Monday, July 21, 2008 Seares: ‘Hurry slowly’ By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
TORKJEL Rygnestad, a Norwegian specialist in disaster victim identification (DVI), says they’re carefully planning the setup of a mobile morgue at the Cebu port.
The morgue will handle more than 500 bodies expected to be retrieved once mv Princess of the Stars, now lying in Romblon waters after the June 21 tragedy, is re-floated. As they did with cadavers earlier sent to Cebu, DVI experts will identify them.
They are rushing but are not being rash. They call it “rush slowly,” says Rygnestad.
It’s an oxymoron, which is what English teachers call figure of speech that combines contradictory words: sweet sorrow, open secret.
Bag of tricks
On figures of speech, Theodore M. Bernstein says in his 1965 book “The Careful Writer”: The writer’s bag of tricks contains all sorts of devices “to help him make his points effectively and to lift his prose from the stodgy level” of a mere string of words. They can be useful, Bernstein says, or “betray the writer into absurdity.”
It depends on how oxymoron affects reader or listener. E.B.
Browning’s “thunders of white silence” or even Rolando Carbonel’s “I rage in my tenderness” steps up heartbeat but what does “hurry slowly” send?
To families of disaster victims who desperately want their sorrow put to rest, hurrying slowly is confusing if not absurd.
The oxymoron may be moronic to those who still can’t accept why the awful thing of death at sea happened to good people like the persons they love.
Yet in haste, DVI experts might tag a victim wrongly and a family might mourn and bury the wrong body.
