A massacre of metaphors

As someone whose many jobs requires him to zip to and fro around the city, I appreciate the intermittent traffic reports that I get on two of my favorite radio stations. (To tell you the truth, it doesn’t help me all that much to learn that the traffic just ahead of me is impossibly heavy, if I have little choice but to go that way, anyway; it just makes me feel better to know that someone out there, somewhere else in the city, has it just as bad or even worse.)

But then I can’t help wincing and squirming when I listen to what the traffic reporters are really saying: things like (I’m making some of this up, now, but I swear to God this is what they sound like) "from Katipunan to Edsa on Boni Serrano is in a slow drag, from Arnaiz to Pasong Tamo is a crying game, while Quiapo to Dapitan is a losing proposition, but Tuktukan to Araneta is in a forward motion!"

I think I know how and why this happens: I can see whoever writes these reports staring at the wall and thinking how absolutely boring and brain-deadening it is to keep saying words and phrases like "moving fast," "moving slowly," "light to moderate," and "heavy" all the time. And so he (or she) grabs a thesaurus or a book of idioms and fires away with blithe abandon. Is traffic slow? Say "CP Garcia is a stretch of molasses!" Is traffic light? Say "Ortigas to P. Tuazon is easy as pie!"

All this, of course, can be fun for both writer and listener, as long as you decide not to be a stuck-up professor of English or persnickety editor like me. But the trouble – not even thinking of the massacre of metaphors and idioms that’s happening here – is that the expressions can sometimes get so twisted that I can’t really figure out what they mean. One, for example, I heard the traffic reporter say that "Traffic from So-and-So Boulevard to So-and-So Avenue is in a sideways motion." Whaaat? I imagined a great rightward skid, culminating in a massive pile-up up the road, but I’m sure the reporter on the scene was looking at something much less exciting.

I’m a great believer in directness and simplicity when it comes to providing functional information, and I run a tidy business retrieving and simplifying technical information that’s been successfully buried under layers of jargon and excessive stylization. Even in creative writing class, I advise my students not to bother with looking up synonyms for recurring words like "said"–as in, "he averred" or "she expostulated." Of course you lose a little something in absolute precision, but you gain a lot more in clarity. I’ve always thought of the thesaurus as being more of a hindrance than a help to most users, especially the clueless who will trawl its pages for the fancier equivalents of simple words.

The bottom line is, if you don’t know what the word or phrase means, don’t use it; the results could be embarrassing, if not disastrous. I once heard President Arroyo say, in a prepared speech, that a certain program was "truncated in three directions." I thought that she or her speechwriter may have meant "trunked" – even then, a rather awkward word to use – but "truncated" was absolutely wrong (it means "cut short"), the same way that people use "fulsome" as in "fulsome praise," thinking that it means "abundant" (it doesn’t – "fulsome" means "insincere").

So go easy on those idioms and metaphors, folks –or you just might find yourself in a pickle, if not in a kettle of fish.

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I had the pleasure, a couple of Saturdays ago, of having coffee with a visiting Filipino writer, Tony Joaquin, who’s now based in Daly City in California. "Writer" barely begins to describe this extraordinary man, whose long career has spanned advertising, teaching, theater, radio, TV, publishing, and industrial management. But a fellow writer he was to me, because while I had never met him before, we had corresponded by e-mail, and Tony had kindly sent me a copy of his autobiography, Simple Glories (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 2000), which proved to be a fascinating read.

Some lives are fascinating in themselves, no matter how you tell the story. In Tony’s case, his many-splendored life has only been enhanced by his gentle, sometimes laconic, narrative. Typical of Tony’s understated style is one of my favorite passages: "The first time the ship docked in Hong Kong, I was an eighteen-year-old, fresh out of high school and innocent of the ways and behavior of old sea hands... [Tony goes on to relate his exposure to the harborside liaisons between sailors and ship-boarding Suzie Wongs.] When the sampan girls came around this time, I was suddenly called and introduced to a lovely, 15-year-old Cantonese called Leah. The chief engineer had taken a liking to me and was looking out to see that I would not be lonely. Leah did not speak too much English. Her skills lay elsewhere and she was very good at that. While the experience was brief, it was both exciting and delightful, but funny in some ways." (I know what some of you are thinking: how un-PC it is, to say the least, to be having sex with a 15-year-old, never mind if you were 18. But let’s remember that this was 1948, and that Shakespeare’s Juliet was 14.)

Tony Joaquin’s memoir runs to the present, to his life as a Filipino-American retiree and grandfather in California, but his most valuable contributions are his evocations of Manila life and living in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, when – because of his talents and his family’s prominence – he came to meet and to work with just about everybody who was anybody in Philippine culture and media. We get glimpses of a young, leggy, and pretty chorus girl named Mary Walter, of the formidable Fr. John Delaney, and of the visionary Marshall McLuhan, who once invited Tony over to dinner. And lets not forget Tony’s illustrious Tio Onching, a.k.a. Nicomedes "Nick" Joaquin, who says of Tony, in the intro the book, that "He admires my prose, I admire his poise; he reverses my gods, I revere his guts."

Sadly, Tony’s reason for his most recent visit home was an unpleasant one – the death of his mother, Sarah K. Joaquin – but I’m sure she was more than happy to have read his book before she left. You will be, too; there are autobiographies that simply boast and bore, but this one amuses and enriches the reader.

Thanks for the book and the coffee, Tony, and here’s hoping our paths cross again, sometime.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.