Messages

1

Site Announcements / Playlist Update (October 5 - 11, 2024) of Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« on: October 09, 2024, 02:04:43 PM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR OCTOBER 5 - 11, 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 Better: “Using reference word strategies to avoid too much word repetition”


IMAGE CREDIT: PINTEREST.COM
                                    SOME REFERENCE WORD STRATEGIES TO REDUCE
                                      TOO MUCH WORD REPETITION IN OUR SENTENCES


2. You Asked Me This Question: “Precisely how do the English demonstrative pronouns work?”




3. Use and Misuse: “Those troublesome modifiers of countable or uncountable nouns!”




4. My Media English Watch Retrospective: “Highly politicized physics and grammatically faulty news reporting”

                 


5. Getting to Know English: “The little-heralded past imperfect tense in English”




6. Essays by Jose A. Carillo: “A potent tool for whittling down complex sentences into simpler ones”




7. Students’ Sounding Board Retrospective: “An assortment of bewildering questions about English usage





8. Your Thoughts Exactly: “The Theater of Life," personal essay by Forum Member Melvin (pseud.)




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


 

10. Readings in Language: “A recovered ancient manuscript changes the course of human thought”




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




12. Time Out From English Grammar: “Geniuses are clear proof that people are not created equal,” American historian on the evolution of the concept of genius from antiquity to the present day




13. Education and Teaching: “ASEAN TeachingEnglish Online Conference now underway till October 30 to challenge traditional teaching paradigms”




14. The Forum Lounge: “What Peter Dinklage walked away from to become a resounding success” (YouTube video)




14. Education and Teaching: “ASEAN TeachingEnglish Online Conference now underway till October 30 to challenge traditional teaching paradigms”




15. The Forum Lounge  Retrospective: “Lost in the English translation--The Tagalog word Nakakagigil!”

Click this link to earlier Playdate features

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language

2

Getting to Know English / Using reference word strategies to avoid repetition

« on: October 09, 2024, 08:36:05 AM »

Most of us hate the icky feeling of seeing or hearing the same word over and over again in the same statement, as in this case: “This cellular phone comes in three colors. The first of the colors is gray, the second of the colors is beige, and the third of the colors is blue.” Writers or speakers who come up with such constructions wrongly assume that by repeating the phrase “of the colors” three times in a row to reinforce the phrase “in three colors” in the first sentence, they are making themselves crystal clear. On the contrary, they just make themselves boringly repetitive instead.

A good way to avoid this construction bind is to use the reference word strategy. This is the active effort of preventing the needless recurrence of certain words or phrases in our prose by methodically using more concise words or phrases in their place. These replacements, called reference words, are not the kind we usually hunt for in dictionaries or thesauruses. Reference words are those that we can figure out logically from the relationships of the phrases in the sentence itself, or those that we can readily deduce from their contexts.

   IMAGE CREDIT: PINTEREST.COM

SOME REFERENCE WORD STRATEGIES TO REDUCE
TOO MUCH WORD REPETITION IN OUR SENTENCES

One of these reference word strategies is the noun omission technique, which  avoids the recurrent use of a noun by using the following words in its place: (1) “one,” “another,” and “the other” for three singular count nouns in consecutive order; and (2) the nouns “some,” “others,” and “the others” (or “the rest”) in place of the plural count adjectives “some,” “other,” and “the others” that we normally use right before plural count nouns to modify them. After the noun omission process, however, we must keep in mind that these words become pronouns and cease to work as adjectives.

Of course, the technique of using “one,” “another,” and “the other” in place of three singular count nouns in consecutive order should already be second nature to us. Thus, we know that the repetitive statement at the beginning of this column can take this more concise, more forceful form: “This cellular phone comes in three colors. One is gray, another is beige, and the other is blue.” We should also be very familiar with the technique of organizing our sentences when only two singular count nouns in consecutive order are involved. All we have to do is use “one” and “the other” in tandem: “This cellular phone comes in two colors. One is gray; the other is blue.”

While we are at it, we might as well answer this question: What happens if there are more than three singular count nouns in consecutive order—say, if there are four or six of them? As most of us already know, we simply use the already familiar numerical order technique: “This cellular phone comes in four colors. The first is gray, the second is beige, the third is blue, and the fourth [or last] is green.” Or we can use a serial numbering sequence: “This cellular phone comes in six colors. Color number 1 is gray, 2 is beige, 3 is blue, 4 is green, 5 is pink, and 6 is maroon.” It’s really all that simple.

Things are only a little bit different when we deal with three or more plural count nouns in consecutive order. For instance, if we didn’t use noun omission as a reference word strategy, we might come up with a longwinded sentence like this: “Some of the presidential aspirants are credible, other presidential aspirants are obviously unqualified, and other presidential aspirants are simply nuisance candidates.” Using the noun omission technique, we can boil down the sentence to this more concise and more elegant form: “Some of the presidential aspirants are credible, others are obviously unqualified, and the rest are simply nuisance candidates.”

We can also use elliptical construction to make the sentence even more concise, this time by eliminating the repetitive verb “are” after the first noun clause: “Some of the presidential aspirants are credible, others obviously unqualified, and the rest simply nuisance candidates.” In a sense, noun omission as reference word strategy is another form of elliptical sentence construction, which, we will remember, is the grammar technique of eliminating certain obvious elements in a sentence in a way that doesn’t distort its meaning.

Some caveats when using noun omission for three or more plural count nouns in consecutive order: (1) Never use the word “another” instead of “other” before a plural count noun; thus, this sentence is grammatically wrong: “Some of the presidential aspirants are credible, another presidential aspirants are obviously unqualified.” (The correct way: “Some of the presidential aspirants are credible; other presidential aspirants are obviously unqualified.”); (2) The phrases “the rest” and “the rest of the” are inviolate; they cannot be shortened to “rest” or “rest of them”; thus, this sentence is unacceptable: “Some of the presidential aspirants are credible, others are obviously unqualified, and rest are simply nuisance candidates.” (The correct way: “Some of the presidential aspirants are credible, other presidential aspirants are obviously unqualified, and the rest are simply nuisance candidates.”).

This essay, which first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times, subsequently became Chapter 54 of my book Giving Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Using reference word strategies to avoid repetition

Next week: Using repeated action and sequence words      (October 17, 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.

3

Site Announcements / Forum letter on Second Batch of Silent Fire Retrospectives

« on: October 07, 2024, 08:21:56 AM »

October 6, 2024

Dear Forum Member and Friend,

The Forum is pleased to announce the posting today, October 6, of the Second Batch of its retrospective of 12 selected "Silent Fire" columns--three columns per batch--that started last Sunday, September 29. This retrospective is primarily for the benefit of very young English-language learners and very busy adult learners at the time who had likely missed reading these columns.

The Second Batch consists of these three "Silent Fire" columns that appeared in the Campus Press section of The Manila Times in 2008-2009, as follows:

4 - "Grammar curiosities and crudities"
5 - "Doing battle with bad English grammar"
6 - "Grammar imprecisions, semantic near-misses"

Simply click this link to access and read all three of them: https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=9156.0.

