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Silent Fire Retrospectives / My Silent Fire Retrospectives - Batch 3
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My Silent Fire Retrospectives - Batch 3
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 third batch of the 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.
7 - “What's the difference between ‘will’ and ‘would’?”
A reader, Napoleon C., asked me the following question point-blank the other week: “I’m not so sure which of these two sentences is grammatically right: (1) ‘I hope that you would get well soon!’ (2) ‘I hope you will get well soon!’ Please tell me.”
Here’s my reply to Napoleon:
The first sentence is grammatically correct: “I hope that you would get well soon!” This sentence has the pattern “subject + operative verb + the relative pronoun ‘that’ + noun clause,” and the combination of “that” and the noun clause (“you would get well soon”) is what’s known as a relative noun clause. Normally, relative noun clauses that follow operative verbs like “hope” require the modal auxiliary “would” rather than “will” for their verb. This is to indicate that the outcome of the action is uncertain or conditional—it is desired but is not sure to happen or take place.
In the same token, therefore, if we replace “hope” in that sentence with a similar verb of uncertainty like “wish,” “expect,” or “pray,” we would also need to use “would” in the relative clause: “I wish that you would get well soon!” “I expect that you would get well soon!” “I pray that you would get well soon!”[/i]
IMAGE CREDIT: THESAURUS.COM
In contrast, when the operative verb expresses certainty in the expected outcome, the relative noun clause should use the auxiliary verb “will”: “I am sure that you will get well soon!” “I am positive that you will get well soon!” “I am certain that you will get well soon!”
Now, Napoleon’s second sentence, “I hope you will get well soon!” is actually an elliptical form of the sentence “I hope that you will get well soon!” Recall now that in English grammar, an elliptical sentence is one that lacks a grammar element, but it’s easy to infer that element from the logic or pattern of the sentence. In this particular case, the elliptical construction drops the conjunction “that” for brevity and ease of articulation, but this doesn’t change the modal character of the expected outcome to outright certainty.
Thus, the elliptical form of the sentence would still require the modal auxiliary “would” to indicate that uncertainty: “I hope you would get well soon!” Similarly, for the verbs “wish,” “expect,” and “dream,” we should also use the modal “would” when we make the sentences elliptical: “I wish you would get well soon!” “I expect you would get well soon!” “I pray you would get well soon!”
Napoleon’s question having been answered, though, we must now clearly distinguish this use of “would” from its two other major uses: (1) as the past tense of “will” in indirect speech, and (2) as a softer form of “will” when expressing polite offers or requests.
Remember now that when the “reporting verb” in indirect or reported speech is in the past tense, the verb in the main clause generally gets “backshifted” or takes one step back in tense. Assume that a male official has made the following direct remark: “I will cancel their franchise because of their blatant abuses.” In reported speech, the auxiliary verb “will” gets backshifted to the past tense “would”: “He said he would cancel their franchise because of their blatant abuses.”
A major exception to this backshifting is when the reporting verb is itself in the modal form. Take this direct remark: “I would like to cancel their franchise outright.” There’s no backshifting in the reported speech for it: “He said he would like to cancel their franchise outright.”
When making an offer or request in polite society, of course, the socially graceful thing to do is to use “would” instead of “will.” We don’t ask, “Will you like to have dinner now?” and we don’t say, “I will like some quiet here, please.” Instead, we ask, “Would you like to have dinner now?” and say, “I would like some quiet here, please.” (Manila Times, Saturday, June 14, 2008)
8 - Too much “boasting” and “nestling in”
If I were to judge from my newspaper, magazine, and web readings in recent years, it would appear that we Filipinos are not only a most boastful people but also one so predisposed to petty exaggeration in our language. This is strongly evident in our glib overuse of two English expressions, “boast of (something)” and “nestled (in),” particularly in newspaper and magazine journalism, in advertising, and in the tourism literature.
Let’s talk about “boast of (something)” first. Its dictionary definition is, of course, “to puff oneself up in speech,” “to speak of or assert with excessive pride,” or “to possess and call attention to a source of pride.” Of course, it can also simply mean “to have” or “to contain”—the unboastful denotation that’s actually what is meant in many “boast of” statements.
