subsequently became Chapter 152 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 and published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
At a loss for words

(Next: The wealth of our vocabulary) May 30, 2024

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.

Education and Teaching / PHINMA Education launches 5.5K-peso scholarship program

« Last post by Joe Carillo on May 17, 2024, 05:42:10 PM »

May 17, 2024—PHINMA Education, one of the biggest private higher education networks in Southeast Asia, has launched the Hawak Kamay (HK) 5.5 Scholarship Program to improve access to quality college education. In its most inclusive program yet, qualified students will only pay Php5,500 per semester (exclusive of books and uniforms) for both Education and Business programs offered across eight schools in the PHINMA Education network. Additionally, HK5.5 is available for the Criminology program at PHINMA University of Pangasinan.

This scholarship redefines accessibility not only by eliminating barriers, such as entrance exams and maintaining grades but also by providing unprecedented levels of financial support to its students. Importantly, the student’s fee of P5,500 per semester will remain unchanged throughout the student’s college journey to maintain affordability despite inflation. The launch of HK5.5 coincides with PHINMA Education’s 20th year anniversary to be celebrated by nine schools in the Philippines and one in Indonesia.

Christopher Tan, Country Head of PHINMA Education Philippines, said: “At PHINMA Education, our commitment goes beyond mere accessibility; we are dedicated to guiding students every step of their journey, from enrollment to employment. Our goal is not only to provide quality education but to also help the more vulnerable students in the country believe that they can change the course of their lives. The pandemic may be over, but serious economic hardships remain. Inflation has gone up, driven by increases in food and transportation costs. Especially during crises, schools have the responsibility to keep education accessible. We need to constantly find ways to reduce our costs so that we can reduce our fees.”

For two decades, PHINMA Education has provided hope through learning. With the new HK5.5, the network solidifies its commitment to social transformation by continuing the mission of making lives better through education.

The application for HK5.5 and other HK scholarship offerings for SY24-25 is ongoing. Students across the nation are encouraged to apply through this link: https://bit.ly/phinmaedhk55scholarship
-------------------
PHINMA Education Holdings, Inc. (PEHI) under the conglomerate PHINMA Corporation, started investing in the education services sector in 2004 through the acquisition of PHINMA Araullo University in Nueva Ecija. It has since expanded its presence across the country with its network of schools namely: PHINMA Cagayan de Oro College, PHINMA University of Pangasinan, PHINMA University of Iloilo, Southwestern University PHINMA in Cebu City, PHINMA Saint Jude College in Manila and Quezon City, PHINMA Rizal College of Laguna, and PHINMA Union College of Laguna. It also aims to expand across Southeast Asia beginning with Horizon University in Karawang, West Java, Indonesia. For more information, please visit: https://www.phinma.edu.ph.

Site Announcements / Playlist Update (May 11 - 17, 2024) Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« Last post by Joe Carillo on May 15, 2024, 10:23:14 PM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MAY 11 - 17, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “The perils of sweeping generalizations”

[

2. Use and Misuse: “Pitfalls in constructing negative used to sentences”

THE AMERICAN ENGLISH PRESCRIPTION FOR “USED TO” USAGE

3. You Asked Me This Question: “The problem with overellipted sentence constructions”

4. Students’ Sounding Board: “How to identify what’s wrong in a sentence construction test”

5. Students’ Sounding Board: “‘All’ can actually mean ‘totality,’ ‘everything,’ or even ‘nothing’”

6. Getting to Know English: “Revisiting the 'who'/'whom' grammar conundrum”

7. Education and Teaching: “Taylor Swift studies surging in North America akin to the 1990s Madonna-ology ”

8. Advocacies: “Deliberately and intentionally miseducating the Filipino,” a critique by Forum Contributor Antonio Calipjo Go of a 2015 DECS textbook

9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “Memorable quotes from famous celebrities of yesteryears”

10. Time Out From English Grammar: “Measuring up to the human body’s perfection in architectural terms”

11. You Asked Me This Question: “How do litotes and the double negative differ?”

12. Essay by Jose Carillo (A Retrospective): Verbal fallacies nearer home”

13. Your Thoughts Exactly: "A Prayer to St. Jude," Retrospective Essay by Angel Casillan, Forum Contributor

14. Going Deeper Into Language: "Subordinate clauses don't always play second fiddle to main clauses”

15. The Forum Lounge: “'Pun-ography' is wordplay to make you smile”

Click this link to earlier Playdate features!