If you haven't read yet the earlier three Batch 1 columns, click this link: https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=9150.0   

The Third Batch and Fourth Batch--each consisting of three columns--are scheduled for these coming two Sundays, October 13 and 20.

With our best wishes!

Sincerely yours,
Joe Carillo

4

Silent Fire Retrospectives / Silent Fire Retrospectives - Batch 2

« on: October 06, 2024, 08:15:06 AM »

Silent Fire Retrospectives - Batch 2
By Jose A. Carillo


Silent Fire was my Saturday column on English usage in The Manila Times from 2008 - 2009, completing what used to be a six-times-a-week run of my English Plain and Simple columns during the first two years of its continuing 18-year-run to date. This is the second batch of a retrospective series of 12 selected Silent Fire columns—three columns per batch that started last Sunday, September 29—that I am running  primarily for the benefit of very young English-language learners and too busy adult learners at the time who had likely missed reading them.

Feedback about the English grammar critiques presented in these columns is most welcome.


4 - Grammar curiosities and crudities 

Let’s dissect the last two of the six grammar curiosities and crudities that I asked Forum readers to fix to test their own English proficiency:

“News photos showed the derailed train laying at the bottom of a ditch, with rescuers removing passengers from a carriage that had fallen onto its side.” (Foreign news service story)

“As a young short story fellow at the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio a decade ago, the workshop banner carried our batch’s official theme: Who do you write for?” (Newspaper columnist) 

Grammar-savvy readers must have easily figured out what’s wrong with the first sentence above. It misuses the progressive form of the transitive verb “lay,” which means “to put or set something down.” The correct verb to use here is the progressive form of the intransitive “lie,” which means “to stay at rest horizontally,” as shown in the corrected sentence below:

“News photos showed the derailed train lying at the bottom of a ditch, with rescuers removing passengers from a carriage that had fallen onto its side.”

                                                           IMAGE CREDIT: WRITERSDIGEST.COM

But the more interesting question is: Why are people so prone to mixing up “lay” and “lie”? Well, to begin with, they are look-alikes, sound-alikes, and mean-alikes. Even worse, they sometimes inflect into a bewildering form in certain tenses; oddly, for instance, the past-tense form of the intransitive “lie” takes exactly the same form as that of the present-tense plural of the transitive “lay”—“lay” in both cases. It’s really no wonder why even seasoned writers and editors often bungle their use.    

(If you think I’m overstating the case about how notoriously misused this verb-pair is, look at this recent reportage by a foreign news service on an earthquake devastation in China at the time: “An hour after the quake, a half-dozen patients in blue-striped pajamas stood outside the hospital. One was laying on a hospital bed in the parking lot.” The correct verb form here is, of course, “lying,” the progressive form of the intransitive verb “lie.”)

As to the second problematic sentence in question, its message has been mangled by a badly misplaced modifier. The prepositional phrase “as a young short story fellow at the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio a decade ago” absurdly modifies the wrong subject, “the workshop banner.” Its proper and logical subject is, in fact, the “young short-story fellow” or the author herself.

This is a very serious grammatical problem and I’m quite sure that many readers won't find it so easy to fix. Indeed, it took me quite an effort to break that bad interlock between the modifying phrase and its wrong subject. At any rate, I finally came up with these three major overhauls:

(1) “I recall that when I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow a decade ago, the workshop banner for our batch carried this official theme: ‘Who do you write for?’” 

(2) “A decade ago, when I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow, the workshop banner for our batch carried this official theme: ‘Who do you write for?’” 

(3) “A decade ago, I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow and I recall that the workshop banner carried this official theme for our batch: ‘Who do you write for?’

Our best defense against misplaced modifiers is nothing less than eternal vigilance over our language, not just over form or grammar. We must always check for logic. If what we’re saying looks grammatically correct but somehow doesn’t make sense, it’s a telltale sign of a misplaced modifier somewhere. We need to hunt it down to prevent it from doing mischief on our prose. (Manila Times, Saturday, May 24, 2008)   

(To fortify yourselves against grammar crudities, read my book The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors, copies of which are still available with the publisher. You can also order copies from Lazada.)

 
5 - Doing battle with bad English grammar     

In my book The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors, I gave the following sentence as an exercise in doing battle with footloose modifiers: “When deciding on places to go to during your summer vacation, it ultimately becomes a matter of how far your budget can bring you.”

I then provided this reconstruction to get rid of the dangling modifier in that sentence: “When deciding on the places to go to during your summer vacation, you will find that they will ultimately depend on how far your budget can take you.”

I explained that the “it” in the main clause of the original sentence isn’t a proper subject (it’s actually an expletive or filler word), so we need a legitimate subject like “you” to make the sentence work properly.

                                   

Earlier that week, though, Danny R. of a large Philippine bank sent me e-mail asking if the following reconstruction of the original sentence is also correct:

 “Deciding on places to go during your summer vacation ultimately becomes a matter of how far your budget can bring you.”

He explained that he followed Strategy #3 as prescribed in my book to make the original sentence more concise.

My reply to Danny:

“Your reconstruction of the problematic sentence is much better and even more forthright than the ones I supplied in the book. Of course, this became possible because you changed the structure of the modifying phrase from a ‘when’-format to a gerund phrase. In actual practice, I do encourage finding the best and most concise construction for problematic sentences—which is precisely what you’ve done.

When taking tests under a straitlaced teacher or when editing the work of your boss, however, it would be prudent to stay within the parameters of the original sentence construction. You may not be able to achieve the best possible grammatical construction that way, but you certainly would minimize hurt feelings.”
 
This reply drew a refreshingly crisp, clear, and grammatically airtight rejoinder from Danny that I decided to share with readers:

Dear Joe,

Thank you for praising my reconstruction. Coming from you, I find that a delightful compliment.

I am 55 years old and, quite fortunately, no longer face the specter of a straitlaced English teacher. My boss, whose writing skill I also admire, does not have reason to correct my grammar—pardon the boast—although sometimes she finds the need to improve on the flow of thoughts in my reports. When she does, believe me, I follow what she wants. On the other hand, my work allows me to read and edit voluminous reports, and notwithstanding that I truly love this part of my job, I oftentimes cringe at the way people violate even the most basic rules of grammar. Annoying is indeed the right word.

Your book English Plain and Simple is by far the most helpful grammar book I’ve ever read.  I’m proud that it was written by a Filipino. I really think it should be a required textbook in high school and college. Even the training departments of corporations will find the book an invaluable tool in their efforts to improve the quality of the written and spoken English of their officers and staff.

The English language is one area where I believe we Filipinos have really deteriorated and lost our edge. We can plainly see this decline even in the articles in our revered dailies and magazines, as you yourself have observed.

I hope it’s not a lonely battle for you, Joe, but I salute and commend you for your work. Keep it up!