At the time of this writing, from Google’s estimated 775,000 citations in 2008 of what are boasted about in the Philippines, the following representative high-level boasts are perhaps semantically justifiable and factually defensible: “The Philippines boasts of some of the best beaches and scuba diving waters in the world,” “The Philippines boasts of a 94 percent literacy rate,” “The Philippines boasts (of) good English-language skills,” and “The Philippines boasts (of) some of the finest IT workers in the world.”
Even so, if I were the drumbeater for these things, I’d be more circumspect and use “has” or “lays claim to” instead of “boasts of.” After all, levelheaded language often works much better than rank exaggeration in promotional talk of this kind.
Indeed, many of our boastings captured by Google are woefully out of proportion to the semantic enthusiasm expended on them: “Mindanao boasts of two new vapor heat treatment plants,” “(The library) boasts of a wealthy collection of multi-media materials on governance, productivity, and management,” “(The city) boasts of the first community-based breast screening program in RP,” “Domestic air travel market in Philippines boasts of a growth rate of 47 per cent,” and “One of the oldest in the province, this church boasts of a huge mural painting on its ceiling…”
I think “boasts of” is out of line in all of the above statements; the verb “has” could have done a much better job.
Now let’s talk about the terribly overused expression “nestled (in),” which means “settled snugly or comfortably” or “lying in a sheltered manner.” Google lists 288,000 citations for this expression in the Philippines alone, and when I looked at a representative sampling, I got the dreadful feeling that the expression is not only overused but subjected to severe semantic abuse as well.
Of course, there’s no doubt that the use of “nestled (in)” is semantically justified in the following three statements: “Nestled deep in the Cordilleras is Banaue, about nine hours from Baguio by bus,” “The first and only pine estate south of Metro Manila, (it) is a quiet sanctuary nestled in the gently rolling hills of Tagaytay,” and “Nestled atop a beachside cliff, (the resort) offers breathtaking views of the ocean from the balcony of your own private villa.” The sense of curling up comfortably and of restfulness is evident and warranted in all of these three statements.
But I think the writers went overboard in using “nestled (in)” in these highly contrived statements: “The Philippines lies nestled in the bosom of the East Asian growth area,” “Nestled in the center of everything worth the while, [the hotel] is located along Manila’s Roxas Boulevard fronting the Manila Bay,” “…the sophistication and elegance of a hotel (that’s) nestled right at the heart of Cebu’s bustling business district,” and “Taal Volcano—the word's smallest volcano (that) is nestled in the middle of a scenic lake.”
Obviously, we can’t force everything to nestle into just anything for the sake of lending drama to our language. Instead of settling for a semantic near-miss, therefore, why not use a no-nonsense word like “located” or “situated” instead? It will be right on the mark all the time. (Manila Times, Saturday, August 23, 2008)
9 - One-word, two-word mix-ups
In my work as an editor, I often spend considerable time correcting a good number of single words that should have been spelled out in two, or two words that should have been spelled out as just one word. I sometimes wish I could leave those words well enough alone so I could save time, but most of them could actually mean something different—even wrong—if not rendered in the proper way.
The word everyday is a particularly instructive case. Many writers habitually use it to mean “each day” in sentences like this: “She tends to her garden everyday.” That’s wrong usage, of course, for “everyday” is an adjective that means “encountered or used routinely,” as in “Our prim lady professor shocked us when came to class in everyday dress.” So the correct word choice in the sentence in question is the two-word variant every day: “She tends to her garden every day.” Here, it literally means “each day without fail.” As computer-savvy people might say, “every day” is wysiwyg, which is computer-speak for “what you see is what you get.”
Another recurrently misused tandem is “maybe”/“may be,” which not a few writers often use interchangeably. But the single-word form “maybe” is, as we know, an adverb that means “perhaps,” as in “Maybe sabotage is what caused that plane crash.” On the other hand, the two-word “may be” is a verb form indicating possibility or probability, as in “You may be right about that woman after all.” We don’t say, “You maybe right about that woman after all.”
