I came across the following notable grammar blunders on the domestic web news and on network TV during the past week:
A. These problematic sentences from a July 1 foreign news-service report about two
fatalities of lightning strikes:
“Police say lightning strikes have separately killed two people in the northern and central Philippines within hours of each other.”
“Police say 73-year-old Mauricia Sacuebo was walking in a rice field in central Iloilo province when she was struck Tuesday and declared dead on arrival at a hospital.”
B. These problematic parts of a news story in the July 1 online edition of a leading Metro
Manila broadsheet:
(1) Headline on its report about the likelihood of martial law in the Philippines:
Specter of martial law not far fetch-political analyst
(2) These three passages from the news story itself:
(a) “The looming specter of a martial law declaration is not far-fetched with the spate of bombing incidents in Metro Manila and other parts of the country, according to a political analyst.”
(b) “(The political analyst) said series of bombings in 1972 resulted to martial law declaration by the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos Sr.”
(c) “Ultimately, the series of bombings in the country that time resulted to the installation into power a dictator and the revision of the 1973 Constitution…”
C. This grammatically flawed regular spiel by a news commentator in an evening TV newscast:
“No issue is too big or too small to affect you.”
What’s wrong with the English grammar and usage of the passages in question above and how can we rectify them and avoid them?
MY CRITIQUE AND SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS:
A. The foreign news-service report about the two fatalities of lightning strikes
1. First sentence:
“Police say lightning strikes have separately killed two people in the northern and central Philippines within hours of each other.”
Problems:
1. The bad sentence construction gives the wrong impression that the same lightning strikes killed two people in two distant places, which of course is a physical impossibility.
2. The use of the verb “killed” gives the wrong impression that the lightning strikes purposively struck the victims.
3. The adverb “separately” is redundant in that sentence because it’s obvious that the lightning strikes happened in two far-flung places in the country.
4. The adverbial phrase “within hours of each other” is a dangling modifier because it couldn’t seem to find an appropriate noun to modify. Is it supposed to modify “northern and central Philippines,” “two people,” or “lightning strikes”? The sentence construction utterly fails to make clear which.
5. The use of the noun phrase “two people” is normally frowned upon in straight-news stories of this kind; the usual preference is for “two persons.” But since the reporter knew that the first victim was a woman and the other a man, it would have been much better journalistically (because it’s more informative) to use “a woman” and “a man” in that lead sentence.
Suggested improvement of that sentence:
“Police say a woman and a man died when they were struck by lightning within hours of each other in northern and central Philippines.”
2. Second sentence:
“Police say 73-year-old Mauricia Sacuebo was walking in a rice field in central Iloilo province when she was struck Tuesday and declared dead on arrival at a hospital.”
Problems:
1. This is a confusing fused or run-on sentence, with the compound dependent clause “she was struck Tuesday and declared dead on arrival at a hospital” improperly linked to the main clause. The result is the absurd sense of the lightning strike victim being struck by lighting at the same time that she’s declared dead on arrival at the hospital. To correct the illogic here, it would be necessary to spin off the dependent clause as a separate sentence.
2. In newspaper reporting, a more forthright and concise way of indicating the age of someone is to set if off with a pair of commas after his or her name, as in “Juan de la Cruz, 25,” rather than spell it out as “25-year-old Juan de la Cruz.” This is the preferred usage particularly if age is not a central or crucial element of the story.
The sentence as corrected:
“Police say Mauricia Sacuebo, 73, was walking in a rice field in central Iloilo province when she was struck by lightning Tuesday. She was declared dead on arrival at a hospital.”
B. The political analyst’s martial law bogey
The headline:
Specter of martial law not far fetch-political analyst
Problems:
1. The proper word and spelling for the adjective “far fetch” is “far-fetched”—a hyphenated word with “fetch” in the past-participle form “fetched,” not in the present-tense form “fetch.”
2. The proper punctuation between the statement “Specter of martial not far fetched” and the attribution to the “political analyst” is a double dash or em dash, not a hyphen. A hyphen is a punctuation mark used to divide or to compound words, word elements, or numbers; the em dash, on the other hand, is used to show an abrupt change in thought or to punctuate a statement where a period is too strong and a comma too weak.
Corrected headline:
Specter of martial law not far-fetched—political analyst
The first passage from the news story:
“The looming specter of a martial law declaration is not far-fetched with the spate of bombing incidents in Metro Manila and other parts of the country, according to a political analyst.”
Problems:
1. The use of the adjective “looming” is redundant and semantically unnecessary because a “specter” by definition always looms, “a visible disembodied spirit or ghost” or “something that haunts or perturbs the mind.”
2. The construction of the political analyst’s quoted statement is semantically and logically faulty because of the bad positioning of the prepositional phrase “with the spate of bombing incidents in Metro Manila and other parts of the country”; in short, the conclusion doesn’t logically follow from the premise. Positioning that prepositional phrase ahead of the main clause would have delivered the message clearly and logically.
3. The word “declaration” is superfluous after “martial law” in the context of the statement in question here. The phrase “specter of martial law” is adequate, concise, and more elegant.
Suggested improvement of that sentence:
“With the recent spate of bombing incidents in Metro Manila and other parts of the country, the specter of martial law is not far-fetched, says a political analyst.”
Even better and more concise:
“With the recent spate of bombing incidents in Metro Manila and other parts of the country, martial law is not far-fetched, says a political analyst.”
The second passage and third passage from the story:
“(The political analyst) said series of bombings in 1972 to martial law declaration by the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos Sr.”
“Ultimately, the series of bombings in the country that time resulted to the installation into power a dictator and the revision of the 1973 Constitution…”
Problems:
1. Both sentences suffer from the very common misuse of the prepositional phrase “resulted to”; the correct form is “resulted in.”
2. The first sentence reads badly because of its overall awkward phrasing.
3. The second sentence suffers from missing prepositions and from this abstruse, awkward, Pidgin-sounding phrasing: “resulted to the installation into power a dictator and the revision of the 1973 Constitution…”
Corrected and improved versions of the two sentences:
“(The political analyst) said the series of bombings in 1972 resulted in the martial law declaration of the strongman Ferdinand Marcos Sr.”
“Ultimately, the series of bombings in the country at that time resulted in the installation into power of a dictator and in the revision of the 1973 Constitution…”
C. The grammatically flawed TV news commentator’s spiel
I thought I simply heard it wrong, but my 23-year-old son confirmed that he heard the same from the concluding spiel of the TV news commentator a few nights ago. She said with aplomb:
“No issue is too big or too small to affect you.”
It’s either the TV news scriptwriter doesn’t know his or her English grammar, or the TV news commentator missed out on a word as she read the script. This is because to make sense, that sentence should be phrased with a double negative, as follows:
“No issue is too big or too small not to affect you.”
Without the “not” to form a double negative, the statement is actually nonsensical, even absurd; it’s as if the TV news commentator had rendered trivial and irrelevant everything she had said in her commentary.
The moral of the story? Be extra-cautious when using double negatives. They could negate every good thing you say.
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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.
