October 27, 2024
Dear Forum Reader and Friend,
During the past 21 years, my column “English and Simple” in The Manila Times and its eventual companion web platform Jose Carillo’s English Forum (starting 2009) have provided readers and Forum members with a continuing stream of critiques of the quality of the English in the news reportage, opinions and commentaries, as well as commercial advertising carried by the mass media and social media entities that we are monitoring. Our primary objective in these efforts is to help Filipinos in their homeland and overseas improve their proficiency in English through a much better understanding of its grammar, semantics, standard usage, and language peculiarities.
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In this our latest Forum retrospective, we are presenting the Forum’s critiques of the 10 most notable instances through the years when the news stories and commentaries under review terribly showed bad sense and awful English grammar. Do take time to read them and see for yourself why we had not been as lenient and forgiving in our appraisal of their faulty English usage:
1. “It’s obtuse, even distasteful, to say that seeing a doctor is ‘pleasurable’” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=7508.0) (April 13, 2018)
2. “The perils of misusing literary allusions in feature stories” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=1519.0) (May 29, 2011)
3. “Shock-and-awe English in 2013 Bohol earthquake reportage” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=7016.0) (October 18, 2013)
4. “Open letter on news stories that Filipinas have the world’s smallest breasts” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=6631.0) (July 15, 2016)
5. “When immodest medical jargon is used as a slogan” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=9032.0”) (April 10, 2005)
6. “The madcap names of the party-list groups” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=7707.0) (May 8, 2010)
7. “Retrospective on the importance of grammar-perfect English” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=9030.0) (April 20, 2024)
8. “The state of our English” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=48.0) (May 22, 2009)
9. “Do kingfishers eat butter?” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=6755.0) (2004)
10. “A crash course in politically correct English” (https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=6256.0) (July 26, 2014)
With my best wishes,
Joe Carillo
Att.: As stated