Danny    

My open reply to Danny’s rejoinder:

Sometimes it does get so lonely fighting the long war against bad English, but every time I receive from readers an admirably clear and good writing like yours, my resolve to keep up the fight returns and I cheerfully go back to battle again. (The Manila Times, Saturday, July 26, 2008)

 
6 - Grammar imprecisions, semantic near-misses

A friend of mine, Ed Maranan*, freelance writer and Hall of Famer of the Palanca Awards for Literature, sent me the following e-mail: 

“Here’s the opening sentence of a short story that recently won a prize in the literary awards of a magazine: ‘Like me, my cousin Ramon was also the first-born child of my Uncle Conrado and his wife Emilia.’ I sense something wrong with it. What do you think?    

“And here’s another from that same story: ‘Three big, covered carts pulled by a bull traveled slowly on the shoulder of the road.’ (This may be correct, though I get the sense of three carts being pulled by just one animal, but how can it be improved?)”

Dear Ed,

Not having the literary gift that you possess, Ed, I shy away from doing literary criticism. This is why I’m glad you’re only asking for my opinion on the English and not on the literary merit of the two passages in question.

Yes, there’s definitely something grammatically and semantically wrong with the first passage: “Like me, my cousin Ramon was also the first-born child of my Uncle Conrado and his wife Emilia.” It’s a fused, inadequately punctuated sentence that results in an illogical statement—an error many nonnative writers commit when they aren’t careful enough in their sentence construction. Indeed, I used to commit that same error myself when I was much younger and audacious enough to think that I could always wing it with my English even without mastering its basics.

                                                       IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDESERVE.COM
 

The main clause of that sentence is, of course, “my cousin Ramon was also the first-born child of my Uncle Conrado and his wife Emilia.” That entire clause is then modified by the adverbial modifier “like me,” which has the effect of making the first-person speaker say that like his cousin Ramon, he’s also the first-born child of Ramon’s parents.

That’s impossible, of course. No two infants could be first-borns of the same couple; indeed, even if they are twins, it’s not possible for them to be born at exactly the same time. The physical limitations of childbirth preclude such a possibility. Thus, the only logical conclusion we can make here is that the first-person speaker and Ramon are indeed first-borns, but with different fathers who happened to be brothers.

So how do we get rid of the illogic in that opening sentence? It’s through this very simple comma fix and change of articles: “Like me, my cousin Ramon was also a first-born, the child of my Uncle Conrado and his wife Emilia.” Notice how the insertion of a comma after “first-born” makes the appositive phrase “the child of my Uncle Conrado and his wife Emilia” modify only “Ramon” as a first-born to the exclusion of the first-person speaker. This, I’m sure, was what the writer meant but wasn’t able to pin down.

As to the other passage: “Three big, covered carts pulled by a bull traveled slowly on the shoulder of the road”—yes, I also have a feeling that the sense you got from it—that the three carts are being pulled by just one animal—wasn’t what the writer had in mind. In my many years of living in a rural area in the province, in fact, I had never seen such a three-cart, single-bull setup. The writer probably meant three carts, each being pulled separately by a bull—in which case the sentence can be fixed by the simple expedient of using the pronoun “each”: “Three big, covered carts each pulled by a bull traveled slowly on the shoulder of the road.” 

The two grammar errors I have just analyzed are actually very common, particularly in spoken English. Nobody’s perfect. But we definitely should watch out for them with eagle eyes when we submit our written work for publication, and even more keenly than that—perhaps “obsessively” is the right word—if we are entering it as a competition piece.[/size]

Joe Carillo

(The Manila Times, Saturday, June 21, 2008)

*Award-winning writer Edgardo B. Maranan, 71, passed away on May 8, 2018. The most honored writer in the history of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, he won a total of 35 prizes for his writing between 1971 and 2015.

Watch for the next three retrospectives on Sunday, October 13, 2024!

5

Site Announcements / Playlist Update (Sept 28 - Oct 4, 2024) of Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« on: October 02, 2024, 07:27:17 AM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR SEPTEMBER 8 - OCTOBER 4, 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 world in 854 words”


For all his ingenuity and imagination, the Greek mathematician-physicist Archimedes
obviously exceeded his mind’s grasp when he bragged that he could lift the world
with a plank.


2. You Asked Me This Question: “The strange grammar of ‘need’ as modal auxiliary”




3. My Media English Watch Retrospective: “Two exceptionally instructive cases of bad English in our domestic print media”

                       


4. Badly Written, Badly Spoken: “The need to be grammatically correct in our English”


                 


5. Getting to Know English Better: “Is your ‘were’ in the indicative or subjunctive mood?”




6. You Asked Me This Question: “When notional agreement overrides grammatical agreement”




7. Use and Misuse: “Techniques for gender-free or gender-neutral writing” by Gerry T. Galacio, Forum Member and Contributor




8. Notable Works by Our Very Own: “Learning to Reinvent Ourselves: How to Make the Philippines a Winner in the 21st Century” by Romeo O. Encarnacion, Fil-Am HR and business development consultant



9. Language Humor at its Finest: “34 business jokes and quotes to perkup up our dreary days”



 

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




11. Readings in Language: “Travails with learning just a smattering of Latin,” essay by Jose A.Carillo with an insightful response by Forum Contributor Tonybau  




12. Going Deeper Into Language: “The perils of sweeping generalizations”




13. The Forum Lounge: “AI and sustainability challenges to be taken up at StratMark Marketing Confab in Manila this coming October 8”




14. Education and Teaching: “ASEAN TeachingEnglish Online Conference this coming Oct.10-30 to challenge traditional teaching paradigms”




15. Advice and Dissent: “‘Sugrophobia’ is a veritable epidemic and cultural obsession”

Click this link to earlier Playdate features!

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language

6

Essays by Joe Carillo / Retrospective: The world in 854 words

« on: October 01, 2024, 10:05:27 AM »

If I were asked to describe the world as I see it today, I would readily give this answer: it has hardly changed since 2,200 years ago when Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and physicist, was said to have bragged that he could move the world if only he had the lever to lift it. For all his ingenuity and imagination, however, Archimedes was dead wrong on this count. He knew the power of the lever like the back of his hand, assiduously applying this knowledge to design military catapults and grappling irons; he figured out with stunning accuracy the mathematical properties of circles and spheres, including the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, or what we now know as pi (3.14159265...); he began the science of hydrostatics, or the forces that govern stationary fluids, after discovering the now familiar Archimedes Principle; and he even invented the Archimedes screw, an ingenious water-raising machine still used today to irrigate fields in Egypt.

For all his ingenuity and imagination, the Greek mathematician-physicist Archimedes
obviously exceeded his mind’s grasp when he bragged that he could lift the world
with a plank.