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language

Essays by Joe Carillo / The perils of sweeping generalizations

« Last post by Joe Carillo on May 15, 2024, 02:58:27 PM »

A common pitfall in writing is to mistake possibility or simple probability for certainty. Either from faulty grammar or faulty thinking, writers can unknowingly make sweeping generalizations—statements that assert too much on too little evidence. They thus overstate their case and undermine the very argument they are making.

Consider this opening statement of a recent advice column: “Your greatest weakness is the one that you are unaware of. Because you do not know that it exists, you become vulnerable to the one who spots it.” By using the superlative “greatest” without qualification, this statement makes an assertion that can’t be possibly proven. Being unaware of a weakness doesn’t necessarily make it one’s greatest weakness; more likely, one’s greatest weakness would be the weakness that one actually suffers from and is fully aware of. The premise thus proves logically indefensible.

IMAGE CREDIT: PROWRITINGAID.COM

Here’s a simple grammar fix that can straighten the logic of such sweeping generalizations—qualify their premise as a possibility instead of an absolute certainty. See how the modal “could” efficiently eliminates the sweeping generalization from the statement above: “Your greatest weakness could be the one that you are unaware of. Because you do not know that it exists, you become vulnerable to the one who spots it.” Depending on the degree of possibility or conditionality, of course, the modals “can,” “may,” and “might” can also be used to qualify such statements.

Logic is likewise violated when conditional statements are made to appear like absolute truths. Take this lead sentence of a recent newspaper feature story: “Did you know that the country’s top chefs get their ingredients from Farmers Market in the Araneta Center in Cubao?” Although the story cites six Metro Manila-based chefs as getting their ingredients from the same market, this statement turns out to be a sweeping generalization because (1) it makes the unwarranted general claim that the country’s top chefs get their ingredients from that market, and (2) it makes the gratuitous implication that the five chefs mentioned in the story are the country’s top chefs, although they are cited only as examples of Metro Manila chefs sourcing their ingredients from the same market.

Such breaches of logic can be avoided by properly qualifying words or phrases that imply totality. See how much more credible the statement above becomes when we use “many” to qualify “the country’s top chiefs”: “Did you know that many of the country’s top chefs get their ingredients from Farmers Market in the Araneta Center in Cubao?” But even this statement may still be too sweeping, for it can be argued that “five well-known Metro Manila chefs” is not synonymous to “many of the country’s top chiefs.” Here’s a more accurate restatement that probably stands a better chance of silencing all objectors: “Did you know that many of Metro Manila’s top chiefs get their ingredients from Farmers Market in the Araneta Center in Cubao?”

In face-to-face interactions, making sweeping generalizations may not be so harmful because our listeners will usually prompt us and give us the opportunity to qualify our statements until their intended meaning gets clear enough. When we make sweeping generalizations in writing, however, we risk being totally misunderstood or being deemed unreliable because the opportunity to qualify our ideas is no longer available.

We thus need to be very precise in stating our premises, arguments, and conclusions. In particular, we should be extra cautious with words that imply absoluteness or totality, such as “always,” “never,” “everyone,” “everybody,” “completely,” “totally,” and “constantly.” As the old saying goes, there’s always an exception to the rule, so we should make it a point never to make absolute statements without properly qualifying them.

When proving a point, we must also beware the all-too-common temptation to use “all” for “some” or “most,” “none” for “few” or “hardly anyone” or “hardly anybody,” “always” for “usually” or “frequently,” “surely” for “probably” or “perhaps,” and “never” for “rarely” or “seldom.” One single imprecise qualifier can throw our statements out of kilter. For instance, even allowing for literary license, the following lead statement in a recent personality feature (the subject’s identity has been changed) obviously oversteps the bounds of its argument: “All her life [italics mine], Jennifer del Mar wanted to be a schoolteacher to help her poor parents make ends meet.”

By using “all her life” as a qualifier, the statement risks inviting disbelief. The subject could not have wanted to be a schoolteacher “all her life”; at most, she must have started wanting to become one when she was already in grade school or high school. The statement gets a better temporal perspective with this more realistic qualifying phrase: “Even as a child, Jennifer del Mar already dreamed to be a schoolteacher so she could help her poor parents make ends meet.”

