During the past 21 years, my column “English and Simple” in
The Manila Times and its eventual companion web platform Jose Carillo's English Forum (starting 2009) have provided its readers with a continuing stream of routine critiques of the quality of English in the news reportage, opinions and commentary, as well as commercial advertising purveyed by the mass and social media. Our primary objective in these efforts is to help Filipinos improve their proficiency in English through a better understanding of its grammar, semantics, standard usage, and language peculiarities. This, of course, can clearly be discerned from my column series and the thousands of English-usage postings in the Forum to date.
In this latest retrospective series, however, we are taking the opportunity to present the Forum's critiques of the 10 most notable instances when the news stories and commentaries under review terribly assaulted us with their bad sense and awful English grammar. Read them and see for yourself why we had not been as lenient and forgiving in our critiques of their English usage.
As originally posted in the Forum, these 10 exceptionally harsh critiques of their bad sense and awful English grammar are as follows:
1.
“It’s obtuse, even distasteful, to say that seeing a doctor is ‘pleasurable’” (April 13, 2018)
2.
“The perils of misusing literary allusions in feature stories” (May 29, 2011)
3.
“Shock-and-awe English in 2013 Bohol earthquake reportage” (October 18, 2013)
4.
“Open letter on news stories that Filipinas have the world’s smallest breasts” (July 15, 2016)
5.
“When immodest medical jargon is used as a slogan” (April 10, 2005)
6.
“The madcap names of the party-list groups” (May 8, 2010)
7.
“The importance of grammar-perfect English” (April 20,2024)
8.
“The state of our English” (May 22, 2009)
9.
“Do kingfishers eat butter?” (2004) 10.
“A crash course in politically correct English” (July 26,2014)
Simply click their respective links to read the Forum's harsh critique of each them.
