A hypersized balikbayan-box flood metaphor that simply won’t hold water
Jose Carillo
October 17, 2009
Dear Fellow Communicators in English,
Some metaphors could be stunningly resonant and true, like the description of the first atomic bomb explosion as generating a flash of light “brighter than a thousand suns,” but not the sensational billion-balikbayan-box metaphor used by a Metro Manila broadsheet for the water released by the San Roque Dam in Pangasinan at the height of Typhoon Pepeng. Its front-page headline story breathlessly said: “Water equivalent to a billion balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second hit 10 hapless towns in Pangasinan province…” Something’s wrong there somewhere.
Indeed, if my simple computations are correct, it looks like the science experts who conjured that metaphor had erroneously hypersized those balikbayan boxes by almost 6 times their actual volume, and then had grossly understated the dam’s water releases to only 1/6 of its actual magnitude of 2.5 billion balikbayan boxes. Here, as I point out in My Media English Watch in Jose Carillo’s English Forum, lies the danger of exuberantly politicizing and sensationalizing the science and the journalistic reporting of one of the deadliest natural disasters of our time.
My critique of this serious case of inaccurate and misleading reporting topbills this week’s features package of the Forum, which carries other thought-provoking stories about surviving the killer floods and calls for more science and precision in our thinking to make life more bearable if not entirely pleasant in our calamity-riven planet.
THIS WEEK IN THE FORUM (October 17-23, 2009): · My Media English Watch: Highly Politicized Physics and Faulty News Reporting (That hypersized balikbayan-box metaphor simply won’t hold water!) · Special Education Forum: Setting the Tone for Our Post-Flood Discussions on Education, Teaching (We need a finely tuned judgment to achieve real progress) · Pour Out Your Mind in English: A Harrowing, Uplifting Tale of September’s Killer Floods (Some great lessons need to be learned from the calamity) · Essays by Jose Carillo: Learning to Use the Relative Pronouns with Confidence (How to get out of a very common grammatical Waterloo ) · News and Commentary: Education Department Releases Corrections to Faulty English Books (An inveterate grammar curmudgeon’s efforts are finally vindicated!) · Time Out from English Grammar: Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory as “Mother of All Paradigm Shifts” (The virtue of focusing on Earth rather than on Heaven) · Advice and Dissent: Figuring Out the “Millennials” is Lucrative Business in the US (But to gather all those experts in one room would be pure bedlam!) · You Asked Me This Question: What’s the Proper Tense for “Do” in the Negative of a Statement? (Remember the rule: It’s the helping verb that takes the tense!)
See you at the Forum!
With my best wishes,
Joe Carillo We e-mail this free update to regular readers of Jose Carillo’s English Forum. If you’re on our mailing list by mistake or don’t want to continue receiving this update, simply e-mail a note to us with the word “Unsubscribe.” Thank you. Where do you want to go today?
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