But on hindsight, we know now that Archimedes obviously exceeded his mind’s grasp when he thought of lifting the world with a plank. It wouldn’t have been possible even if a suitable fulcrum could be found. The world was actually (and still is) an ovaloid sphere 12,760 km in diameter, one rotating on its axis in 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds and revolving  around a much bigger sphere—the sun—in 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.6 seconds. The object Archimedes had bragged of lifting actually has a mass in tons of about 5.98 x 10 raised to the 21st power, and a volume in cubic meters of about 1.08 x 10 raised to the 21st power—quantities too big and too mind-boggling to even think about, much less to trifle with.

These elemental things obviously went beyond the ken of Archimedes’ overarching genius. It was only 1,750 years later, in fact, that the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was to make the startling, heretical thesis that Earth was not the center of the universe at all but simply one of the planets orbiting  the bigger, stationary sun. But on this even Copernicus, who began the scientific reawakening that came to be known as the Copernican Revolution, was only partly right. The sun, it turned out centuries later, was not stationary in the heavens at all. It was rotating on it own axis in a perpetually moving spiral arm of the galaxy that we now call the Milky Way.

All of these facts about our world are now well-established certainties. Despite this accumulated knowledge, however, mankind still acts more primitively and more irrationally than its ancestors before the time of Archimedes. Humanity is still as mired as ever in superstition and religious fundamentalism. Organized religion, superstition, and nationhood have no doubt been great civilizing forces, instilling fear, awe, faith, and patriotism in man, and marshaling both the motive and creative energies for such architectural marvels as the Stonehenge in England, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the stately cathedrals in Europe, the great mosques in the Middle East and in Asia, the Borobodur temples in Cambodia, and the huge statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. Yet these very same forces— organized religion, superstition, and nationhood—are now methodically destroying not only human lives by the thousands but even the physical, social, and cultural legacies humanity had accumulated in the interim.

Intolerance on the religious, political, or ideological plane has always plagued mankind through the centuries, of course, both long before and long after the time of Archimedes. It brought about so many of the horrible depredations on either side of the major religious or geopolitical divides, from the time of the Crusades—those armed Christian expeditions to the Holy Lands and Constantinople in the 11th century—to the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. But more deeply disturbing is the fact that this intolerance and bloodshed have persisted even with the civilizing influence of the Age of Reason and Scientific Enlightenment. Today, people in many parts of the world are still murderously lunging at each other’s throats, intolerant of one another’s religious beliefs, disdainful of one another’s politics and ideology, and covetous of one another’s personal or national possessions. Humanity obviously has not learned its lessons well up to now.

Thus, the great flowering of scientific knowledge and rational thinking that began with Archimedes and pursued with vigor by such great scientific minds as Copernicus, Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein—not to mention Charles Darwin—seems not to have really amounted to much. Our mindsets and dispositions as a species have remained largely primitive—there are disturbing signs, in fact, that we have deteriorated as social and reasoning animals, perhaps irreversibly. It is therefore not at all surprising that today, on a shocking improvement on Archimedes’ claim that he could lift the world with a lever, people by the thousands could think and claim that they could move the world simply on pure belief—no lever, no fulcrum, no hands or physical effort even—just belief and absolutely nothing else.

This essay, which first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in the The Manila Times, subsequently became Chapter 154 of my book Giving Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Retrospective: The world in 854 words

Next week: Aiming for euphony in our English prose    (October 10, 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.

7

Education and Teaching / ASEAN TeachingEnglish Online Confab to challenge traditional teaching paradigms

« on: September 30, 2024, 09:49:53 AM »

The ASEAN TeachingEnglish Online Conference is set to return for its highly anticipated session this year. the British Council Philippines announced this week. Scheduled to take place virtually from October 10-30, 2024, the event promises to challenge traditional teaching paradigms for English educators across Southeast Asia.

This conference offers a unique opportunity for educators to enhance their skills while questioning the very foundations of English Language Teaching (ELT). With over 16 hours of interactive online sessions available free of charge, participants will explore not only the latest trends but also controversial topics in education.

The theme for this year’s conference is “Understanding Our Learners,” emphasizing the urgent need to address motivation, behavior, and resilience in a rapidly changing educational landscape.

Discussions will delve into the implications of AI and educational technology, raising questions about equity and accessibility in learning environments.

Lotus Postrado, Country Director of British Council Philippines, highlighted the conference’s role in fostering collaboration among educators while acknowledging the challenges posed by digital divides.

Last year’s event achieved record participation, particularly from the Philippines, with over 6,000 teachers gaining insights that could redefine their teaching practices.

Philip Zefanya Damanik, a teacher educator from the Philippines, emphasized the importance of integrating art and culture into teaching methodologies as a means to engage diverse learners.

The 2024 conference remains completely free and accessible to educators across the region, but will it truly revolutionize how we teach English?

For more information, log on to https://www.britishcouncil.or.th/en/programmes/teach/asean2024

8

Silent Fire Retrospectives / My Silent Fire Retrospectives -Batch 1

« on: September 29, 2024, 12:24:23 PM »

My Silent Fire Retrospectives
By Jose A. Carillo

Silent Fire was my Saturday column on English usage in The Manila Times in 2008, completing what used to be a six-times-a-week slot of English Plain and Simple during the first two years of its 18-year-run to this day. I am doing this retrospective series of 12 selected Silent Fire columns—3 columns each time starting today—primarily for the benefit of very young English-language learners who had likely missed reading them.

Feedback about these columns is most welcome and will be greatly appreciated


1 – “Just plug it!” or “Just plug it in!”?

This intriguing grammar question was e-mailed to me by Mr. Basil C., who at that time was a Canada-based Filipino reader of my column: 

“I’m an avid reader of your column and I’m just curious and bothered. Recently, giant blue billboards have materialized touting a [Philippine telecommunication company’s] new wireless Internet offering. It says ‘WIRELESS INTERNET. JUST PLUG IT!’ and it shows a little contraption with a short wire and an electrical plug attached to its end. The company has doubtless spent lots of money for this campaign, judging by the number, the prominence, and—as I have already said—the sheer size of those billboards.

         

“Please tell me: Doesn’t ‘Just plug it!’ mean ‘Barahan mo’ as in ‘Plug that leak’? Shouldn’t it say ‘Just plug it in!’ as in ‘Ikabit mo!’ or ‘Isaksak mo!’?

“Am I wrong or has that company committed a gigantic grammar blunder?”

My reply to Basil C.:    

Let’s evaluate this matter starting from its grammatical roots.   

As a stand-alone verb, “plug” may either be transitive or intransitive. According to my trusty digital Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, “plug” in its transitive sense can mean: (1) to stop, make tight, or secure by inserting a plug; (2) to shoot with a bullet; and (3) to advertise or publicize insistently. As a transitive verb, of course, “plug” needs an object to function properly, as in “Plug that leak!”
   
In its intransitive sense, on the other hand, “plug” can mean: (1) to become plugged (here, it usually takes the form of the phrasal verb “plug up,” as in “The pipe got plugged up”; (2) to work persistently, as in “He plugged away at the calculus problem”; and (3) to fire shots, as in “The shooter plugged on until his bullets ran out.” The intransitive “plug” doesn’t take an object at all.