I strongly advise writers to likewise clearly differentiate between “awhile” and “a while.” The single-word “awhile” is an adverb that means “for a time”—a short period reckoned from a particular action or condition—as in “Dinner’s almost ready; please wait awhile.” On the other hand, the noun “while” preceded by the article “a” serves as the object of the preposition in expressions like these two: “It’s raining hard; stay for a while.” “We thought for a while that she could be trusted.” But take note that when we knock off the preposition “for” in such expressions, changing “a while” to “awhile” becomes a correct, natural option: “It’s raining hard; stay awhile.” “We thought awhile that she could be trusted.”
In the same vein, I must caution writers from giving their prose the wrong drift by using the two-word all together in such sentences as “The committee’s assessment of the situation was all together inaccurate.” It delivers an incorrect meaning for that statement because “all together” means “everyone in a group” or “all in one place.” The correct word is the adverb altogether, which means “wholly, “completely,” or “as a whole”: “The committee’s assessment of the situation was altogether inaccurate.”
Some of the manuscripts I copyedit also misuse the “anyway”/“any way” tandem every now and then. We know that the one-word variant “anyway” means “in any case” or “anyhow,” and its two-word counterpart “any way” means “any particular manner, course, or direction.” So it’s incorrect to write, “We told her to avoid seeing that man, but she continued to date him any way”; instead, it should be, “We told her to avoid seeing that man, but she continued to date him anyway.” Conversely, it’s incorrect to write, “Do it anyway you like; after all, you’re the one paying for it”; instead, it should be, “Do it any way you like; after all, you’re the one paying for it.”
And just in case you are among those who still have trouble mistaking everything for every thing, let’s clarify the difference between them once and for all. The single-word “everything” means “all that there is” or “all that is important,” as in this sentence: “She took care of everything for me—from my speaking engagements to my travel bookings.” The two-word variant “every thing,” however, means “each thing individually” and usually allows an adjective in-between: “Every little thing means a lot to her.” (Manila Times, Saturday, August 30, 2008)
Watch for the last three Silent Fire retrospectives on Sunday, October 20, 2024!
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 third batch of the 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.
7 - “What's the difference between ‘will’ and ‘would’?”
A reader, Napoleon C., asked me the following question point-blank the other week: “I’m not so sure which of these two sentences is grammatically right: (1) ‘I hope that you would get well soon!’ (2) ‘I hope you will get well soon!’ Please tell me.”
Here’s my reply to Napoleon:
The first sentence is grammatically correct: “I hope that you would get well soon!” This sentence has the pattern “subject + operative verb + the relative pronoun ‘that’ + noun clause,” and the combination of “that” and the noun clause (“you would get well soon”) is what’s known as a relative noun clause. Normally, relative noun clauses that follow operative verbs like “hope” require the modal auxiliary “would” rather than “will” for their verb. This is to indicate that the outcome of the action is uncertain or conditional—it is desired but is not sure to happen or take place.
In the same token, therefore, if we replace “hope” in that sentence with a similar verb of uncertainty like “wish,” “expect,” or “pray,” we would also need to use “would” in the relative clause: “I wish that you would get well soon!” “I expect that you would get well soon!” “I pray that you would get well soon!”[/i]
What's the difference between “will” and “would”?
In contrast, when the operative verb expresses certainty in the expected outcome, the relative noun clause should use the auxiliary verb “will”: “I am sure that you will get well soon!” “I am positive that you will get well soon!” “I am certain that you will get well soon!”
Now, Napoleon’s second sentence, “I hope you will get well soon!” is actually an elliptical form of the sentence “I hope that you will get well soon!” Recall now that in English grammar, an elliptical sentence is one that lacks a grammar element, but it’s easy to infer that element from the logic or pattern of the sentence. In this particular case, the elliptical construction drops the conjunction “that” for brevity and ease of articulation, but this doesn’t change the modal character of the expected outcome to outright certainty.
