My attention was drawn to a September 17, 2018 memo to the heads of CEAP NCR Schools* by its Regional Trustee that has, in part, this grammatically faulty, rhetorically obtuse, and almost semantically incoherent statement: “For God and Country, let us in communio be at these events in as large as possible delegation of administrators, teachers, staff and students to express that an awful lot of whathavebeen and are happening and may still happen, while man-made, are strategized and manipulated,and have need to be straightened, out; and that integrity and the use of competence for the good of this nation's people have been too long in the back seat.” (This is a verbatim quote from the memo, fused words and faulty punctuation and all. Its full text is to be found in the GetRealPundit post that you can access by clicking this link.) This horribly bad English and the unfocused, slapdash thinking process that went with it reminded me of a curious parallel occasion many, many years ago that I recounted in an essay,“The Dangers of Overstatement.” Its relevance to this state of affairs now impels me to post it in the Forum retrospectively in time for the scheduled CEAP NCR “United People’s Action” being instigated by this memo at Rizal Park today, September 21, 2018, at 2:00 in the afternoon.The Dangers of OverstatementBy Jose A. CarilloAs a largely self-taught student of rhetoric, I watched and listened attentively to the homily that Sunday afternoon. The priest officiating the Mass exuded the verve and confidence of an experienced schoolmaster, speaking in fluent Tagalog interspersed with impeccable English. He obviously knew how to speak rhetorically, and I must say that at the start, his eloquence held me and the rest of the audience spellbound.
His elocution was classically Aristotelian. First, although a lector had already given him a suitable introduction, he restated his bonafides to more firmly establish his
ethos, or the appeal of a speaker’s character (“Yes, I am a teacher, make no mistake about that.”). Then, for
pathos, or the appeal to emotion, he used some academic-style humor that often drew laughter and half-smiles from the audience. I thus imagined that he was conversant with the Grecian flowers of rhetoric, so I naturally expected his homily to have a persuasive
logos or appeal to reason as well.
THIS PHOTO OF THE HOLY MASS CELEBRATION IS FOR REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY
To my bewilderment, however, he used a strange rhetorical device for the homily. What he did was to pick a native-language phrase—let’s just say
“pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“my closest friend”)—then playfully ask everybody what each letter of the first word represented. Of course, there really was no way even the most intelligent person could have fathomed what those were. It was like telling a quiz show contestant this: “Give me the names of all the persons who perished in the Titanic.” A mind with total recall and steeped in trivia probably could have hazarded a guess if the priest had used a concrete noun instead, like “Doe, a deer, a female deer/Ray, a drop of golden sun…” in that delightful song of the Von Trapps in
The Sound of Music. But the priest did it in the manner that people with nothing else to do will ask:
“Ano ang kahulugan ng bawat letra sa katagang ‘San Miguel’? Sirit na? Ang hina mo naman! E, di ‘(S)a (a)ming (n)ayon (m)ay (is)ang (g)inoo (u)minom (e)h (l)asing.” (“In our village a gentleman got drunk.”)
The rhetorical device he used certainly was not a
hyperbole, or an extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis or effect, as in “I ate so much that I must now be heavier than an elephant.” It could not have been a
simile or
metaphor, either, because no word was really compared or substituted with another. I had a fleeting feeling—soon gone—that it was some form of
synecdoche, a variant of the metaphor that mentions the part to signify a whole, as in “I need six hands” to mean “I need six people.” In hindsight, I can see now that it was a weak fusion of
metonymy and
prosopopoeia, the first being a figure of speech that substitutes some suggestive word for what is actually meant, and the latter—also called “personification”—one that invests human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects. In any case, his question was so nebulous that the priest, as might be expected, ended up providing all the answers himself.
The words he assigned to the letters of the word
“pinakamatalik” are no longer relevant, so I will not dwell on them here. They formed the core of his
logos, however, and from sheer repetition, they ultimately brought home the message of the beneficence, love, and invitation to the communion that God extends to us all. There was no question about that. The problem was that the priest didn’t know when to stop. Ever the taskmaster giving pupils a grammar drill to the very end, he dunned his listeners many times to repeat each word; when they balked, he would browbeat them until they relented and blurted out the words. Then he asked everyone to do what I thought bordered on the absurd: to say
“Ikaw ang pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“You are my closest friend.”) to his seatmate. He sternly badgered the listeners until he was satisfied that their collective voice was loud enough.
That was where, I think, the logic of his logos snapped; the liberties he took with the language simply became too embarrassing. Perhaps
“Ikaw ay aking kaibigan” would have been acceptable rhetorically, but to ask someone to tell a total stranger that he is “your closest friend”? This gave you the feeling that the priest was more interested in testing his power to elicit the blind obedience of his flock than in planting a divine message in their minds.
In his classic book,
Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that persuasion by argument is best achieved when the speaker’s chain of argumentation is not too hard to follow and not too long: “The links in the chain must be few.” I have this feeling that the priest, in coercing his listeners to be party to his convoluted rhetoric, had seriously violated that role on both counts. This is the danger in overstatement that all public speakers must always guard against to keep their persuasiveness intact.
This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times circa 2003 and subsequently appeared in Jose Carillo’s book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language
, ©2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.----------------
*CEAP NCR is the acronym of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP) National Capital Region.