Note that none of the meanings above applies to the sense intended by those billboards of that telecommunication company. Instead, the meaning they convey is that of the phrasal verb “plug in,” which either means “to attach or connect to an electric outlet” (transitive sense) or “to establish an electric circuit by inserting a plug” (intransitive sense). In both cases, the preposition “in” is integral to the phrasal verb; without it, that phrasal verb reverts to the stand-alone verb “plug” in the sense of “plugging a leak or hole.”

   

It is therefore evident that the billboard statement “WIRELESS INTERNET. JUST PLUG IT!” is semantically flawed, and I think you have a good basis for thinking that phrased this way, “JUST PLUG IT!” actually means “Barahan mo!” or, in English, “Plug that leak!” (in the sense of the first definition of the transitive “plug” given earlier). And I agree with your suggestion that the grammatically correct way to say it is ‘JUST PLUG IT IN!’ as in ‘Ikabit mo lang!’ or ‘Isaksak mo lang!’

(I think Sattinger’s Law applies to this situation: “It works better if you plug it in.” This is as quoted in a humorous vein by Lawrence J. Peter in his 1973 book The Peter Prescription: How to Make Things Go Right.)

But to spare the telecommunications company the big trouble of dismantling and redoing all those huge billboards, it may want to consider this no-fuss, low-expense, simple-paint-over grammatical alternative: replace the pronoun “IT” in that slogan with the preposition “IN,” so the slogan will read as follows: “WIRELESS INTERNET. JUST PLUG IN!” Indeed, I have a feeling that this was probably what the advertising writer probably had in mind in the first place.

Let’s just hope that advertising license or literary license won’t be invoked as a defense for this shaky usage of “JUST PLUG IT!” We have freedom of speech, of course, but it always pays to phrase ourselves beyond reproach. As one of my favorite English-usage websites proclaims in its homepage, “A society is generally as lax as its language.” (The Manila Times, Saturday, March 8, 2008)


2 - The proper uses of ‘they’ and ‘it’

In my discussion of the plural pronoun “they” in a previous column, I pointed out that although its usage is rather simple and straightforward, it does present some exasperating complications when used to refer to the indefinite pronouns “everyone,” “anyone,” and “someone.” I then asked which of the following sentences is correct: “Everyone realized they were mistaken.” “Everyone realized he [or she] was mistaken.”

My grudging answer is that both are correct, and I must quickly add that this aspect of English grammar remains controversial. This is because the indefinite pronoun “everyone” may be plural in sense but is considered grammatically singular. Some grammarians therefore insist that it’s unnatural for the plural “they” to stand for “everyone.” On the other hand, it’s so cumbersome to be always using “he or she” to indicate the gender uncertainty in the pronoun “everyone.” And then some grammarians, insisting that the pronoun “his” is strongly gender-biased toward males, bristle at its use when “everyone” is the antecedent pronoun.

                                                           IMAGE CREDIT: MICAELA PARENTE ON UNSPLASH

IS THE PRONOUN "EVERYONE" SINGULAR OR PLURAL?

                                                           

All of these usage problems arise from the fact that for all its vaunted richness as a language, English doesn’t have a common-gender third person singular pronoun for referring to the indefinite pronouns “everyone,” “anyone,” and “someone.” (Our own Tagalog* is much better off in this respect, having the singular “siya” and “niya” and the plural “sila” and “nila” as common-gender third person pronouns, as in “Alam ng bawat isa na nagkakamali siya” and “Alam ng lahat na nagkakamali sila.” In Tagalog, therefore, the matter of unknown gender doesn’t muddle the pronoun picture.)

Thus, over the centuries, English speakers had little choice but to use the plural pronouns “they” and “their” to refer to the indefinite pronouns, as in the following sentences: “Everyone should study if they want to pass this course.” “Anyone in their proper senses wouldn’t do such a hideous thing.” “Someone is going to suffer for their irresponsibility.” This usage came to be known as the singular “they” and “their.”

In the late 1800s, however, English grammarians under the spell of Latin attacked this usage as bad grammar and prescribed the use of the masculine “he” and “his” as default pronouns in such cases: “Everyone should study if he wants to pass this course.” “Anyone in his proper senses wouldn’t do such a hideous thing.” “Someone is going to suffer for his irresponsibility.”

In our present time that calls for gender equality, however, there’s increasing pressure to avoid this male-biased usage of the pronouns “he” and “his.” Many particularly careful writers thus prefer to use “he or she” and “his or her” as a politically correct, non-sexist compromise: “Everyone should study if he or she wants to pass this course.” “Anyone in his or her proper senses wouldn’t do such a hideous thing.” “Someone is going to suffer for his or her irresponsibility.” It’s obvious, though, that using “his or her” repetitively in such situations could become an eyesore in print and annoyingly tiresome in speech. 

In my case, therefore, I take recourse whenever possible to the “zero pronoun” option, which means constructing sentences in a way that avoids the third-person pronouns altogether. See how this works in the case of the three sentences that we have been using as examples: “Everyone should study to pass this course.” “Anyone in the proper senses wouldn’t do such a hideous thing.” “Someone is going to suffer for this [or that] act of irresponsibility.”

When the “zero pronoun” isn’t possible, however, I always fall back on the simplest option: pluralizing the third-person indefinite pronoun: “All should study if they want to pass this course.” “All those in their proper senses wouldn’t do such a hideous thing.” “All are going to suffer for their irresponsibility.” (The Manila Times, Saturday, June 7, 2008)

Check out Erin Zervais' lively Grammar Party Blog to get more insights on the question of whether "everyone" is singular or plural.


3 - Shades of meaning
 
I am sharing with readers a letter from Rossdorf in Germany by someone who identified himself as Dr. Erhard G. I received the e-mail more than a month earlier but I hadn't bothered to read it because my server had suspiciously delivered it to my spam folder. Before zapping it along with my usual mailbox junk, I later decided to open it for curiosity’s sake three days later. To my pleasant surprise, it wasn’t some nasty virus-laden file but a curious and interesting commentary on English usage.

Dear Mr. Carillo,

For many years now, I have been a frequent reader of your language column and I am stunned by your profound knowledge of the English language. I highly appreciate your book English Plain and Simple and I collect your articles that are published weekly in The Manila Times.

Nonetheless, I would like to mention a topic that I think you have not yet thoroughly elaborated on. It is the ample field of synonyms and pleonasms. In your book, you devoted to synonyms barely one page (p. 277), and you took up the subject only briefly as part of your column No. 317. I must admit, though, that my collection of your articles is far from complete.

