In early February of 2016, an anguished letter was sent to the Personal Messages box of Jose Carillo’s English Forum. I’m presenting that letter here in full with minimal editing, but to protect their privacy, I’ve withheld the name of the letter-writer—a Forum member—and of the English teacher involved. It took me over two weeks to act on the letter because I wanted to avoid judging or moralizing on a matter that’s not entirely the province of English grammar and usage. In the end, though, I thought it would be for the public good to just share the letter as a cautionary tale about the perils of a student asserting to his teacher what’s good or bad English.
The letter:“Something terrible happened to me last Tuesday. My instructress in Earth and Environmental Science publicly confronted me because I corrected her grammatical mistake on the examination paper she gave our class.
“When I was answering the midterm exam, I found what I believed was a grammatical error in this sentence: ‘Mauna Loa is the largest volcano in the planet.’ I encircled the preposition ‘in’ and replaced it with ‘on.’
“In the afternoon, my teacher called me and confronted me in public. She told me how insensitive and offensive my actuation was, and how I had shown her practically no respect. She emphatically declared, ‘You are not greater than your teacher!’, then told me that I don’t have the right to rectify her mistake.
“Despite her immature behavior and apparent hysteria, I remained composed and just listened, although I have to admit that the confrontation made me feel really sick. If she did that same thing to a student with low self-esteem, that student might have experienced depressive episodes or committed suicide at worst.
“What can you say, Sir? I felt so offended and insulted by that teacher’s behavior. Was my act of silently correcting her English appropriate? Was my grammatical correction correct in the first place? Why are there people like that teacher of mine? What can I do as a student to address that problem?”
ILLUSTRATIVE IMAGE OF SCIENCE TEACHER ANGRILY CONFRONTING
HER STUDENT FOR CORRECTING HER ENGLISH TEST GRAMMAR
My comments:Prudence on the part of the student and better anger management on the part of the teacher could have precluded that very unpleasant confrontation. It’s neither here nor there now though, but as to the grammar issue involved, this is what I can say:
In the test sentence “Mauna Loa is the largest volcano in the planet,” the use of the preposition “in” rather than “on” is grammatically correct. Recall that the general rule for establishing relationships in space is to use “in” for an enclosed space, “on” for a surface, and “at” for a point. With the word “planet” though, this question arises: Isn’t it a surface rather than an enclosed space?
From the standpoint of its land area alone, Earth can indeed be considered a surface. It’s therefore grammatically correct to say “Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on Earth” and, to be didactic about the usage, also to say “The Philippines with its 7,100 islands is an archipelago that has the second biggest number of islands on Earth, next only to Indonesia with its 18,307 islands.”
From a planetary standpoint, however, Earth is an enclosed space. Its land surface is actually surrounded by an atmosphere with six sparse (but still material) layers of diminishing density: the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, ionosphere, and exosphere. Grammatically, this warrants the use of “in” for establishing the position of a volcano and all other objects within this enclosed space.
Clearly then, since the teacher used the word “planet” in the context of an enclosed space, her choice of the preposition “in” in the sentence “Mauna Loa is the largest volcano in the planet” is grammatically and defensibly correct.
(Next:
Tough, counterintuitive aspects of English grammar) March 14, 2019
This essay, 1,134th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the March 7, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
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