This essay first appeared in my “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times and subsequently became Chapter 136 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 and published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
The perils of sweeping generalizations

(Next: At a loss for words) May 23, 2024

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.

Site Announcements / Playlist Update (May 4 - 10, 2024) Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« Last post by Joe Carillo on May 08, 2024, 03:40:22 PM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MAY 4 - 10, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Getting To Know English Better: “Using nondiscriminatory English – Part 2”

2. Use and Misuse: “What are substantive and attributive clauses?”

3. You Asked Me This Question: “Is it advisable to drop ‘that’ from reported speech?”

4. Getting To Know English: “How many types of adverbial clauses are there in English?”

5. Essays by Jose A. Carillo: “Dealing with various levels of intransitivity”

6. Students’ Sounding Board: “An assortment of bewildering questions about English usage”

7. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Some tangled tropes that annoy me,” essay by Forum Member Isabel Escoda

8. Going Deeper Into Language: “The need to know the English idioms”

9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “24 boggling imponderables to think through”

10. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: “A compelling alternative to Shakespeare's true identity was that he was a woman

11. Readings in Language: “Tagalog among top 5 most widely spoken non-English languages in the U.S. today”

12. Time Out From English Grammar: “Two memorable and truly inspiring commencement speeches”

13. A Forum Lounge Open Dialogue (A Retrospective): “Religions and the basis for faith”

14. Time Out From English Grammar: “Focusing on three things all at once is courting information overload”

15. Essays by Jose A. Carillo: “English in a used jar”

Click this link to earlier Playdate features!

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language

Getting to Know English / Using nondiscriminatory English – Part 2

« Last post by Joe Carillo on May 07, 2024, 11:52:37 PM »

Now let’s focus on the success of contemporary English in avoiding asymmetrical treatment of people on account of their age, ethnicity and social standing. To begin with, it is no longer socially and politically correct to label people past middle age as “the old,” “the aged,” or “septuagenarians”; they are more properly referred to now as “older people,” “seniors,” or “senior citizens.” In the same token, to call people in the lower age bracket as “youths,” “juveniles,” “adolescents,” “greenhorns,” or “neophytes” would be insensitive; the socially acceptable generic terms today are “young persons” and “young people.” Then, when referring to ethnic group members in negative situations, it is now unthinkable for the mainstream mass media to run a discriminatory headline like this: “Lithuanian [Polynesian, Armenian, Dane, Filipino, etc.] Nabbed in Miami Multinational Drug Bust.” The era of gratuitously stereotyping ethnic people for shock effect is long over.

Here in the Philippines, however, we are still prone to using dangerously unfair English-language stereotypes, particularly when referring to the disadvantaged sectors of our society. Take this recent headline of a leading national newspaper: “Old building collapses; 10 looters feared dead.”

The story reported: “Nasipit Mayor Enrico Corvera said most of the victims were scavengers looking for metals inside the dilapidated and concrete-walled building...when it collapsed at around 2 p.m. yesterday.” The headline categorically labeled those who died in the accident as “looters,” while the mayor simply identified them as “scavengers.”

A “looter,” by definition, is someone who “plunders or sacks in war,” or who “robs especially on a large scale and usually by violence or corruption”; a “scavenger,” on the other hand, is plainly “a garbage collector” or “a junk collector.” “Looting” is a criminal offense while “scavenging” is not, however lowly the occupation may appear, and no amount of headline-letter-count constraints can justify glossing over that difference in meaning. Because of the writer’s semantic ignorance, the victims have not only been killed owing to their poverty but were slandered even in death.

Avoiding unfairly focusing on irrelevant or discriminatory characteristics of people when describing them in negative situations. It’s obviously difficult for people to forego or curb the tendency to use derogatory language privately against their opponents or pet peeves. Human nature seems to be permanently wired for that. But to use blatantly discriminatory language in polite society or in the mass media is an altogether different matter. We have to avoid it not only in the interest of good taste and political correctness but also to avoid committing slander or libel.