Also, in spite of my poor understanding of English idioms, I think the title of your book seems faulty and is likely to be misunderstood. I have consulted several dictionaries, among them the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English by A.S. Hornby (Oxford University Press: 1974), and I found that the expression “plain” is congruent to “simple.” There is therefore no difference between these two sentences: “The student’s English is plain.” “The student’s English is simple.” The words “plain” and “simple” mean the same thing, so to use both in the same phrase is pure pleonasm. And by doing this, you missed to “kill” one adjective, contrary to Mark Twain’s strong admonition against it [“When you catch an adjective, kill it.”].

                                                 IMAGE CREDIT: POST IN LINKEDIN.COM BY FULL POTENTIAL LEARNING ACADEMY


Please don’t take offense at my comments and, if you can find the time, do enlighten me on the proper use of synonyms.

My reply to Dr. Erhard,

Thank you for the compliment about my English-usage columns and my first book, English Plain and Simple. It warms my heart to know that even English learners outside my country are finding my work of some use in their quest to improve their English.

Yes, there are some obvious overlaps in the meanings of the words “plain” and “simple,” but I don’t think my use of both for the title of my book constitutes a pleonasm. By definition, a pleonasm is the use of more words than necessary to convey the same sense, as in “a lovely and beautiful woman,” “the rich and wealthy businessman,” and “The lady in white dress she did it.” The first two examples are obviously pleonasms, for the adjective pairs “lovely” and “beautiful” and “rich” and “wealthy” are each practically exact synonyms. The third example is another type of pleonasm: the pronoun “she” unnecessarily repeats the sense of “the lady in white dress” and is therefore a redundancy. Indeed, redundancy is a common feature of pleonasms.

In contrast, although they may look synonymous, the adjectives “plain” and “simple” actually have so many different shades of meaning. For my book’s title, in particular, I used “plain” to mean uncomplicated and uncluttered, and “simple” to mean clear and easy to understand. There’s a major conceptual difference between the two, so their joint use in modifying the word “English” doesn’t constitute a pleonasm but simply an emphatic expression.

Please be assured that I am by no means offended by your comments. On the contrary, I appreciate them for opening my eyes to other aspects of English that I still need to take up to help people get to know the language better. (The Manila Times, Saturday, June 21, 2008)

POSTSCRIPT:

I later learned that Dr. Erhard Glogowski, the perceptive critic of the grammar of the title of my book English Plain and Simple, is himself an accomplished book author in Germany, one specializing in finance and economics.
 
Watch for the next three retrospectives on Sunday, October 6, 2024!

9

Lounge / AI and sustainability challenges to be taken up at StratMark Marketing Confab

« on: September 28, 2024, 08:39:56 AM »

The Philippine Marketing Association (PMA) will host on October 8 the Strategic Marketing (StratMark) Conference 2024 as the country’s premier annual convergence of marketing students, educators, and academic professionals. With the theme "Transform: Marketing in the Age of AI and Sustainability," the event will explore how artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainable practices are reshaping the marketing industry.

The full-day conference, to be conducted both in-person and via livestream at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, is expected to draw an estimated 10,000 participants from across Southeast Asia. StratMark 2024 will spotlight the integration of AI in marketing, with discussions on its role in driving sustainability while navigating the challenges that businesses face in this evolving landscape.

The program will feature keynote speeches and panel discussions with industry leaders from technology, policy, education, and sustainability sectors. The speakers include Dato Eric Ku from the Asia Committee of Small Businesses of Malaysia, who will share insights on incorporating AI and sustainability into marketing strategies and business models.

In addition to the main event in Manila, StratMark 2024 will actively engage marketing communities nationwide and make itself accessible to participants across Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao through its partner universities.

In the lead-up to the event, the PMA secured key partnerships to strengthen its focus on sustainability and youth engagement. Last September 3, the PMA and Eco-Business, which is Asia’s largest sustainability media organization, signed an agreement to co-present the event. On hand during the signing were Eco-Business Country Manager Ping Manongdo and PMA officials, including Youth and Academe Director Leah Ayeng, Treasurer Cristy Oreta, Executive Vice President Mitch Ballesteros, and Vice President Marco Montes.

Last September 6, the PMA then formalized a partnership with the University of Santo Tomas, the Global Compact Network Philippines, and the Anak, Ikaw ay Henyo Movement. This collaboration aims to amplify the focus the key themes of the upcoming event--sustainability and youth engagement.

Present during the partnership signing were Dr. Antonio Etrata, Chair of Marketing Management at US; Henry Tenedero, founder of Anak, Ikaw ay Henyo Movement; Edward Gacusana, Executive Director of Global Compact Network Philippines; PMA President Kathy Mercado, PMA Executive Vice President Mitch Ballesteros, StratMark Chair Dr. Jenn Ramos, and PMA Directors Jerry Yao and Leah Ayeng.

The PMA also announced its partnership with PCE-GoNegosyo on September 12, which will focus on the "Prosperity Pillar in Sustainable Development" across various school venues. The signing was attended by Joey Concepcion, founder of GoNegosyo;  Mina Akram, executive director of PCE-GoNegosyo, and Paul De Guzman, program director of PCE-GoNegosyo.The  PMA was represented by its President Kathy Mercado; Treasurer Cristy Oreta , Director of Youth and Academe Leah Ayeng, and the PJMA National Executive Board.

10

Lounge / SSS sets record high 2.4M new members in H1 2024

« on: September 27, 2024, 01:53:14 PM »

Social Security System (SSS) President and Chief Executive Officer Rolando Ledesma Macasaet today said that SSS is on track for a record-setting year in terms of registering new members after it hit 2.4 million new registrants in July 2024.

In a press briefing, Macasaet reported that the number of new SSS members from January to July 2024 surged by 165 percent to 2.4 million from 923,000 new members recorded in the same period last year.
 
Macasaet said that in previous years, SSS usually averaged around one million new members annually. But for this year, he challenged SSS officials and employees to target two million new SSS registrants for 2024.
 
“SSS took the challenge and even went the extra mile. In the first six months, we hit our year’s target of two million new members, a positive result of our massive membership and coverage drives throughout the country,” Macasaet said.

 
Macasaet underscored that this milestone reflects SSS’ commitment to expand its membership and reach all working Filipinos.
 
“The implications of this record membership are profound because it means more Filipinos will have access to a comprehensive set of social security benefits from SSS. The social security protection offered by SSS can help safeguard the financial well-being of Filipino families, particularly during times of uncertainty,” Macasaet added.
 
SSS Executive Vice President for Branch Operations Sector Voltaire P. Agas reported that the highest number of new members came from prior registrants, totaling 1.2 million. Prior registrants are individuals who already have SS numbers but have not yet been reported as covered employees or self-employed members.
 
“We observed a significant increase in new self-employed members, which surged by 273 percent—from 112,000 in 2023 to 419,000 in 2024. Additionally, the number of new OFW members more than doubled, rising to 10,300 in 2024 from just over 5,000 last year,” Agas explained.
 
Data showed that Luzon recorded the highest number of new members, with more than 882,000. The National Capital Region (NCR) came in second with over 693,000 new enrollees. Mindanao and Visayas followed with 436,000 and 417,000, respectively. Meanwhile, over 10,000 new members came from international operations.
 
