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Site Announcements / Playlist Update (April 6 - 12, 2024) Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on April 10, 2024, 01:14:35 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR APRIL 6 - 12, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 16 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 immodest medical jargon is used as a slogan”




2. Getting to Know English Better: “Mastery of the connectives can make us write and speak much better”


                                         
                                     
3. Use and Misuse: “Fused sentences are very serious, very annoying grammar violations”




4. You Asked Me This Question: “Inverted sentences have a subject-verb agreement peculiarity”




5. You Asked Me This Question: “A grammar conversation on parenthetical usage” with the late writer Ed Maranan, Palanca Awards Hall of Famer in Literature




6. My Media English Watch Retrospective: “Shock-and-awe English in Bohol earthquake reportage (2013)”




7. Getting To Know English Better: “Don’t get caught using wrong double negatives!”




8. Essays by Jose A.Carillo: “My hunch was right about the usage of 'between' and 'among'”




9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “Contributed jokes from all over to brighten up your day”




10. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Lockdown, Before and After,” a Retrospective by Tonybau, Forum Member and Contributor




11. Advice and Dissent: “As one goes way past the prime of one’s life,” a personal summing up by English professor and book writer Joseph Epstein




12. The Forum Lounge: “Young upcoming novelist on 'The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer'”




13. Time Out From English Grammar: “Peeling off the multilayered legends from ancient Greece”


 

14. Time Out From English Grammar: “The thief who stole 106 priceless timepieces in audacious museum heist”




15. Readings in Language: “In self-defense, we must see through deliberately devious English jargon”




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





12
Essays by Joe Carillo / When immodest medical jargon is used as a slogan
« Last post by Joe Carillo on April 10, 2024, 12:28:16 PM »
Many years back, while I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green on Ortigas Avenue corner EDSA in Metro Manila, my wife Leonor nudged me and pointed to an undulating phrase and image painted prominently on the side of a brand-new hospital ambulance that had stopped beside our car. The phrase was this hospital motto: “Patient on Center Stage, Service of Greater Worth.”

Leonor said with a scowl: “Oh that motto not only confuses me but gives me the creeps! If I were a patient in a hospital I wouldn’t want to be placed on center stage. I’d rather that they put me in a nice private room where only the doctors and nurses can efficiently but discreetly attend to me until I got well.”


                                        IMAGE CREDIT: FROM MODERNHEALTH.COM ARTICLE – CRAIN COMMUNICATIONS, INC.
Medical professionals at work in a modern hospital operating theater

“Dear, I think you misunderstood the phrase,” I said. “It’s using the words ‘Patient on Center Stage’ figuratively. It’s actually saying that when you are admitted into that hospital, you’ll become the focal point of its attention. They’ll treat you like a prima donna—the star of the show.”

“But that’s precisely what’s wrong with that phrase, Honey,” she said. “It considers being hospitalized more like showbiz than health care, and I must tell you that such a view evokes many unpleasant images in my mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that phrase gives me the feeling that in that hospital, they’d put patients on conspicuous display as a matter of procedure. Remember that creepy old operating theater in that London hospital—if I remember right it was in that Frankenstein movie that had Robert De Niro in the monster’s role—where doctors did major surgery on patients while dozens of medical students and other observers watched from a winding observation gallery high above the operating table? That’s definitely not my idea of excellent hospital service!”

“Now I see your point,” I said. “It’s a semantic problem. The motto’s ‘center stage’ metaphor is giving you negative imagery. That’s what happens when highly figurative language is used in supposedly commonsense statements, and the problem gets worse when such language is mixed with fuzzy jargon or business-speak. But you know, some pretesting through focus-group interviews could have caught that motto’s problem with its language.”

“That’s right—and pretesting could have also caught the problem with the second phrase. You see, it’s so difficult to understand what ‘Service of Greater Worth’ means. Are they saying that the services of that hospital actually should be priced higher than those of other hospitals? But then that’s not something worth crowing about from a marketing standpoint, is it? Also, I always thought that in English, when using comparatives like ‘greater,’ you need to identify the thing you are comparing something with. That second phrase doesn’t do that.”

