“Dad, do kingfishers eat butter?”
I thought my 12-year-old son was kidding me when he asked me this question many, many ago, but he wasn’t. As proof, he showed me the front-page newspaper item that had this curious passage: “The Silvery Kingfisher . . . thrives in aquatic habitats and eats fish, insects, butter and dragon flies, and small crabs.” [italics mine]
(http://josecarilloforum.com/imgs/kingfisher_flying-1M1.png)
A kingfisher diving for food
“No, Jack,” I said, “the kingfisher couldn’t be that fastidious as a food connoisseur. A butter-eating kingfisher? No way! I think it’s simply a bad case of elision. What that sentence actually meant to say is that the Silvery Kingfisher eats butterflies and dragonflies,” but this part of the kingfisher’s insect diet got wrongly elided into “butter and dragonflies,” which of course is absurd.
“Mmmm . . . I see what you mean, Dad. I just wish the writer and editor of this piece were more organized and careful with their English. You see, I was thinking that since butterflies and dragonflies are insects, and since fish and crabs are both aquatic animals, that passage would read much better if written this way: ‘The Silvery Kingfisher. . . thrives in aquatic habitats and eats fish and small crabs as well as insects like butterflies and dragonflies.’ Everything would have been in its proper place.”
“Right, Jack! That’s a neat organizing touch—putting together fish and small crabs in a single phrase, and putting together butterflies and dragonflies as the insects that they are. You can make sentences much clearer by grouping similar things together instead of the helter-skelter way they were presented in that passage.,. Now you should get going for your football practice.”
“OK, Dad, but just one more question. You used a word that’s new to me—‘elision.’ What does it mean?”
“In general, Jack, elision is the omission of one or more sounds from a word or phrase—maybe a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable—to produce a more easily pronounced or euphonic statement. In the kingfisher case, however, it was the omission for brevity’s sake of something presumed to be obvious. But the writer made a serious mistake. He or she thought that since the term ‘flies’ is common to the words ‘butterflies’ and ‘dragonflies,’ that term can be detached from each of them to stand as a generic word for both. This is a terribly wrong and deadly case of elision. ‘Flies’ couldn’t be a generic term for ‘butterflies’ and ‘dragonflies.’ That word is an entirely different genus, or a class, kind, or group marked by common characteristics. ‘Butterflies’ and ‘dragonflies’ are generic on their own, with insect flight—not flies—as a common characteristic.”
“I get it now, Dad. But is elision always bad for language?”
“Only if done badly as in that kingfisher passage. Elision actually works very well in informal conversations, as when people make contractions like ‘I’m’ for ‘I am’ and ‘shouldn’t’ for ‘should not,’ or in poetry, when it becomes necessary to omit or elide an unstressed vowel or syllable to achieve a uniform metrical pattern.”
“I see. But does elision have any practical uses in day-to-day writing?”
“Definitely, son! In written compositions, when things in an enumerative sequence are modified by the same compound adjective, it’s much better to elide or take out the common term in that compound adjective and use it only once at the end of the enumerative sequence. For instance, professional business writers will never be caught writing statements like this one: ‘The strawberry-flavored, apple-flavored, cherry-flavored, and mint-flavored drinks sold very well during the summer months.’ They would elide the common term ‘-flavored’ to produce this more concise, streamlined statement: ‘The strawberry-, apple-, cherry-, and mint-flavored drinks sold very well during the summer months.’ Keep in mind, though, that the intended effect of the hyphens is difficult to achieve when such statements are spoken, so elisions like this work well only in writing.”
“Well, Dad, I guess I’ll just have to be very careful with elisions. I’d hate to end up writing about fastidious birds like that butter-eating kingfisher without really meaning to.”
This essay first appeared in my “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times and subsequently became Chapter 139 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:
Do kingfishers eat butter? (https://www.manilatimes.net/2024/06/20/campus-press/do-kingfishers-eat-butter/1952259)
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.
Next week: Aiming for euphony in our prose (June 20, 2024)