Nationwide Registration Day enrollees reached 26K

Agas said one of SSS’ initiatives to expand membership is the Nationwide Registration Day on July 15.
 
“In a single day, SSS successfully registered more than 26,000 new members in the SSS e-services booth set up in the activity centers of partner malls and establishments.
 
Agas explained that during the activity, SSS urged all working Filipinos to become SSS members so they could access social security benefits in times of need.
 
Aside from new registrants, Agas said the SSS e-services booth served 54,000 members in their SSS transactions, such as creating their My.SSS account, resetting their My.SSS login credentials, updating member records, disbursement account enrolment, generating Payment Reference Number (PRN), and filing their salary and benefit claims applications.
 
Road to 5M new members by year-end

Macasaet expressed optimism that SSS could reach four to five million new members by the end of 2024, adding, “SSS will sustain this growth trajectory in the coming months as we aim for a historic peak in new member registrations.”
 
“Halfway through the year, we already hit our year’s target. But SSS won’t stop there. We remain steadfast in our mission to further broaden our membership base and cover all Filipinos in the workforce,” Macasaet said.
 
Macasaet concluded that SSS will explore innovative strategies to promote social security awareness and instill among fellow Filipinos the value of acquiring SSS membership.

11

Site Announcements / Playlist Update (Sept 21 - 27, 2024) of Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« on: September 25, 2024, 05:54:49 PM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR SEPTEMBER 21 - 27, 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: “When the verb’s object is the doer of the action itself”

2. Use and Misuse Retrospective: “Getting rid of wordy beginnings for our writing”





3. Badly Written, Badly Spoken Retrospective: “Exception in writing numbers”


                 

4. My Media English Watch Retrospective: “How ‘right of reply’ differs from ‘right to reply’”

                       
 

5. Getting to Know English Better: “The age of imprecision”




6. You Asked Me This Question: “The touchy matter of capitalizing names and position titles”




7. Use and Misuse: “A style guide for writing and publishing in English”




8. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Bridges,” personal essay by Antonio Calipjo Go, Forum Contributor




9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “A treasury of funny quotes and outrageous sayings”




10. Time Out From English Grammar: “Thomas Edison’s greatest idea ‘wasn’t something anybody could patent or touch’”




11. Going Deeper Into Language: “When faulty logic overrides good grammar and semantics”




12. Your Thoughts Exactly Retrospective: “Candor of Reality,” personal outpourings in 2015 by Forum contributor Neronver-Zack (pseud.)


IMAGE CREDIT: PHOTO BY JOHANNES PLENIO ON UNSPLASH
 

13. Readings in Language: “Verbal diagnostician par excellence comes up with a grammar guidebook”  


                                   

14. Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Overcome with deaths during the Civil War, Americans turned to spirit photography”


PETER MANSEAU’S BOOK; ABRAHAM LINCOLN FOR REELECTION; PHOTO
OF MARY LINCOLN WITH ABRAHAM'S “GHOST”

 
15. Time Out From English Grammar: “On evolving Gods, prehumans as food, and grammar’s impact on thought”

Click this link to earlier Playdate features!

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language

12

Getting to Know English / When the verb’s object is the doer of the action itself

« on: September 25, 2024, 02:06:55 PM »

We all know that when a sentence uses a transitive verb as the operative verb, it’s absolutely necessary for the subject to take a direct object and to act on it: “The woman spurned her suitor last week.” “Her suitor found a better woman yesterday.” Nothing really happens when there’s no direct object to take the action: “The woman spurned last week.” “Her suitor found yesterday.” When a transitive verb can’t act on anything, in fact, expect the sentence to make no sense at all.

A direct object, however, need not always be someone or something other than the subject itself. In grammar as in real life, there are many situations in which the subject can perform actions to or for itself as the direct object. The transitive verb therefore still functions even in the absence of an external object or receiver.

                             
The grammar device used in English to indicate such situations is the reflexive pronoun. Recall now that each of the personal pronouns has a reflexive form that ends with the suffix “self”: “myself” for “I,” the singular “yourself” for the singular “you,” the plural “yourselves” for the plural “you,” “himself” for “he,” “herself” for “she,” “ourselves” for “we,” “themselves” for “they,” “oneself” for “one,” and “itself” for “it.” The suffix “self” works to pass back the verb’s action to the subject performing that action.

Let’s refresh our memory about the most common applications of reflexive pronouns:

When the subject and direct object are one and the same. A reflexive pronoun is called for when (1) the subject acts on itself, or (2) describes a state, condition, or fact about itself. Acting on oneself: “I restrained myself to avoid getting into trouble.” “The long-distance runner paced herself to conserve her energy.” “They fooled themselves into believing that the pyramid company would make them rich.” Describing one’s own situation: “She considered herself qualified for the post.” “Don’t blame us; we were victimized ourselves.”

In imperative sentences, of course, the reflexive expresses an action that someone expects another or others to do to themselves: “You behave yourself.” “You bring yourselves here at once!” The pronoun “you,” however, is often dropped from such constructions for greater immediacy: “Behave yourself.” “Bring yourselves here at once!”

When the subject itself is the indirect object (usually the object of a preposition). The reflexive works to establish the idea that the subject is not the verb’s direct object but simply an indirect object or intermediate receiver of the action: “I picked some books for myself.” “She is eating lunch all by herself.” “The thieves divided the loot among themselves.”

When the subject needs to be emphasized to make the context clearer. The reflexive can emphasize a particular action as solely the doing of the subject (to the exclusion of everybody else): “I’ll do it myself since nobody wants to help.” “She drove to the city herself because her chauffeur called in sick.” “They drank all the water themselves so we went thirsty.”

                                                      IMAGE CREDIT: TES TEACH
                                       
A final point about the behavior of verbs before we close: although as a rule, intransitive verbs can’t take a direct object and act on it, a few intransitive verbs are able to do that. This is when such a verb, to reinforce meaning in a sentence, takes its noun equivalent as a cognate object, or an object represented by a word very close to the verb in form: “Although born rich, he lived the life of a bum.” “We dreamed a dream that couldn’t come true.” “They scrupulously speak the speech of New Yorkers down to the slightest twang.”

With our improved grasp of how transitivity or intransitivity shapes verb usage, we can be more confident now of constructing sentences beyond semantic reproach.