Take this discriminatory reporting still prevalent in Philippine journalism: “Singer X was adjudged the ‘Female Vocalist of the Year’ award despite her diminutive size, being only 54 cm. on bare feet.” (What does her height got to do with her singing voice?) Or this spiel by a TV sports commentator: “The two runners performed in the 20K marathon like geriatrics just out of the hospital.” (In one fell swoop, this discriminatory remark slanders both the runners and ailing aged people in general.) And then this recent diatribe by a magazine columnist: “And when [Politician X], ever so slowly (and perhaps painfully), raised his arthritic right arm to emphasize a point, as we were taught to do in Ateneo elocution class, it was obvious to me that his target audience was the Living Dead.” (Deliciously wicked, that dig at “the Living Dead,” but the terribly unkind reference to Politician X’s pain in raising his supposedly arthritic right arm borders on the libelous, I think.)

Having taken a quick look at the progress English has made so far in fighting discriminatory language, we will now examine its hard-core grammar limitation that we already know so well, but which we must take pains to learn how to handle better: English has no gender-neutral pronoun for the third person singular, a quirk that forces it to use the generic masculine forms “he,” “him,” and “his” to refer to both men and women. We thus usually end up with discriminatory language that makes women invisible, like this: “The typical Filipino voter is a laborer who works in a factory, or a farmer who subsists in marginal farming. He has a wife who usually augments the family income with piecework or retail selling. Sometimes these roles are simply reversed.”

For gender equality, and also considering the fact that Filipino women slightly outnumber the men, it would be prudent for that statement to refer to the “Filipino” in the generic plural: “Majority of Filipinos are laborers who work in a factory, or farmers who subsist in marginal farming. They have spouses who usually augment the family income through piecework or retail selling.”

In sum, by being more discerning in our choice of words, we can truly make ourselves confidently and pleasantly nondiscriminatory in our English.

This is the continuation of my 1,631-word essay with the original title “Using nondiscriminatory language” that formed Chapter 135 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 and published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Read this part of the essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Using nondiscriminatory English – Part 2

(Next: The perils of sweeping generalizations) May 16, 2024

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.

Site Announcements / Playlist Update (April 27 - MAY 3, 2024) Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« Last post by Joe Carillo on April 30, 2024, 11:42:46 PM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR APRIL 27 - MAY 3, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Getting to Know English Better: “Using nondiscriminatory English – Part 1”

2. You Asked Me This Question: “How to deal with long, complicated noun phrases”

3. Going Deeper Into Language: “When faulty logic overrides good grammar and semantics”

4. Getting to Know English: “When simple indicative sentences can’t drive home our point”

5. Use and Misuse Retrospective: “Why an object needn’t follow the verb ‘told’ every time”

6. You Asked Me This Question: “What the origin of the word ‘gaslighting’ is and other questions”

7. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Outrage over a wasted investment in English proficiency”

8. Readings in Language: “Knowing this sprinkling of 'pilot speak' might save a troubled aircraft”

9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “Five dozen amusing job descriptions”

10. Time Out From Grammar Retrospective: "Shakespeare the ‘hard-headed businessman’ uncovered"

11. Time Out From English Grammar: “Thomas Edison’s greatest idea 'wasn’t something anybody could patent or touch'”

12. Advice and Dissent: “A review of 'The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus'”

13. Notable Works by Our Very Own: “Fil-Am blogger thrives on her uncommon freedom to negotiate the web”

14. A Forum Lounge Retrospective: ”The one single thing that brought them all to America”

15. A Forum Lounge Retrospective: “A bold embodiment of what’s grand or fraudulent in American mass culture”

Click this link to earlier Playdate features!

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language

Getting to Know English / Using nondiscriminatory English – Part 1

« Last post by Joe Carillo on April 30, 2024, 09:21:09 PM »

During the past several decades, a sometimes raucous but generally silent revolution has been taking place within the English language. This revolution—call it an induced evolution, if you may—is the much welcome shift of English toward nondiscriminatory grammar, structure, and form. Fanned by the civil libertarian and feminist movements in the major English-speaking countries, this movement has substantially freed the inherently sexist, chauvinist language of Chaucer and Shakespeare from some of its most vexing linguistic biases. For the first time in its over 1,500-year history, and well in keeping with its role as today’s global language, English is now consciously nondiscriminatory in its more formal forms. Informally, of course, it still has to find ways of cleaning up some more of the intractable semantic vestiges that prevent it from expressing total equality and respect for all individuals.

