Listen up, Filipinos, because this concerns you. You have adopted bad English habits from us Americans for far too long. Yes, we Yanks are responsible. Our culture pushed our slangy ways upon you; we take full blame. Our version of the King’s English is sloppy, unkempt. It’s also very malleable and attracts more new words per year than Kim Kardashian does Twitter followers. But henceforth, you really should take your lead from the folks who invented the language itself: the English. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.

4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive. Read the rest of this entry »

If you don’t know the meaning of the word “inchoate,” you join many readers of The New York Times (NYT) who have looked up the word and many others in the NYT’s website built-in American Heritage dictionary. According to a feature published in The Daily Tribune (source not mentioned) “inchoate,” “profligacy,” “sui generis” and “austerity” topped the latest words published by The Times. The list is a yearly undertaking. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Fellow Communicators,

As an observer of language, I came across a very instructive case study recently of how a revealing, off-the-cuff press statement of a presidential candidate, Sen. Benigno Aquino III, was fudged in translation and in paraphrase by certain media outlets that reported it. The concern of Jose Carillo’s English Forum being primarily the use and misuse of language, however, I would neither dwell on the political implications of that statement nor make any psychological inferences from it. My critique will simply focus on the blatant unfaithfulness of the translation from Tagalog to English by two media outlets, and on how another media outlet presented as direct quotes a heavily paraphrased and fudged English translation of Sen. Aquino’s actual statement in Tagalog. Read the rest of this entry »

[Following are some very funny spelling bloopers caught in US local newspapers, publications and various emails - as reported in Clean Laffs. See if
you can catch the goofs.] Read the rest of this entry »

These days, we tend to communicate via the keyboard as much as we do verbally. Often, we’re in a hurry, quickly dashing off e-mails with typos, grammatical shortcuts (I’m being kind here), and that breezy, e.e. cummings, no-caps look. It’s expected. It’s no big deal. But other times, we try to invest a little care, avoiding mistakes so that there’s no confusion about what we’re saying and so that we look professional and reasonably bright.In general, we can slip up in a verbal conversation and get away with it. A colleague may be thinking, Did she just say “irregardless”?, but the words flow on, and our worst transgressions are carried away and with luck, forgotten. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are the most common circumlocutions and their single-word equivalents: Read the rest of this entry »

Filipinos make mistakes mixing metaphors.
So do Americans!
Can you spot the errors?

English professors love to catch the errors students make
in their term papers, and they love nothing better than
to catch mixed metaphors. The “friends and survivors” of
Calvin College English department collected this list of
mixed metaphors and posted them on their web site: Read the rest of this entry »

Misuse of restrictive relative clause makes zombies of dead war veterans

Following are some very funny spelling bloopers caught in local newspapers, publications and various emails. See if you can catch the errors. – From Laffaday Read the rest of this entry »