“You’re right, and that makes its use of the comparative grammatically wrong. But I can see now that the phrase has an even bigger problem: it uses the word ‘worth’ very loosely. Of course, what the motto is trying to convey is that this hospital offers ‘better service’ than other hospitals, but this message gets garbled because the phrase ‘greater worth’ is wrongly used to mean ‘of greater value,’ when in fact those two mean entirely different things.”

“So how would that motto go if you were to rephrase it?”

“Frankly, dear, I don’t know how! Coming up with a good motto or slogan isn’t easy. It’s a creative act, actually an art form that needs not only good sense but also a great eye and ear for wordplay. You just know that a slogan is great or good or bad when you read or hear it for the first time. Listen to these slogans: ‘We’ve got it all for you!’ (of that big department store chain), ‘Where beautiful skin happens’ (of that facial care center), ‘Your success is our business’ (of that local bank), and ‘Delighting you always’ (of that foreign maker of electronic cameras and computer printers). Each of them uses felicitous wordplay to express a clear and persuasive idea. And they all ring true and convincing, giving us no reason at all to quibble over their words or to debate in our minds whether what they are saying is true or not.”

“I agree with you that those slogans are well-crafted and pleasing to the ears. Now why don’t you make an improved version of that hospital’s motto along the same lines?”

“I can’t, my dear, and that’s precisely my point. Making good mottoes or slogans isn’t something that just anybody can do on short notice, and it certainly shouldn’t be assigned to professionals whose minds are so steeped in business or medical jargon that they no longer find it comfortable to think in plain and simple English. Mottoes and slogans meant for the world at large are best written by professional wordsmiths—people who can create extraordinarily expressive, convincing, and memorable messages in just a few words.”

“Well,” Leonor sighed, “I hope that hospital gets one such slogan professional very soon to fix its airy motto.” (2005)

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
When immodest medical jargon is used as a slogan

(Next: The world in 854 words)        April 11, 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.
13
Site Announcements / Playlist Update for March 30 - April 5, 2024 of the Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on April 03, 2024, 11:38:12 AM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MARCH 30 - APRIL 5, 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 importance of grammar-perfect English”




2. You Asked Me This Question: “How long should a sentence be to effectively deliver an idea?”



                                         
                                     
3. Use and Misuse: “The grammar of English conditional sentences”




4. Students’ Sounding Board: “How to use ‘to have been’ and ‘having been’”




5. Pervasive Prickly Problem With An Idiomatic Phrase: “With regard to ‘with regards to’ or ‘as regards to’”




6. Essay by Jose A. Carillo Retrospective: “Open secret to writing prose that leaps out from the page”




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




8. You Asked Me This Question: “What does the term ‘Philippine area of responsibility’ mean?”





9. Language Humor at its Finest: “When children define science in their own terms”


There is a tremendous weight pushing down on the center of the Earth 
because of so much population stomping around up here these days.

10. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: "When even the passive voice isn't enough”




11. “Time Out From English Grammar: “The psychometric test that promised to be an ‘X-ray to the soul’”




12. Advice and Dissent: “Interpretive contests are essential in efforts to advance historical understanding"


BUST OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT, 312 CE


13. Readings in Language Retrospective: “When you really don't have anything to say but simply need to say it well”




14. A Forum Lounge Retrospective: “23 stunning, magically beautiful sights from all over the world”




15. A Forum Lounge Retrospective: “A beauty and a love verboten” by Angel B. Casillan, Forum Contributor





14
Essays by Joe Carillo / The importance of grammar-perfect English
« Last post by Joe Carillo on April 02, 2024, 06:13:36 PM »
Several years ago, when I went to a dental clinic in one of the big malls in Metro Manila to have a tooth filling restored, the front-desk clerk asked me to fill out a patient’s ledger card. The card was one those 5”x 8” affairs that ask for your name, address, telephone number, age, marital status, occupation, and allergies, but it had this curious final category in the all-noun information-gathering array: “Complain.” 

“Something’s wrong with this ledger card,” I told the clerk. “It spells ‘complain’ without the ‘t’ so it makes the word a command, which is grammatically and semantically wrong. The correct word to use is ‘complaint,’ a noun that has the added virtue of being in parallel with the all-noun elements in the set.”