IMAGE CREDIT: PINTEREST.COM

Concerted efforts have been made in recent years to make English more
nondiscriminatory, neutral, or non-inclusive, such as by eliminating
specifically feminine versions of professions or using “they”
to refer to singular individuals

The language has of late been most successful in handling four problematic tendencies: (1) discriminating against women in word formation, grammar, and sentence structure; (2) universalizing human attributes in favor of men; (3) treating people asymmetrically based on such aspects as gender, age, and ethnicity; and (4) unfairly focusing on irrelevant, discriminatory characteristics of people when describing them in negative situations. We will examine these areas of success more closely, then look at the hard-core semantic structures for which English still has to find enduring nondiscriminatory alternatives.

Nondiscriminatory word formation, grammar, and sentence structure. For centuries, English had been bedeviled by its linguistic propensity not only to treat men as superior to women but also to emphasize the dependence of women to men. We all know, for instance, how inherently sexist the most common English idioms are, like “the man in the street,” “the best man for the job,” “one-man show,” and “man to man.” Similarly, its generic occupational nouns and job titles have for ages been male-oriented: “laymen,” “policeman,” “businessman,” “craftsman,” “fireman,” “postman,” and “salesman.”

Due to pressure from the feminist movement, however, major inroads have been achieved against this blatant sexism in the English vocabulary, making those phrases politically incorrect in educated circles. As nondiscriminatory equivalents for “the man in the street,” for instance, we now have “the average citizen,” “the average person,” or “an ordinary person.” For “the best man for the job,” we now have “the best candidate [applicant, person] for the job”; and for “one-man show,” we now have “solo show” or “one-person show.” In the occupational areas, of course, the following nondiscriminatory equivalents are now routine in formal circles: for “layman,” we have “laypeople,” “nonspecialist,” or “nonprofessional”; for “policeman,” we have “police officer”; for “businessman,” we have “business executive”; and for “fireman,” we have “firefighter.”

English is also successfully veering away from the traditionally sexist way of adding the suffixes “-ess”, “-ette”, and “-trix” to feminize male words, as in “seamstress” for “seamster” and “poetess” for “poet,” “usherette” for “usher,” “bachelorette” for “bachelor,” “administratrix” for “administrator,” and “mediatrix” for “mediator.” Self-respecting women rightly saw this manner of word formation as trivializing and discriminatory, in much the same way as labeling a female professional as, say, a “woman doctor,” a “lady lawyer,” a “woman reporter,” or a “female accountant.” Such expressions are now scrupulously avoided, particularly in contexts where gender-specific reference is irrelevant.

Avoiding the tendency to universalize human attributes in favor of men. Because of its inherent male chauvinism, the English language has historically treated men as the universal stereotype for humanity in general, glossing over women to the point of their total invisibility or exclusion. Thus, even the usually politically correct American president Abraham Lincoln couldn’t help but be male-chauvinistic in his “Gettysburg Address”: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth to this continent a new nation…” What happened, the feminists correctly ask, to the mothers and grandmothers and sisters and aunts on board the ship Mayflower when it docked at Portsmouth? Today, of course, a politically astute editor or adviser would have easily convinced Lincoln to change “our forefathers” to “our forebears” or, even more semantically precise, to “our ancestors.” We are well advised to do the same in our spoken and written English in the interest of gender equality and political correctness.

Avoiding the asymmetrical treatment of people on such aspects as gender, age, and ethnicity. Another glaring discriminatory aspect of English usage that we must consciously avoid is the tendency to focus on the attributes or background of females in negative or unflattering contexts involving males, as in this statement: “Five suspected drug addicts, four of them teenage male students and the fifth a pretty coed, were arrested in a predawn raid on a drug joint in Taguig, Parañaque City.” (Why focus on the physical look of the woman yet be silent on how the men looked?) Such discriminatory language is now becoming rare in the more enlightened English-speaking countries, but it is still endemic in Philippine journalism, particularly in the English-language tabloids. We still have miles to go before we can finally exorcise such patently discriminatory goblins from our macho culture. (To be continued)

This is the first part of my 1,631-word essay with the original title “Using nondiscriminatory language” that formed Chapter 135 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 and published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Using nondiscriminatory English – Part 1

(Next: Using nondiscriminatory English – Part 2) May 9, 2024

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.

Site Announcements / Playlist Update (April 20 - 26, 2024) of Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« Last post by Joe Carillo on April 24, 2024, 01:39:47 PM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR APRIL 20 - 26, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “When saying it once isn’t enough”