This essay, which first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in the December 13, 2004 issue of The Manila Times, subsequently became Chapter 97 of my book Giving Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
When the verb’s object is the doer of the action itself

Next week:  The world in 854 words       `(September 26, 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 (Sept 14 - 20, 2024) of Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« on: September 19, 2024, 09:58:40 AM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR SEPTEMBER 14 - 20, 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: “Helping intransitive verbs surmount their handicap”




2. Getting to Know English: “A figure of speech that can subvert reason and logic”




3. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “On the trail of serendipity,” an exposition on the power of the six composition tools



                 


 4. My Media English Watch: “Avoiding misuse of the conjunction ‘as well as’ in newspaper reporting”

                       
 

5. Students’ Sounding Board: “Confusion over the use of ‘due to’ and ‘owing to’”




6. You Asked Me This Question: “How to ask a question within a question”




7. Use and Misuse:  “Clarifying a questionable notion about the proper use of ‘each’”




8. Notable Works by Our Very Own: “Literature as History,” a 2005 lecture by the late F. Sionil Jose, Philippine National Artist for Literature, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California




9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “Getting a squiggly yet very instructive hang of world history”


 


10. Education and Teaching: Conversations: “Close encounters with highly atrocious English”




11. A Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Filipino-Australian woman on helping people write and speak good English”




12. Your Thoughts Exactly: “My two love stories,” by Fred Natividad, Forum contributor




13. Readings in Language: “There’s more to our passwords than the annoyance they bring”  


                                   

14. Time Out From English Grammar: “The real wonder is that humans ever discovered science at all”



 
15. A Forum Lounge Retrospective: A folktale for our troubled times—“The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a version by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), shared by the late Forum contributor Charlie Agatep

Click this link to earlier Playdate features!

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language

14

Getting to Know English / Helping intransitive verbs surmount their handicap

« on: September 18, 2024, 12:24:46 AM »

As we should all know by now, intransitive verbs are handicapped by their inability to take a direct object. Another way of saying this is that a subject cannot perform the action of intransitive verbs on a direct object. This is why a sentence construction like the following doesn’t work: “The magician disappeared the rabbit.” Indeed, because of its intransitivity, the verb “disappear” simply won’t take “rabbit” or any other object. The English language allows only transitive verbs to take objects and act on them, as “feed” in “The magician feeds the rabbit” and “eat” in “The rabbit eats the carrot.”

This doesn’t mean, however, that when the operative verb is intransitive, the subject can’t ever make an action happen to an object, or make that object perform the action of the verb. We know, for instance, that the verbs “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” enables the intransitive verb “disappear” to cause its action to happen to an object, as in these sentences: “The magician made the rabbit disappear.” “The magician got the rabbit to disappear.” “The magician had the rabbit disappear.” “The magician let the rabbit disappear.” The subject in these sentences is not seen as performing the action itself, but uses some other agency (“magic” or “sleight of hand”?) to perform that action.
 

                       
We know, too, that “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” can also make objects do the action of intransitive verbs: “She made the dog jump.” “She got the dog to jump.” “She had the dog jump.” “She let the dog jump.” This time, it’s clear that the “dog” is the object of the first verbs, “she” is the agent causing the action, and the action of the intransitive “jump” is what this agent causes the object to perform.

The verbs “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” belong to a class of verbs called causatives. In sentences that use a causative verb, the subject doesn’t perform the action of the operative verb but causes someone or something else to do it. And as we have seen above, causative verbs do very well in enabling intransitive verbs to surmount their handicap of being unable to act on an object.

We mustn’t suppose, however, that causative verbs are meant only for intransitive verbs. They work as well with transitive ones: “The mother made her child take the medicine.” “The movie director had the leading lady wear a wig.” The big difference is that transitive verbs—working with causative verbs or not—always need an object somewhere in the sentence for the latter to make sense. Drop the objects “medicine” and “wig” from the two sentences given earlier, for instance, and both simply collapse: “The mother made her child take.” “The movie director had the leading lady wear.”

The English language actually has many more causative verbs of the enabling kind, and to our small inventory so far we will now add these other common ones: “ask,” “allow,” “command,” “compel,” “convince,” “encourage,” “employ,” “entice,” “force,” “hire,” “induce,” “insist,” “motivate,” “permit,” “persuade,” “require,” “suggest,” and “urge.” Each needs to work on a[/i]n operative verb for the latt[/i]er’s action to take place at all.

Let’s now examine the ways we can construct sentences using causative verbs.

The most common, of course, is the construction where the causative verb is immediately followed by an object (noun or pronoun), which is followed in turn by an infinitive (“to” + verb stem): “Some countries require foreign visitors to present a visa.” “We hired temporary workers to handle the seasonal demand.” “Our school encouraged us to learn English.”

The causative construction above has a variant specifically for the causatives “let,” “had,” and “made,” which can only take the so-called “bare infinitive” (the infinitive without “to”): “Amanda let her boyfriend kiss her.” “The mayor had the illegal loggers face the irate townsfolk.” “The manager made her pay for the missing goods.” Force-fitting “to” into such constructions results in disconcerting—and unacceptable—sentences like “Amanda let her boyfriend to kiss her.”

The third type of causative construction is for the causative verbs “insist,” “suggest,” “ask,” “demand,” or “recommend,” which can neither take the infinitive nor the bare infinitive form of the operative verb. These causative verbs can work only in “that”-clause constructions like these: “The tour guide suggested that we leave.” “The judge demanded that the accused appear in court.” “The consultant recommended that we divest.” The second verbs in these sentences are always in the base form, without tense, which differs from non-causative “that”-clause constructions like, say, “The tour guide proved that we took a longer route,” in which the verb in the “that”-clause takes a tense.

Now, as an exercise, try to discover for yourselves which causative construction will work for the rest of the causative verbs in our expanded list.

This essay, which appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times on July 18, 2009, subsequently became Chapter 46 of my book Giving Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Helping intransitive verbs surmount their handicap

Next week: When the verb’s object is the doer of the action itself      (September 19, 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 (Sept 7 - 13, 2024) of Jose Carillo Forum's Facebook Gateway

« on: September 12, 2024, 01:51:15 AM »

PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR SEPTEMBER 7 - 13, 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: “Dealing with various levels of intransitivity”




2. Use and Misuse: “What can the semicolon do to the quality of my writing?”




3. My Media English Watch: “Bedlam when the verb shows up far too late in a long sentence”

 


4. Badly Written, Badly Spoken: “When using a parenthetical is necessary in a sentence”




5. You Asked Me This Question: “Which usage is correct: ‘those involve’ or ‘those involved’?”



                     
6. Getting to Know English: “How inversion can clarify baffling sentences”

                         


7. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “Verbal fallacies nearer home”




8. Education and Teaching Retrospective: “Taylor Swift Studies surging in North America akin to the 1990s Madonna-ology”


 

9. Language Humor at its Finest: “29  more great palindromes for the road”




10. Your Thoughts Exactly: "A  prayer to St. Jude" by Angel Casillan, Forum contributor

   


11. Time Out From English Grammar: "Finding the diamond in a slush pile of unpublishable books"  


                                   

12. Readings in Language: "The need to equate things solely on comparable attributes"

 


13. Badly Written, Badly Spoken: "The difference between double possessives and single possessives”




14. Students’ Sounding Board: "When is sentence inversion a matter of grammar or style?”




15. Forum Lounge: “The story of Jack, Bob, and the Widow”


             

Click this link to earlier Playdate features!

Visit Jose Carillo's Blogspot on the English Language