Let’s cite two of the major Metro Manila broadsheets for some major and minor crimes against language and English grammar in their news reporting last December 3:
(1) Manila Bulletin: Dangerous mixed metaphorsRetailers prevail in sugar price ‘war’
MANILA, Philippines — Consumers should bite the bullet as they nibble sugar.
The National Price Coordinating Council (NPCC) has officially dumped the suggested reference price (SRP) for sugar in its December 1 meeting for the rest of the year.
This means that as the demand for sugar rises during the holidays, consumers must grin and bear it, all because retailers, particularly groceries and supermarkets associations, threatened to pull out sugar stocks if the SRP of P56.00 per kilo of refined sugar is maintained.
We can see that the lead passage above is extremely trigger-happy with metaphors. The “dumped the suggested reference price for sugar” bit may sound OK, but the sense of the verb “dumped” is obtuse and confusing; “rejected” captures the intended sense much better. As to the figurative expression “consumers must grin and bear it,” it’s iffy and forced but passable. But for sure, “consumers should bite the bullet as they nibble sugar” is an absurd, extremely toxic mixed metaphor that shouldn’t have been used at all.
Figuratively, of course, “to bite the bullet” means “to endure the worst part of an ordeal” or “to accept something difficult or unpleasant.” To use this metaphor to refer to the price increase in sugar is by itself already grossly overblown, but the reporter further compounded the semantic problem by using the “nibble the sugar” metaphor in tandem with it. For consumer safety’s sake, the reporter and editor of this news story should have known that bullets and sugar don’t mix, whether literally or figuratively. Bullets are usually made of lead, which is poisonous when ingested with or without sugar. And one more thing: hardly any consumer—even kids for that matter—is a sugar-nibbler these days. (We all take sugar dissolved in our coffee, juice, or soda pop or blended with our cakes and sweetbreads, don’t we?) We can therefore be sure that “Consumers should bite the bullet as they nibble sugar” is both dangerous nutritional advice and bad journalism that’s also, uhmm, way off the truthfulness mark!
So here’s how I would have edited that passage to put it on an even semantic keel:
Retailers prevail in sugar price ‘war’
MANILA, Philippines —The National Price Coordinating Council (NPCC), in its December 1 meeting, has officially rejected the suggested reference price (SRP) for sugar for the rest of the year.
This means that as the demand for sugar rises during the holidays, consumers must grin and bear it because retailers, particularly groceries and supermarkets associations, have threatened to pull out sugar stocks if the SRP of P56.00 per kilo of refined sugar is maintained.
(2) Manila Bulletin: Garbled sentence with a badly misplaced key phrase Over my dead body
MANILA, Philippines — Senator Panfilo M. Lacson said on Thursday he would come out of hiding if Justice Secretary Leila de Lima only exercises her plenary powers to ask the Manila Regional Trial Court (RTC) to withdraw the double murder charges lodged against him in the November, 2000, Dacer-Corbito murder case and conduct a reinvestigation “or when I’m already dead.”
Like me, many readers must have had a very serious problem understanding the lead sentence above. Its construction is so garbled that it’s so difficult to make heads and tails of it. Particularly confusing is the part of the sentence that reads “in the November, 2000, Dacer-Corbito murder case and conduct a reinvestigation ‘or when I’m already dead.’” The key phrase “...and conduct a reinvestigation ‘or when I’m already dead’” is where it shouldn’t be, dangling precipitously there and making the construction sound like a run-on or fused sentence.
I’m afraid only a sweeping rewrite can straighten out that badly constructed sentence. I won’t attempt to do it, though. Instead, I’ll just present the first three paragraphs of the much clearer and more readable report of the
Philippine Daily Inquirer that was based on the same Facebook posting of the fugitive senator. Here it is:
MANILA, Philippines— In hiding since January, Sen. Panfilo Lacson will surface only when justice has been served, or when he is dead.
Lacson made the declaration in a message he sent the Inquirer through the social networking site Facebook on Wednesday night. He turned wistful in the same message, saying: “It has been a long time. I miss the Senate.”
But he said in a statement Thursday that Justice Secretary Leila de Lima’s claim—based on intelligence reports of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI)—that he was hiding in the country had prompted him to go deeper into hiding.Dacer-Corbito murder case. and conduct a reinvestigation “or when I’m already dead.”