                                        IMAGE CREDIT: COURTESY OF KASHMIRNEWSOBSERVER.COM

“Never mind that, sir,” the clerk said. “Those ledger cards are only supplied to us by a drug company for free and they all use the same word. Anyway, sir, ‘complain’ and ‘complaint’ are the same thing anyway, so why all the fuss?” 

“But I do mind, miss, because those two words don’t mean the same thing, “ I said. “You better tell the dentist to tell that drug company to tell its supplier to tell its printer to correct that word to ‘complaint’ by adding ‘t.’ And right now, before I even fill out this form, I am crossing out that wrong word and replacing it with the right one, OK?”  “If you say so, sir,” the clerk replied huffily.

“I just don’t understand why you waste your time over such petty matters.” 

Since it so happened that the dentist was ready to see me, I didn’t get the chance to explain to the clerk why all users of English should mind such errors and correct them. As my favorite saying about language goes, “A society is generally as lax as its language.” (This is the banner slogan of The Vocabula Review, a well-regarded website on English usage active at that time.)

In retrospect, though, I can see more clearly now why some people simply couldn’t fathom why the noun form of the verb “complain” should end with a “t.” The word “complaint” just happens to be one of the very few English nouns—there are actually only four of them—that had been formed by adding the suffix “t” to a verb ending in “-ain.” All of French derivation, those nouns are “complaint,” “constraint,” “distraint,” and “restraint.”

Most English verbs that became nouns took the present participle or “-ing” form, which made them gerunds, such as “undertaking” (from the verb “undertake”), “launching” (from “launch”), and “rating” (from “rate”). Many other verbs took the suffix “-ion” or “-age” to become nouns, such as “abstraction” (from “abstract”), “rotation” (from “rotate”), “marriage” (from “marry”), and “carriage” (from “carry”).

Of course, there are also several nouns formed by adding the suffix “-al” to the verb, such as “acquittal” (from “acquit”), “rebuttal” (from “rebut”), and “referral” (from “refer”), but in such cases, note that when the verb ends in a consonant, that consonant is repeated before the suffix is added. And finally, there are some abstract nouns that were formed by adding the suffix “-ence” to the verb, such as “insistence” (from “insist”), “existence” (from “exist”), and “difference” (from “differ”).

But even granting that people knew these characteristics and peculiarities of English nouns, many of them would likely still make the mistake of including the verb “complain” in an all-noun array if they were clueless about parallelism. Thus, in situations like this, it’s very important to remember this basic parallelism rule: all elements in a list—whether nouns, verbs, infinitives, gerunds, and participles—should take the same grammatical form.

Thus, in that dental patient’s ledger card where all the elements are nouns (“name,” “address,” “telephone number,” “age,” “marital status,” and so forth), you need to add a “t” to the verb “complain” to make it a noun so it will be parallel with all the other nouns in the list.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
The importance of grammar-perfect English

(Next: When business-speak goes over our heads)     April 11, 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.
15
Site Announcements / Playlist Update for March 23 - 29, 2024 of the Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 26, 2024, 07:15:00 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MARCH 23 - 29, 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 Carillo: "The Tree of Life, aka The Tree of Knowledge”




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


                                         
                                     
3. Getting to Know English: "The grammar of antecedents in English”




4. You Asked Me This Question: "Is there such a thing as a complex-complex sentence?”


COMPOUND-COMPLEX SENTENCES, YES, BUT THERE ARE
NO COMPLEX-COMPLEX SENTENCES


5. Getting to Know English: "Some perplexing aspects of noun usage in English”




6. Students’ Sounding Board: "Is the multiple use of the first-person 'I' necessarily a redundancy?"




7. English Grammar Basics Refresher: “A puzzling peculiarity of grammatical objects in English”




8. You Asked Me This Question: “Simple random questions that need a lot of explaining to answer”




9. Language Humor at its Finest: "Gems of the fine but now vanishing art of persiflage”




10. Essay by Jose Carillo Retrospective: “A personal tribute to the late Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez”