Thus, the elliptical form of the sentence would still require the modal auxiliary “would” to indicate that uncertainty: “I hope you would get well soon!” Similarly, for the verbs “wish,” “expect,” and “dream,” we should also use the modal “would” when we make the sentences elliptical: “I wish you would get well soon!” “I expect you would get well soon!” “I pray you would get well soon!”
Napoleon’s question having been answered, though, we must now clearly distinguish this use of “would” from its two other major uses: (1) as the past tense of “will” in indirect speech, and (2) as a softer form of “will” when expressing polite offers or requests.
Remember now that when the “reporting verb” in indirect or reported speech is in the past tense, the verb in the main clause generally gets “backshifted” or takes one step back in tense. Assume that a male official has made the following direct remark: “I will cancel their franchise because of their blatant abuses.” In reported speech, the auxiliary verb “will” gets backshifted to the past tense “would”: “He said he would cancel their franchise because of their blatant abuses.”
A major exception to this backshifting is when the reporting verb is itself in the modal form. Take this direct remark: “I would like to cancel their franchise outright.” There’s no backshifting in the reported speech for it: “He said he would like to cancel their franchise outright.”
When making an offer or request in polite society, of course, the socially graceful thing to do is to use “would” instead of “will.” We don’t ask, “Will you like to have dinner now?” and we don’t say, “I will like some quiet here, please.” Instead, we ask, “Would you like to have dinner now?” and say, “I would like some quiet here, please.” (Manila Times, Saturday, June 14, 2008)
8 - Too much “boasting” and “nestling in”
If I were to judge from my newspaper, magazine, and web readings in recent years, it would appear that we Filipinos are not only a most boastful people but also one so predisposed to petty exaggeration in our language. This is strongly evident in our glib overuse of two English expressions, “boast of (something)” and “nestled (in),” particularly in newspaper and magazine journalism, in advertising, and in the tourism literature.
Let’s talk about “boast of (something)” first. Its dictionary definition is, of course, “to puff oneself up in speech,” “to speak of or assert with excessive pride,” or “to possess and call attention to a source of pride.” Of course, it can also simply mean “to have” or “to contain”—the unboastful denotation that’s actually what is meant in many “boast of” statements.
At the time of this writing, from Google’s estimated 775,000 citations in 2008 of what are boasted about in the Philippines, the following representative high-level boasts are perhaps semantically justifiable and factually defensible: “The Philippines boasts of some of the best beaches and scuba diving waters in the world,” “The Philippines boasts of a 94 percent literacy rate,” “The Philippines boasts (of) good English-language skills,” and “The Philippines boasts (of) some of the finest IT workers in the world.”
Even so, if I were the drumbeater for these things, I’d be more circumspect and use “has” or “lays claim to” instead of “boasts of.” After all, levelheaded language often works much better than rank exaggeration in promotional talk of this kind.
Indeed, many of our boastings captured by Google are woefully out of proportion to the semantic enthusiasm expended on them: “Mindanao boasts of two new vapor heat treatment plants,” “(The library) boasts of a wealthy collection of multi-media materials on governance, productivity, and management,” “(The city) boasts of the first community-based breast screening program in RP,” “Domestic air travel market in Philippines boasts of a growth rate of 47 per cent,” and “One of the oldest in the province, this church boasts of a huge mural painting on its ceiling…”
I think “boasts of” is out of line in all of the above statements; the verb “has” could have done a much better job.
Now let’s talk about the terribly overused expression “nestled (in),” which means “settled snugly or comfortably” or “lying in a sheltered manner.” Google lists 288,000 citations for this expression in the Philippines alone, and when I looked at a representative sampling, I got the dreadful feeling that the expression is not only overused but subjected to severe semantic abuse as well.
Of course, there’s no doubt that the use of “nestled (in)” is semantically justified in the following three statements: “Nestled deep in the Cordilleras is Banaue, about nine hours from Baguio by bus,” “The first and only pine estate south of Metro Manila, (it) is a quiet sanctuary nestled in the gently rolling hills of Tagaytay,” and “Nestled atop a beachside cliff, (the resort) offers breathtaking views of the ocean from the balcony of your own private villa.” The sense of curling up comfortably and of restfulness is evident and warranted in all of these three statements.
