Korina interviewing CID Commissioner on 11 June show:
"Is that how some leaders ACCEPT BRIBE MONEY ILLEGALLY?"
"So your’re losing weight! Does it have anything to do with THE NEWS IN THE HEADLINES these days?"
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Wait for the teaser for Korina’s show. She says three sentences directly to the viewer (the rest are clips of the interviews).
Sentence One: This is Korina Sanchez asking your questions NOW.
Sentence Two: These are the people who make a difference in your lives.
Sentence Three: Until then, have a good one.
Which really doesn’t make any sense.
Obviously, this is a teaser and she isn’t asking our questions NOW (at THIS very moment).
At this point I am asking, is she addressing each of us individually, each viewer with many questions (so YOUR would be a singular personal second person pronoun) or all her viewers with one or more questions each (and YOUR would be a plural personal second person pronoun)? Not clear.
But then with Sentence Two we know she means YOUR as plural. How? Because she says "your lives". If she were addressing the viewer as an individual she would have said "your life".
But Sentence Three is the killer. Until then, have a good one.
Until when? I thought she was asking our questions NOW. When is "Then"?
Have a good one? A good what? I thought hmm.. maybe since she just said that her guests makes a difference in our lives, maybe she is saying, "have a good life"?
A good life? Until Then? Naw, probably not. A good dinner? A good show? A good question? A good night?
And then, wait, she said have a good ONE? So the YOUR is singular after all? Or else she should have said, Until then, have SOME good ones. But that would be even weirder.
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Last night, I finally saw an entire episode of Korina Today and found out that Sentence One is how she opens the show, and Sentence Three is how she closes it.
So Sentence One made sense in the context of the show. Because the NOW was the show itself.
As she ends the show, she says the show is aired Monday and Wednesday afternoons with a reply on Monday at 11:30 and Wednesday at 12:00 midnight. Then she says, Until then, have a good one.
Ok, that didn’t make sense. Until Monday or Wednesday (when we watch again? is the then) but again have a good what between the end of this show and the next time we watch???? Not to mention that midnight is actually not Wednesday anymore, is it? It’s Thursday.
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Even before Tim was in "big school" I used to buy workbooks, both imported and local ones, to see how English, in particular, was taught to little kids. I was appalled by what was being published locally. The workbooks would have drawings to illustrate the use of prepositions. One example was of a book on top of a table with accompanying text that read "The book is over the table." In fact, in the early 80s I wrote an article in Mr. & Ms. Magazine (it was still a pretty sensible magazine then) about such workbooks.
When I began teaching English to freshmen and sophomore college students I wondered why they had developed such bad habits in grammar. Most of my students had come from private high schools, where I expect they teach good English. These are students from Miriam and LSGH, Xavier, Ica, Poveda, St. Scho, among others. What was happening? It was not their pronunciation or diction I cared about, but their grammar and sentence construction.
One of the exercises I would do in class was to have them cut out news stories from the dailies and feature stories from magazines, and in class we would go through them and look for the errors. Or i would come armed with quotations from TV shows and ask them to tell me if there was anything amiss in the sentences.
In the years since I started teaching, I have noticed that the problem has gotten worse. And while I can attribute some of the lack of fluency or correctness to kids apparently reading less good literature (and i don’t mean just literary pieces, but material that is published and is longer than a cellphone LCD or a Facebook post), I think it is also because of what they hear and see. The role models on TV is one such bad example.
In the 80s, I was mesmerized by the long sentences and deep vocabulary of Loren on that talk show of hers. Mesmerized because quite often the sentences just didn’t make any sense.
My profession being what it is, it is inevitable that when reading just about anything, I spot typos right off. Some of my colleagues call me eagle eyes. (Of course my own typing is terrible and probably filled with typos.) More often than not, when watching a TV show, or a powerpoint presentation during lectures or meetings, I am silently proofreading while listening to the content.
So why ANC? Because I love news and talk shows, and I flip-flop from CNN, BBC, and ANC on Sky. News channels always make for good background noise, like radio in my high school days, but this has the added feature of visuals when you want to look up from the computer. And ANC is the supposedly intelligent local channel, the upper-end of local news, the face that the country brings to the world with The Filipino Channel.
So from 11 pm to around 5 am I am tuned to ANC. Yes, I even listen to TEXT TEXT TEXT (or whatever the show of Alvin Elchico (Z-man2) and Sheryl Cosim is called. In a later entry I will tell you why Alvin is Zman2. David Celdran is Z-man1.
Don’t get me wrong though. I have nothing against ANC. In fact, as I said, I watch it all the time.
But children beware, some of their English may be dangerous to your health.
