One utterly wrongheaded statement that should give pause to unbridled proponents of active-voice usage is this news headline that I came across in 2013 or almost seven years ago: “Palace: Cops must stop sale of US ready-to-eat meals.”
That headline in a Metro Manila daily conveyed this very disturbing defamatory impression: that some unscrupulous policemen had gone into the business of selling U.S. ready-to-eat meals meant for relief to Typhoon Yolanda victims, and that a Malacañang spokesman had admonished them to stop and desist from engaging in that activity.
After a quick reading of the news story, however, I regained my momentarily shaken faith in the country’s police force. As it turned out, that headline was a semantic dud— a dismal failure of journalistic shorthand. For what the Malacañang spokesman actually was quoted saying in the news proper was that “law enforcement agencies should investigate and enforce the law if it is proven that ready-to-eat meals from the US government were being peddled in local markets.”
In short, the police weren’t really engaged in that illegal activity; they were simply directed by Malacañang to go after unscrupulous traders reportedly blackmarketing US military Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) in some Metro Manila stores.
IMAGE CREDIT: GLOBALGIVING.ORGTYPHOON YOLANDA FOOD RELIEF DISTRIBUTION CENTER, YEAR 2013
So why did that cut-and-dried headline convey a dangerously perverse sense of the news story?
After pondering that quirk in English usage, I concluded that it was the unintended result of an overly strong active-voice mindset among not a few journalists. That mindset forces the editor or reporter to make the doer of the action
always the subject of the sentence even if doing so is uncalled for. This is as opposed to having the flexibility to use the passive voice when the object of the action—or the theme of the statement itself—should logically be the subject of that sentence.
Let’s look at that headline more closely: “Palace: Cops must stop sale of US ready-to-eat meals.” Note that by putting the word “Palace” up front, that headline overemphasizes the source of the information. This is a minor problem that can be fixed by simple repositioning, though; the more serious problem is that just to ensure that the statement is in the active voice, the headline unwarrantedly used the noun “cops” as the subject.
That ill-advised decision skewed the semantics of that headline. As I pointed out earlier, it conveyed the wrong idea that those cops were engaged in blackmarketing US ready-to-eat meals. This became the default sense because grammatically, the headline statement doesn’t specify a particular doer of the illicit trade in the ready-to-eat meals. Of course, the sense of that statement wouldn’t have become ambiguous had it identified the malefactors who must be stopped by police, as in a headline like “Cops must stop blackmarketers of US ready-to-eat meals.”
All of these unpleasant grammatical and semantic complications wouldn’t have arisen if the headline writer was flexible enough to recognize that the passive voice was more suited for that headline than the active voice. Had the headline writer used the passive voice, he wouldn’t have needed “cops” or any other doer of the action; he could have come up with a clearer headline like, say, “Sales of US ready-to-eat meals must be stopped, says Palace” or “Blackmarket of US ready-to-eat meals must be stopped, says Palace.”
The beauty of the passive voice is that it need not always identify an agent or doer of the action, particularly if doing so would only muddle the picture. In that particular headline, not having “cops” as doer of the action, then making the theme of the statement itself as the subject gives emphasis where it’s due—to the need to prevent the diversion of relief goods from foreign governments into the hands of unscrupulous blackmarketers.
(Next week:
When can history be narrated in the present tense?) August 20, 2020
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. Follow me on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/jacarillo, and on Twitter.com @J8Carillo. E-mail: j8carillo@yahoo.com.Read this column online in
The Manila Times:
When we must use the passive voice for clarity’s sake
