Silent Fire Retrospectives - Batch 2By Jose A. CarilloSilent 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.” 
(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. 
“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!
