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I WOULD like to share with readers an intriguing grammar question
e-mailed to me by a formerly Canada-based Filipino reader, Basil
Carating:
“I’m an avid reader of your column and I’m
just curious and bothered. Recently, giant blue billboards have
materialized touting a [Philippine telecommunication company’s]
new wireless Internet offering. It says ‘WIRELESS INTERNET. JUST
PLUG IT!’ and it shows a little contraption with a short wire and
an electrical plug attached to its end. The company has doubtless
spent lots of money for this campaign, judging by the number, the
prominence, and—as I have already said—the sheer size of those
billboards.
“Please tell me: Doesn’t ‘Just plug it!’
mean ‘Barahan mo’ as in ‘Plug that leak’? Shouldn’t it say
‘Just plug it in!’ as in ‘Ikabit mo!’ or ‘Isaksak mo!’?
“Am I wrong or has that company committed a
gigantic grammar blunder?”
Here’s my reply to that question:
Dear Basil,
Let’s evaluate this matter starting from its
grammatical roots.
As a stand-alone verb, “plug” may either be
transitive or intransitive. According to my trusty digital
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, “plug” in its
transitive sense can mean: (1) to stop, make tight, or secure by
inserting a plug; (2) to shoot with a bullet; and (3) to advertise
or publicize insistently. As a transitive verb, of course,
“plug” needs an object to function properly, as in “Plug that
leak!”
In its intransitive sense, on the other hand,
“plug” can mean: (1) to become plugged (here, it usually takes
the form of the phrasal verb “plug up,” as in “The pipe got
plugged up”; (2) to work persistently, as in “He plugged away at
the calculus problem”; and (3) to fire shots, as in “The shooter
plugged on until his bullets ran out.” The intransitive “plug”
doesn’t take an object at all.
Note that none of the meanings above applies to
the sense intended by those billboards of the telecommunication
company. Instead, the meaning they convey is that of the phrasal
verb “plug in,” which either means “to attach or connect to an
electric outlet” (transitive sense) or “to establish an electric
circuit by inserting a plug” (intransitive sense). In both cases,
the preposition “in” is integral to the phrasal verb; without
it, that phrasal verb reverts to the stand-alone verb “plug” in
the sense of “plugging a leak or hole.”
It is therefore evident that the billboard
statement “WIRELESS INTERNET. JUST PLUG IT!” is semantically
flawed, and I think you have a good basis for thinking that phrased
this way, “JUST PLUG IT!” actually means “Barahan mo!” or,
in English, “Plug that leak!” (in the sense of the first
definition of the transitive “plug” given earlier). And I agree
with your suggestion that the grammatically correct way to say it is
‘JUST PLUG IT IN!’ as in ‘Ikabit mo lang!’ or ‘Isaksak mo
lang!’
(I think Sattinger’s Law applies to this
situation: “It works better if you plug it in.” This is as
quoted in a humorous vein by Lawrence J. Peter in his 1973 book
The Peter Prescription: How to Make Things Go Right.)
But to spare the telecommunications company the
big trouble of dismantling and redoing all those huge billboards, it
may want to consider this no-fuss, low-expense, simple-paint-over
grammatical alternative: replace the pronoun “IT” in that slogan
with the preposition “IN,” so the slogan will read as follows:
“WIRELESS INTERNET. JUST PLUG IN!” Indeed, I have a feeling that
this was probably what the advertising writer probably had in mind
in the first place.
Let’s just hope that advertising license or
literary license won’t be invoked as a defense for this shaky
usage of “JUST PLUG IT!” We have freedom of speech, of course,
but it always pays to phrase ourselves beyond reproach. As one of my
favorite English-usage websites proclaims in its homepage, “A
society is generally as lax as its language.”
j8carillo@yahoo.com
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