Saturday, December 22, 2007


TROUBLES USING PERSONAL AND IMPERSONAL MEANINGS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

It appears the prestigious publication "The New York Times" has great problems using personal and impersonal meanings. In order to be fair, we have to admit that using personal and impersonal meanings in English grammar is no joke; however, misusing the two opposite meanings is not allowed for such (or any) important publishing institution.

Last year, The New York Times blessed us with the most hilarious of their personal vs. impersonal pearls: they named "YouTube"--an internet site!--the "Person of the Year 2006". Later in 2007, The New York Times noticed that people were laughing copiously at their "decision", therefore they started an intensive campaign of changing the meaning of their "blog": they said, it was not quite YouTube; it was "You" [sic]. That was another linguistic pearl: the personal pronoun "you" was used impersonally to name "The Person of the Year 2006"! How about little good, classic, and clear English grammar, dear New York Times people?

To be on the safe side, this year NYT has named Mr. Vladimir Putin as the "Person of the Year 2007"! Another unfortunate choice. What the great editors at NYT should know is, any person having official government functions, anywhere in the world, ceases to be a person: that person represents the government, the institution, therefore his name is used impersonally. Mr. Vladimir Putin is not a person today, in 2007: he is the President of the Russian Federation; in other words, Mr. Vladimir Putin IS/REPRESENTS the Russian Federation with all its social, economical, and political activity. The "President Putin" is not the same thing as "Gospodin Putin". When Mr. Putin will cease having any official functions then, and only then, his name will represent the person.

Anyway, at Corollary Theorems we see things differently: we consider the TRUE Person of the Year 2007, for our entire World, is little Madeleine McCann. We took the liberty to insert the picture of the missing child taken from its default site http://www.findmadeleine.com/


Our question to you [this "you" is used here impersonally, since it refers to all people in the world] is: "What have you done to little Madeleine, people?" And also: "What have you done, and what are you doing today, to all children in our World?"

Link to New York Times "Person of the Year 2007" page: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/







 

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Sunday, December 23, 2007


USING ADVERSATIVE CONJUNCTIONS "BUT", "WHILE", "THOUGH", "ALTHOUGH", ETC.

No doubt about it, if you are an USA citizen and you intend to find out clear, untainted information about the latest developments in news, you have to "tune in" to BBC. During the past two years, we have regularly studied the news delivered by CNN, ABC, and New York Times, and also by BBC and NewsDaily--this last one is an Internet site dedicated to news only; it is well up to date, though way too laconic. What is worse, we have noticed that in USA critical information is either censored/auto-censored or it is biased by national propaganda. Of course, that is no news.

The BBC reporters are doing, in truth, the best job in the world, and we do not know how to thank them properly for their tremendous labor. Thank you very much, dear colleagues! Our strongest wish at Corollary Theorems is that one good sunny day our website will make the news at BBC [this is an innocent joke]. Note that Corollary Theorems is not in competition with anybody: we use the available published information only to highlight that "reality is not what it appears to be".

Highlighting the adversative or the hidden side of the news/reality is not easy, and sometimes that task may be even impossible, or useless. For example today, December 23 2007, the news are so abundant at BBC--though little important to us--that we might confuse our readers if we start commenting few of them. The confusion is commonly generated by readers' false perception that we are, somehow, attempting to prioritize the importance of the news.

The only interesting aspect to us, at Corollary Theorems, is the social-psychology side, when news comes to support our theories, our articles, and our books with the power of example. That is far more important than any news, dear readers, because at Corollary Theorems we present, as mentioned, the adversative or the hidden side of our social reality. Although we are slightly inclined to favor the N. American readers--the majority of our visitors--we write for the entire Human Civilization on our planet. All people in the world are our dear brothers and sisters, and we love, cherish, and respect them equally--according to their level of intelligence, naturally.

For today we have a small set of news highlights for you, as follows:

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2033324.stm - FBI campaign against Einstein revealed
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7158029.stm - FBI planned mass arrests in 1950
3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7157993.stm - CIA 'kept' tapes from 9/11 probe
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/world/middleeast/23awakening.html?ref=todayspaper - In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict
5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7148671.stm - Black hole 'bully' blasts galaxy
6. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7151190.stm - 'Active glacier found' on Mars
7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2776229.stm - Fifth closest star discovered

All news articles above are very interesting, though we have selected them to highlight another aspect: few aberrant features in the published English language. First of all, all news above are written in the new style of paragraphing: each paragraph is written separately, well isolated by empty lines, in order to eliminate the paragraph indentation marks. Note, however, that a paragraph should group at least 2 (complex) sentences; one sentence in one paragraph is not allowed. In fact, the paragraph should be used only to mark/highlight ideas or topics--this is, in meaning--not to enhance the form of the documents/articles.

The second interesting aspect--this time as an alarming trend--is the improper use of the conjunction "but": conjunctions should not be used to start sentences, and definitely not the adversative ones. Grammatical rules are frequently "bent" in literary documents, in order to shape the meaning properly, though there are few rules which have to be obeyed. Adversative conjunctions in particular require two opposite terms/sentences/ideas in order to legitimate their use; starting a (complex) sentence with an adversative conjunction, therefore missing the first reference term/sentence/idea, is a grammatical error: it brings confusion to the meaning.

Finally, while few reporters are very good at handling the punctuation marks, in order to build long complex sentences having perfect meanings, most of them prefer to employ the N. American "telegraphic style". Sure, that superficial style may be publishers' requirement, though it doesn't sound very nice, and it does leave the door open for lots and lots of meaning speculations.

Psychologically, the readers are simply reading the news without noticing grammatical shape/form of the meaning. However, the danger in English language is, bad habits may easily become the widespread norm. Consider for example this new, horrible "blogging" trend ...

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