11. Time Out From English Grammar: “A chronicle of the discoveries that shaped the Copernican revolution”




12. Advice and Dissent: "After over 500 years, will the true site of the first Holy Mass be affirmed at last?”


The environs of 1521 Butuan and map of Mazaua Island as drawn by Pigafetta in his chronica


13. Readings in Language: "Five ostensibly factual expressions we need to take with a grain of salt”




14. Time Out From English Grammar: "Revisiting our faith this Good Friday” by Maximo Tumbali, Forum Contributor




15. The Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Things my Mother taught me,” shared with us by Ben Sanchez, Forum Contributor





16
Essays by Joe Carillo / The Tree of Life, aka The Tree of Knowledge
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 26, 2024, 04:30:04 PM »
The Tree of Life, aka The Tree of Knowledge
By Jose A. Carillo

I have given it a lot of thought, and now I suspect that the original Tree of Knowledge aka The Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was not a living plant but a powerful computer. The Bible was surprisingly silent about the nature of that tree, so artists and writers through the ages had felt free to variously picture it as an apple tree, a fig tree, a pear tree, a dragon’s blood tree, even a banana tree. I understand that in a 13th century cathedral somewhere in France, there was even a fresco that showed Eve finding a serpent coiled around a giant branching European mushroom, the lightly toxic and hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria, drawn with Provencãl innocence to represent the tree that gave us our much-dreaded mortality. These images of the Tree of Knowledge are as charming as the Romans envisioning their messenger-god Mercury as a runner with winged feet, as frightening as the early Christians sketching the devil as a thoroughly beastly creature with serpent’s snout and bat wings, and as heavenly as the Renaissance artists conjuring archangels with majestic, blindingly white eagle’s wings.
                                             LEAD-GLAZED EARTHENWARE MADE BY THOMAS TOFT, ©THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge: C.206-1928

All of this ancient imagery, however, miserably fails to capture the essence of a device or icon that is supposed to represent the most powerful source of wisdom and instruction the world has ever known. An apple tree, a banana tree, or a vine-like mushroom as the Tree of Knowledge? This seems to me to stretch the credulity of even a nine-year-old grade-schooler much too much! I would therefore rather think of the Tree of Knowledge as a Pentium 4 personal computer with a 56 kbps fax modem, hooked up by a powerful Internet server to the World Wide Web, capable of directly feeding on the 2.5 billion documents accessible to the Internet and of being able to sift through 520 billion more that are publicly accessible in other databases.* I could not think of any other compendium or structure, no matter how massive, that could draw on such a huge database and merit “Tree of Knowledge” as a sobriquet, much less make this database accessible to even the small populace of the Garden of Eden close to the time of Creation.

Of course I realize that a myriad conceptual objections can be raised against this seemingly whimsical intellectual construct. Chief of these is the question of how the Pentium 4 and the Internet could have gotten themselves into the Garden of Eden in the first place. Could it be that they had managed to quietly transport themselves back in time and install themselves into the Tree of Knowledge, or else disguise themselves as the tree itself? Those fixated with time’s immutability would of course deem this too farfetched, as improbable as the tales of extraterrestrial visitations peddled by the Danish writer Erik von Daeniken. But it is at least not as preposterous a concept as a fruit tree being the source of all human understanding and wisdom. A tree as a source of life, yes, like our coconut with its proverbial one thousand and one uses, from food to shelter to medicine to fuel and to lumber; but just any tree as source of all knowledge, I really wonder.

Imagined digital art rendition of The Tree of Knowledge
 

And what about the paradox that would result if we believed that the Tree of Knowledge drew its power from a state-of-the-art Pentium? Would that belief still hold if we consider the fact that the computer and the Web are actually the culmination of the series of small and big inventions that sprung from Adam and Eve having eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge itself? Remember that the computer became possible only because somewhere early in time, man discovered and learned how to harness fire, then found a way centuries later to use it to melt the tiny particles of glass in sand into wafers of silicon, then developed a method for converting these wafers into transistor chips and into extremely powerful motherboards and processors that are the heart of the modern computer. Remember, too, that the Internet and the Web are of a much more recent vintage. It was only in 1973 that the Internet came into being, the happy result of American research into technologies to interlink computer networks of various kinds. Another 21 years into the future, in 1994, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to unify and integrate the Internet’s global information and communication structure. Since then it has expanded into a global network of networks, enabling computers of all kinds—including yours and mine—to directly communicate and share services throughout much of our planet.

