Relearning the architecture of English

Language lovers of my generation might recall a popular mini-column that was a regular feature in the old days — by which I mean the ’50s and ’60s — in The Manila Times, if memory serves me right.

Written by Jean Edades, the small boxed item titled “How’s Your English?” offered instructive lessons on the do’s and don’ts of English usage. Many of us still lament its eventual demise, as much as we have often wondered why the classroom techniques of parsing and diagramming were given up for lost by high-school English instructors.

Personally, I believe I owe the rapture of a continuing dalliance with the English language to those early, heady days of watching how our teachers “architected” a compound or complex sentence on the blackboard.

A horizontal line was drawn with a chalk, and upon it, subject and predicate were placed and demarcated with a vertical line. Diagonal lines dove below the verb, creating a basement and intricate tunnels for adverbs and prepositional phrases. Above, forked and occasional dotted lines supported towers, with subjunctive clauses occupying the penthouses of the linguistic condominium. 

Ah, diagramming. A visual delight it was, and an effective tool for ingesting the nuances of language, where each part of a sentence construction fell into proper place. The graphic presentation allowed the earnest student a complete understanding of the engineering demands for the most complex expression.

Madame Edades’ how-to’s were in turn much simpler, focusing on the no-no’s and recommending the correct alternatives for simple phrases, clauses, and idiomatic usage.

Decades later, the same newspaper has been gifting us with a learned serial review of how English must be written without grammatical or syntactical transgression. 

Hail Jose A. Carillo, a pseudonym for some reason or other, for a fellow who not only knows his English, but who has been patiently and proficiently exposing the ways the language is often mangled and abused.

His weekly series of exhaustive columns in the Times were first compiled into a formidable book titled English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, which came out in 2004 and promptly won a National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle.

It also went on to become a local bestseller, thanks in part to the resurgence of interest and redoubled efforts to reclaim better facility in the planet’s lingua franca, which happened to be translating into much individual income for college graduates, as well as a GNP spike owing to the proliferation of call centers. 

In 2008, Carillo followed up with a slimmer, smaller book in softcover, The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors. Yours truly was pleased to embroider its back cover with a blurb, to wit: 

“Jose A. Carillo follows up on his award-winning book, English Plain and Simple, with this compilation of egregious acts committed on an acknowledged world language.

“It’s not simply a list that prioritizes the commonest or vilest incidents of vexation, however. Employing a characteristically comprehensive format, Carillo elucidates on what constitutes popular errors, and how speakers and writers who will surely benefit from this assiduous tutelage can untangle themselves from the web of misplaced convention.  

“The 200-million-Elvis-fans-can’t-be-wrong syndrome is thus turned on its head by this chaste if rock-n-rolling lover of language. His extensive critiques turn into step-by-step tutorials that should serve the commendable cause of proper, let alone elegant, communication.”

And now, barely a year later, Carillo completes an invaluable trilogy with a 430-page volume that will become available in hardcover and softcover editions in most bookstores after its formal launching today at Sampaguita Hall, Manila Hotel, starting at 3 p.m.

No less than our esteemed writing colleague, Dr. Jose Dalisay, Jr., director of the UP Institute of Creative Writing, pitches the following endorsement:

“Give Your English the Winning Edge is the latest book in a series of what’s become the definitive guide to the English language for Filipinos (and Americans, the English, and others). It builds on the foundations Carillo raised in English Plain and Simple and The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors to present the reader with ways to gain mastery over the English language by showing how such seemingly simple but tricky concepts as ellipsis, paragraph transitions, modifiers, parallelism, and negation work. More than a grammar textbook, Give Your English the Winning Edge is an enjoyable, invigorating, and often challenging romp through the hills and valleys of language, profusely illustrated with both local and foreign examples. Fans of Carillo — count me among them — will not be disappointed. He makes perfect sense of what I and other professional writers have been trying to do intuitively over these past many years.”

We congratulate the author for his latest signal achievement that is said to show “step by step how the various connectives — the conjunctions, the conjunctive adverbs, and the prepositions — establish the six basic logical relationships in language, then demonstrates how to make them work with the various other grammar elements to form more effective, convincing, and readable expositions.”

We must thank him, too, for selflessly charting an avenue for our countrymen to learn, or relearn, the foundations, posts and lintels, roofs, eaves, and all other architectural features of this great and evolving edifice that is the English language.

* * *

Another important book launch starts at 7 o’clock this evening at Mag:net Katipunan, with Joel M. Toledo breaking a champagne bottle on the prow of his second collection of poetry, The Long Lost Startle.

A literature professor at Miriam College, Toledo has won two Palanca awards for Poetry in English. His new, 59-poem collection is published by the University of the Philippines Press, and comes with an introduction by Gémino H. Abad.

It assembles poems that also won the NCCA Writers Prize, as well as the 2006 Meritage Press Prize (USA) and the international competition for the prestigious 2006 Bridport Prize (UK).

Heraldic blurbs are provided by two of our finest poets operating (like, you know, body shapers) in the US: my compadre Eric Gamalinda and comadre Luisa A. Igloria.

Gamalinda breaks his social silence and writes: “There is generosity and wisdom in these poems, a sense of wonder that elevates the most ordinary of things and bestows upon them a special place in the world. Informed by both intelligence and compassion, Joel M. Toledo’s The Long Lost Startle, I believe, will be considered a major work in Philippine poetry; while the angel of history sees the future by turning his back on the wreckage of the world, Toledo fixes his gaze with attention and astonishment, and in the process heralds a future with some of the most memorable poems our country has ever produced.”

Amen.

Poetry readings and performances will follow the book launch as part of the 57th installment of the bi-weekly Happy Mondays Poetry Nights that Joel organizes and usually hosts. Tonight, Kris Lacaba takes over the honor in introducing the participants that will include Jimmy Abad (freshly arrived from Rome where he received the coveted Feronia Prize), AdMU Fine Arts dean Benilda Santos, and visiting Fil-Am poet Patrick Rosal (who’s enjoying a Fulbright grant and will be based in Ateneo till October).

Other readers are Marne Kilates, Marjorie Evasco, Neil Garcia, Mikael Co, Rafael San Diego, Khavn dela Cruz, Pancho Villanueva, RJ Baliza, Mia Tijam, and Wincy Ong. Featured musical performers are Ang Bandang Shirley, Lourd De Veyra and Jay Japasin of Goliath, and Los Chupacabraz, the all-poets’ rock band that counts Toledo and Co among its now legendary members.