Come back often, as I post the latest quotes, and maybe you can also keep watch and send me some of your own!
“The cameraman of ABS-CBN reporter Ces Drilon said that their captors threatened to behead him many times while they were in captivity.”
http://beta.ph.news.yahoo.com/star/20080618/tph-jimmy-encarnacion-abs-cbn-541dfb4.html
This is the opening sentence of a news article. Ok, there seems to be nothing wrong with this sentence. We all know what is being told to us, right? Well yes, if one is to assume that the reader KNOWS the backstory.
But let’s look at the info first:
“The cameraman of ABS-CBN reporter Ces Drilon”
Does the cameraman belong to Ces? Or work solely for Ces? The “of” implies” that.
“threatened to behead him many times”
To what does “many times” refer — to “threatened” or to “behead”?
How many times can one be beheaded?
Probably once. So it couldn’t refer to behead.
“while they were in captivity”
When else would he be beheaded? After “they” were set free? So “in captivity” is redundant. Well I guess they want to make it clear that he wasn’t threatened BEFORE they were abducted, nor AFTER they were set free.
And who was in captivity anyway? Note the pronouns. “him” (singular) refers to the cameraman. If you don’t know the story, you don’t know that there is more than one person being held. But since only he was threatened with beheading, (he doesn’t say “we” were threatened), we don’t know for sure if he was alone or not, and who “they is.
Captors is a plural noun. “They” were in captivity. Is they the captors then?
Translate into Filipino: Ayon sa cameraman ni Ces Drilon, mamamahayag ng ABS-CBN, ang mga dumakip sa kanila ay bumanta na pupugutan siya ng ulo maraming beses habang sila ay nakabihag.
When actually it should be: Habang sila ay nakabihag, ang cameraman na kasama ni Ces Drilon, mamamahayag ng ABS-CBN, ay maraming beses na binataan na pupugutan siya ng ulo ng mga bumihag sa kanila.
Therefore:
The cameraman accompanying ABS-CBN reporter, Ces Drilon said that while in captivity, their captors threatened him many times with beheading
It’s weird how synchronicity works. The whole ZTE scandal, and all the other strange things that happen in government had me thinking about evil. By chance, Jon Buloaong who is in Germany, found me online one day on ym (we have chats every few months). He told me he had been asking himself whether he was capable of being corrupted - of doing evil things.
Funny, that soon after the whole ZTN thing erupted, I was getting into discussions with my ateneo batch egroups. I was insisting that instead of humans being born inherently good, we were in fact, inherently bad. And that in fact, Genesis, if I would even fall into the fallacy of using the Bible as the end-all of arguments as some would do, proves my point. We are fallen, we have the smudge of original sin. Therefore, bad.
Of course my classmates beat up on me for this. No, they insisted. We are all good. Siyempre, cynical Karen was again taking the less trodden path of ideas.
Well the day after Jon raised the question, I came across a book at National (where I rarely buy books, as I have discount cards at Fully Booked and Powerbooks). But the book intrigued me and as soon as I got home, I started reading.
It’s a book EVERYONE should read. Ok, there are some tedious parts when he goes into much detail about his Stanford Prison experiment. But skim through it, he has to put it there as he is after all a researcher, and has to present his evidence.
But the points he makes are these:
– too long we have blamed evil on personality traits, on motives and the “nature” of a person
– we should instead look at things from the perspective of a social psychologist and look at dispositional factors in why anyone turns to evil
– too long have be said that there are a “few bad apples” when actually it is the “barrel” that is bad
– it is the system (the barrel) or the structure that allows ordinarily “normal”, “ordinary” “average” people to do evil
– when people are put into a situation such as Abu Ghraib, Nazi Germany, the situation makes them do evil deeds
– deindividuation is what pushes us to do evil
And most of all, and I go back to Jon Bulaong, the author says the question to ask is not whether or not we can be corrupted or become evil. Since, given his theses, we are ALL CAPABLE of turning evil, given the right (well, really the ‘wrong’ situation).
The more important question to ask is CAN WE BE A HERO? Can we rise above the situation and do the right thing and shun the evil we are being pushed to do?
He also has some interesting things to say about the legal system. Such as, it is time that the legal system stops blaming solely the person - he is evil, he is morally bereft — but instead take into account the system that made him do wrong.
For example, the man who steals because he cannot find work and cannot feed his family. Ok, we will say tamad, walang pinag-aralan. But why? Why is he poor, why has he no opportunity? Is jail the solution? Or is fixing the system the solution?
But the question is important - not can we be bad, but can we be good?
It’s an important book to read. Sometimes I just wish the world could be saved.
http://www.lucifereffect.org/about.htm
http://www.zimbardo.com/current.html