What is perhaps little appreciated in this dizzying train of inventions is that the modern computer and the Web have been essentially a continuing but silent Hindu-Arabic-European-American co-production, and that at the root of it was the ancient Indo-European language and the Arabic number system. We know, of course, that these twin foundations of our civilization moved into Europe and jumped across the English Channel into England, polishing themselves into the English language and into the Arabic number system that we know so well today. It really is no wonder that Boolean algebra, a mathematical system of representing logical propositions that became the foundation for the modern computer, was developed by the English language expert and mathematician George Boole in the very same soil that produced the wonder of English literature that was William Shakespeare. The Chinese may have invented paper, the abacus, and gunpowder, and the Romans may have built their empire that extended all the way to Africa and to the banks of the Mesopotamian River in what is now modern Iraq, but I simply cannot conceive of the modern computer built from Chinese script or from the Roman numeral system, with which no stable building taller than the Roman Coliseum could be built because the system simply could not multiply and divide numbers properly.

That the Tree of Knowledge could not have been a fruit tree but a computer linked to the Web may remain debatable, and I will not quibble with that fact. But to me, one thing is clear and certain: the computer and the Worldwide Web have made the Tree of Knowledge much more accessible and closer to us than ever before, and it would be a tragedy if not outright foolish for anyone not to learn to freely partake of its fruits. (2002)

From English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright 2008 by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
-------
*Since this essay was written, of course, the Pentium 4 processor has since been supplanted in personal computers by much more advanced and powerful processors like the Core-Duo, and Google has grown even more explosively from 2,469,940,685 web pages in 2002 to over 30,000,000,000 today. It can thus be said that the computing machines and the online search engine capability that I had described glowingly in this 2002 essay are now obsolete. (2009)

This essay, which first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2002 and subsequently formed part of my book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, is part of a collection of my personal essays from mid-2002 to date.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
The Tree of Life, aka The Tree of Knowledge

(Next: The importance of grammar-perfect English)     April 4, 2024
17
Site Announcements / Playlist Update for March 16 - 22, 2024 of the Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 21, 2024, 01:35:15 AM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MARCH 16 - 22, 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: “Keeping English prose trim and slim”


                                         
                                     
2. Use and Misuse: "Avoiding awful misuses of the English possessive”




3. You Asked Me This Question: "The strange grammar of 'need' as modal auxiliary”




4. Getting to Know English Better: “Playing it by ear when to use a gerund or infinitive"




5. Students’ Sounding Board: “Differentiating the use of 'than' and 'than that of'"




6. Getting to Know English Better: “When even the passive voice won’t suffice”




7. A Holy Week Retrospective: “A matter of faith” by Jose A.Carillo




8. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: "The facts make it physically impossible for Limasawa to be Mazzaua"


The 1521 map Pigafetta drew of Mazaua and his own sketch of the island as site of the first Holy Mass


9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “40 choice paraprosdokians to make sense of our times”




10. Readings in Language: "Self-taught scholar-researcher uncovers 'inspiration' for 11 Shakespeare plays”




11. Time Out From English Grammar: “A novelist in ill health races with time to finish a masterpiece”




12. Time Out From English Grammar: “What do you do if Medusa gazes at you or Dracula bites your neck?”




13. The Forum Lounge: “A wheelchair dancer lives up her dream” by Tonybau, Forum Contributor




14. The Forum Lounge: “Hidden miracles of the natural world,” a Louie Schwartzberg TED video presentation




15. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Growing up with my father" by Angel B. Casillan, Forum Contributor





18
Getting to Know English / Keeping English prose trim and slim
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 18, 2024, 02:50:39 PM »
Very much like the human body, English prose has to be kept trim and slim to command attention, to be credible, and to merit continuing interest. Compositions become unsightly and a pain to read when they use the passive voice much too often, when they take recourse to expletives at every turn, and when they rely too much on adjective clauses to qualify or relate ideas. The result is unhealthy flab that must be ruthlessly excised through self-editing and—if need be—total rewriting.