But I think the writers went overboard in using “nestled (in)” in these highly contrived statements: “The Philippines lies nestled in the bosom of the East Asian growth area,” “Nestled in the center of everything worth the while, [the hotel] is located along Manila’s Roxas Boulevard fronting the Manila Bay,” “…the sophistication and elegance of a hotel (that’s) nestled right at the heart of Cebu’s bustling business district,” and “Taal Volcano—the word's smallest volcano (that) is nestled in the middle of a scenic lake.”
Obviously, we can’t force everything to nestle into just anything for the sake of lending drama to our language. Instead of settling for a semantic near-miss, therefore, why not use a no-nonsense word like “located” or “situated” instead? It will be right on the mark all the time. (Manila Times, Saturday, August 23, 2008)
9 - One-word, two-word mix-ups
In my work as an editor, I often spend considerable time correcting a good number of single words that should have been spelled out in two, or two words that should have been spelled out as just one word. I sometimes wish I could leave those words well enough alone so I could save time, but most of them could actually mean something different—even wrong—if not rendered in the proper way.
The word everyday is a particularly instructive case. Many writers habitually use it to mean “each day” in sentences like this: “She tends to her garden everyday.” That’s wrong usage, of course, for “everyday” is an adjective that means “encountered or used routinely,” as in “Our prim lady professor shocked us when came to class in everyday dress.” So the correct word choice in the sentence in question is the two-word variant every day: “She tends to her garden every day.” Here, it literally means “each day without fail.” As computer-savvy people might say, “every day” is wysiwyg, which is computer-speak for “what you see is what you get.”
Another recurrently misused tandem is “maybe”/“may be,” which not a few writers often use interchangeably. But the single-word form “maybe” is, as we know, an adverb that means “perhaps,” as in “Maybe sabotage is what caused that plane crash.” On the other hand, the two-word “may be” is a verb form indicating possibility or probability, as in “You may be right about that woman after all.” We don’t say, “You maybe right about that woman after all.”
I strongly advise writers to likewise clearly differentiate between “awhile” and “a while.” The single-word “awhile” is an adverb that means “for a time”—a short period reckoned from a particular action or condition—as in “Dinner’s almost ready; please wait awhile.” On the other hand, the noun “while” preceded by the article “a” serves as the object of the preposition in expressions like these two: “It’s raining hard; stay for a while.” “We thought for a while that she could be trusted.” But take note that when we knock off the preposition “for” in such expressions, changing “a while” to “awhile” becomes a correct, natural option: “It’s raining hard; stay awhile.” “We thought awhile that she could be trusted.”
In the same vein, I must caution writers from giving their prose the wrong drift by using the two-word all together in such sentences as “The committee’s assessment of the situation was all together inaccurate.” It delivers an incorrect meaning for that statement because “all together” means “everyone in a group” or “all in one place.” The correct word is the adverb altogether, which means “wholly, “completely,” or “as a whole”: “The committee’s assessment of the situation was altogether inaccurate.”
Some of the manuscripts I copyedit also misuse the “anyway”/“any way” tandem every now and then. We know that the one-word variant “anyway” means “in any case” or “anyhow,” and its two-word counterpart “any way” means “any particular manner, course, or direction.” So it’s incorrect to write, “We told her to avoid seeing that man, but she continued to date him any way”; instead, it should be, “We told her to avoid seeing that man, but she continued to date him anyway.” Conversely, it’s incorrect to write, “Do it anyway you like; after all, you’re the one paying for it”; instead, it should be, “Do it any way you like; after all, you’re the one paying for it.”
And just in case you are among those who still have trouble mistaking everything for every thing, let’s clarify the difference between them once and for all. The single-word “everything” means “all that there is” or “all that is important,” as in this sentence: “She took care of everything for me—from my speaking engagements to my travel bookings.” The two-word variant “every thing,” however, means “each thing individually” and usually allows an adjective in-between: “Every little thing means a lot to her.” (Manila Times, Saturday, August 30, 2008)
Watch for the last three Silent Fire retrospectives on Sunday, October 20, 2024!