(3) Philippine Daily Inquirer: Grisly grammatical crime against the deadChinese tourist shoots dead compatriot in Clark
CLARK FIELD, Pampanga—A Chinese tourist was arrested for fatally shooting another Chinese inside a villa at the Fontana Leisure Park and Casino here on Sunday.
In a report on Monday, Chief Inspector Luisito Tan, chief of the Police Station 4 in Angeles City, said Shahani Co, also known as Raymond Co, died at the Mt. Carmel Hospital here due to bullet wounds in the body. Co was a resident of Quezon City.
There’s actually no grammatical or semantic problem with the lead passage above, which is presented here only for context. The problem is in the headline: “Chinese tourist shoots dead compatriot in Clark.” Clearly, this grisly headline is saying that the victim was already dead when the Chinese tourist shot him. The subsequent story tells us, of course, that he was still alive when his assailant shot him; in short, he was shot and died as a result.
Here, then, is an accurate rendition of that headline:
Chinese tourist guns down compatriot in Clark (4) Manila Bulletin: Subject-verb disagreement1,000 expats renews call on Aquino
MANILA, Philippines — Some 1,000 expatriates in Afghanistan has renewed their call on President Aquino to send another delegation that will assess the situation in Afghanistan to lift the deployment ban in the country and allow the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to celebrate Christmas in the country.
Filipinos in Afghanistan (FIA), a group of Filipinos, now based in Afghanistan and working in international organizations like the United Nations and International Red Cross, has sent a letter to President Aquino asking the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) contingent to evaluate the country last Sept. 25.
When a journalist commits a subject-verb disagreement error, I always give him or her the benefit of the doubt by assuming that it’s simply a typographical or proofreading lapse. In the above headline and lead passage, however, it’s obvious that both the reporter and the deskman don’t have a clear grasp of how to achieve subject-verb agreement.
To begin with, the headline “1,000 expats renews call on Aquino” is grammatically erroneous. Since the doer of the action, “1,000 expats,” is plural, the verb denoting the present-tense action should be in the plural form, too, which is “renew.”
Secondly, in the lead sentence, “Some 1,000 expatriates in Afghanistan has renewed their call on President Aquino...”, it’s clear that the writer mistook the singular noun “Afghanistan” as the doer of the action, thus rendering the verb in its present perfect singular form “has renewed.” The true doer of the action, however, is the plural noun phrase “some 1,000 expatriates,” so that verb should be in agreement with it by also taking the present-perfect plural form “have renewed.”
The pertinent portion of that problematic lead passage should therefore be corrected as follows:
1,000 expats renew call on Aquino
MANILA, Philippines — Some 1,000 expatriates in Afghanistan have renewed their call on President Aquino to send another delegation that will assess the situation in Afghanistan to lift the deployment ban in the country and allow the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to celebrate Christmas in the country.
(5) Manila Bulletin: Dangling relative clauseFour civilians killed after robbers hijack bus in Quezon
MANILA, Philippines (PNA) – The Quezon Provincial Police Office (PPO) on Thursday ordered a thorough investigation of all police operatives involved in the running gun battle with armed robbers who hijacked a passenger bus that resulted in the killing of four people on Wednesday.
Quezon police director Sr. Supt. Erickson Velasquez said that he ordered the investigation to determine whether there were lapses on the part of the police operatives.
In the lead sentence above, the relative clause “that resulted in the killing of four people on Wednesday” is a dangling modifier because it doesn’t have an appropriate subject to modify. The noun “passenger bus,” although positioned right before that relative clause, couldn’t be its logical antecedent subject, and neither could it be the noun “armed robbers” nor the noun phrase “all police operatives involved in the running gun battle.” So what could that subject be? Conceivably, it could be “the running gun battle with armed robbers,” but unfortunately, the modifying phrase “who hijacked a passenger bus” gets in the way of proper modification.
But English actually has a way of dealing with such unwieldy modifying situations: the use the progressive form of the verb instead of a “that” clause to lead off the result statement. Here’s how that lead sentence would read when we use this grammatical solution:
“The Quezon Provincial Police Office (PPO) on Thursday ordered a thorough investigation of all police operatives involved in the running gun battle with armed robbers who hijacked a passenger bus,
resulting in the killing of four people on Wednesday.”
Note that when we use this solution, the result phrase in progressive form modifies the whole clause that precedes it rather than a particular antecedent noun in that clause.