We already know that using the passive voice indiscriminately makes English sentences such sluggish creatures. That’s what happens when the subject of the sentence receives the action of the verb rather than does it: “The key was inserted into the doorknob by the woman, and it was turned by her.” Two actions (“was inserted” and “was turned”) were done to the subject (“the key”) by someone (“the woman”). Things happen as if in slow motion right before our eyes.

Now see how the active voice gives the sentence the spark of real action: “The woman inserted the key into the doorknob and turned it gently.” This time, “the woman” becomes the rightful doer of the action, the action unfolds as it happens in real life, and “the key” is put in its proper place—not as something that can act by itself in a void, as in telekinesis, but as something one physically does something to. Fewer words are used in the process (16 versus 19) and the preposition “by” makes a neat disappearing act.

The active-voice mindset likewise forces us to use active verbs instead of passive ones that need the verb “be” for grammatical support. Look at this passive-voice description: “The car was overturned by the strong wind.” The conventional way of reconstructing this weak sentence into an active one is, of course, to use “the strong wind” as the doer of the action: “The strong wind overturned the car.”

This reconstruction is good enough as it goes. But see how much more direct and more vigorous the prose becomes by using active verbs, even with “the car” still as the subject: “The car flipped [somersaulted, twirled, turned turtle, rolled over] in the strong wind.” The active voice—with very few exceptions—is always our best bet for keeping descriptions vivid and narratives moving briskly.

Excessive use of expletive constructions likewise slows down the rhythm of prose. Recall that expletives are the words that we use as grammatical crutches to form thoughts quickly and with little effort: “It is,” “There is,” “There are,” “There were.” The problem with them is that they perform no grammatical function other than to get our sentences started. See how they just lengthen and weaken sentences: “There is an abundance of fruits in summer.” (The expletive excised: “Fruits abound in summer.”) “There were no takers of the special bargain offer.” (“The special bargain offer had no takers.”) “It is my opinion that the movie is overrated.” (“The movie is overrated.”) Notice how eliminating the expletive allows the verb to spring back to life and do real, honest-to-goodness work.

The overuse of adjective clauses is another cause of wordiness—aside, of course, from hampering the smooth, natural rhythm of prose. Adjective clauses, you will remember, are those strings of words that we add to sentences to modify a noun or pronoun; they are introduced by the relative pronouns “who,” “whom,” “whose,” “that,” and “which.” These relative pronouns serve sentences well by qualifying ideas and establishing relationships among them, but they are often expendable: sentences often flow and read better without them.

One way to get rid of them is to change the relative clause into a phrase: “The man, who was identified as the suspect, was freed for lack of evidence.” (“The man identified as the suspect was freed for lack of evidence.”) “The woman, whom we thought was most suitable for the job, backed out at the last moment.” (“The woman we thought most suitable for the job backed out at the last moment.”) “My architect is the one whose office building designs won international awards.” (“My architect won international awards for his office building designs.”) “We are looking for office space that has an independent air-conditioning unit.” (“We are looking for office space with an independent air-conditioning unit.”)

Sometimes we can change a non-restrictive clause into a neat appositive phrase: “Many baby-boomer parents expect their children to wake up early in the morning, which is a habit they themselves learned from their own parents in the 1940s.” (“Many baby-boomer parents expect their children to wake up early in the morning, a habit they themselves learned from their own parents in the 1940s.”)

