‘Thanks God, it’s a Friday’ and other fractured English on TV

With classes in all levels already in full swing by next week, I suppose most students would be spending fewer hours in front of the television – and this is both good and bad.

Bad – because there are some good things you learn from television. Watching American shows, for instance, also helped widen my vocabulary. The word cavity – I learned that as a kid from The Flying Nun. Trot – I first heard about that from The Carol Burnett Show.

Good – because, well, there are a lot more bad things you get from watching television nowadays.

I am not even going to talk about moral values because that’s going to be a lengthy discussion. Besides, I don’t think I’m the right person to talk about that.

Let’s just stick to how some people on television have been mangling the English language during on-cam interviews.

I’ve listed down some fractured phrases in English that I caught while monitoring TV programs the past several months and, quite expectedly, the biggest contributions came from the guests in movie talk shows. Here are samples below:

• From a sexy starlet who loves the English language so much – never mind if the feeling isn’t exactly mutual. "I told her na eh – from the very first start."

• From the same starlet: Yung boyfriend ko, nagte-take-up siya ng doctor." (The boyfriend is supposed to be taking up medicine.)

• From another starlet: "She’s my friend of mine." (Some people can be so possessive.)

• From a stepmother bad-mouthing her celebrity stepdaughter: "She doesn’t have breathing (breeding)."

I also noticed that showbiz people love to use as a crutch the phrase "at this point in time" during their interviews. There’s nothing wrong with that except that it gets annoying to hear that all the time.

What’s wrong is when movie stars say, "lay low" because the correct way of saying it is lie low.

Some movie celebrities perhaps should also be told that "Once in a blue moon" doesn’t mean "from time to time." "He comes here once in a blue moon," a single mother complained about the father of her daughter not visiting them often enough. If you say once in a blue moon, it means never. (Although this is open to debate because some people insist that "Once in a blue moon" means rarely. But I’m willing to be corrected if I‘m wrong.)

Surprisingly, people who appear in news and public affairs programs are also guilty of having twisted grammar. Interviewing a schoolteacher via phone patch one time, this male morning talk show host said on the air, "Ma’am, can I bring your books?" If I were the schoolteacher, I would have shot back, "Yes you can, but you may not!" Maybe the schoolteacher was just being polite – or probably, horrors, she didn’t know any better.

• From another male host of another morning show: "Thanks God, it’s a Friday!"

Watching IBC News Tonite sometime in March, the newscaster said, "There are evidences against Iraq." (You always say pieces of evidence – never evidences.)

• From a military man being charged for some anomalous act: "I have the right to be silence."

• From another military official in an interview with Susan Enriquez for Saksi: "He is already belong to a special group."

On TV Patrol, I am just so glad that Korina Sanchez correctly pronounces southern as "suth’ern," but I don’t think Ernie Baron does.

I was hoping, however, that TV Patrol would stop using tabloid language. Sure, it started out as a tabloid news program in the mid-’80s, but it’s an institution now and its language should be a lot more formal. I wish this newscast would stop using terms like tinira, nakipagbakbakan, or even nabuking. (I cringed in my seat one time when I heard Carmelita Valdez say, "Nabuking ang operasyon...")

Maybe TV Patrol wants to keep its mass base by sticking to tabloid language. But then, TV Patrol is a serious news program (unless it doesn’t want to be taken seriously – and that’s bad for a newscast) and should therefore be an instrument in disseminating what is right, correct and proper to a population that had already been at the receiving end for the longest time of poor quality education.