In some cases, a single word or two can nicely take the place of an entire phrase in a sentence: “One of the members of the delegation that represented the Philippines missed the flight.” (A Philippine delegate missed the flight.”)
------------------------
This essay first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times and subsequently formed Chapter 138  of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

Check out “A masterful guide to the craft of modern nonfiction writing,” the Forum’s earlier feature of Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd’s book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, in the Forum’s Readings in Languages section. https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=5836.0

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Keeping English prose trim and slim

(Next: The Tree of Knowledge)        March 28, 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.
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Advice and Dissent / "The facts make it physically impossible for Limasawa to be Mazzaua"
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 15, 2024, 07:10:56 PM »
The Forum is publishing today a photographic reproduction of a letter by Philippine historian Vicente C. de Jesus way back on April 7, 1998 thanking Dr. Samuel K.Tan, then the Chairman and Executive Director of the Philippine National Historical Institute, for furnishing him a copy of the Gancayco Panel Resolution that officially accepted with finality the island of Limasawa in Leyte as the site of the very first Holy Mass in the Philippine Archipelago officiated on March 31,1521 or over 500 years ago.

De Jesus rued the Gancayco Panel's decision: "We offered new proofs, documents and arguments crucial to Mazzaua. Our study cover[ed] historiography, linguistics, hydrography, calligraphy, paleography, celestial navigation, and others...[T]he body accepted without question the Gines de Mafra eyewitness account and other documents...that Magelan's fleet anchored west of the isle, that Mazzaua is below Butuan separated from it by 15 leguas, that the isle's size is 3 to 4 leguas. All these make it physically impossible for Limasawa to be Mazzaua...

"Limasawa was an honest error by well-intentioned historians victimized by a conspiracy of circumstances. In excluding Gines de Mafra particularly, I am afraid a lie is being foisted on the Nation..."
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*legua (plural leguas) - a traditional Spanish unit of distance equivalent to about 4.2 km

Below is the de Jesus letter in full:


This is apropos to "Historian's commentary on Gines de Mafra's account of the Magellan expedition" as posted in the Forum by Dr. Jorge Mojarro Romero, Ph.D, on March 9, 2021.

Mafra’s account of the Magellan expedition
By Dr. Jorge Mojarro Romero, Ph.D

This commentary on the eyewitness accounts of Gines de Mafra and Antonio Pigafetta--they were a crewmember and the official chronicler, respectively, of the Magellanic Fleet and its landmark sojourn in the Philippine archipelago 500 years ago--came out in the Opinion section of the March 9, 2021 issue of The Manila Times. The Spanish historian Dr. Jorge Mojarro expressed the hope that this brief reminder about Gines de Mafra's eyewitness account of the Magellanic expedition will highlight the necessity to read the original sources critically and to compare the different versions of events to arrive at a more accurate and truthful reconstruction of the past. https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8340.0
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Site Announcements / Playlist Update for March 9 - 15, 2024 of the Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 13, 2024, 12:35:44 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MARCH 9 - 15, 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: “The age of imprecision”


                                         
                                     
2. Getting To Know English Better: “The great importance of parallelism in good writing” - Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4




3. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: "Good communicators hone the use of indirect questions to a fine art”




4. You Asked Me This Question: “How do ‘I hope’ and ‘hopefully’ differ and is the latter acceptable usage?”




5. Getting to Know English Better: “Can superlative attributes apply to any number of comparables?"




6. Just In Case You Missed The Forum's 2016 Year-End Folio: “Six personal essays and six general-interest readings”




7. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: "How genius is within everyone’s reach—but even wisdom, too?”




8. Just a Fleeting Look at History: “Truer, flesh-and-blood portraits of Borgia, Machiavelli, and Da Vinci”




9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “What the teacher says and what the teacher means”




10. Time Out From Grammar Retrospective: “Coping with our inability to predict natural cataclysms”




11. Readings in Language: “An exemplar in horror fiction shares his thoughts on writing”




12. Time Out From English Grammar: “Three eye-opening science readings to fight irrationality”




13. A Forum Lounge Special: “Two magnificent performances of 'The Prayer,' spaced 10 years apart”


THE CHARLOTTE CHURCH-JOSH GROBAN “THE PRAYER”
2002 LIVE CONCERT PERFORMANCE


THE CHARICE PEMPENGCO AND THE CANADIAN TENORS
“THE PRAYER” 2010 LIVE TV PERFORMANCE


14. Their Thoughts Exactly: “Medjugorie, here they come“ by Fred Natividad, Forum Contributor




15. The Forum Lounge: “Charles Aznavour sings a classic!”





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