Aquino eyes Philippine presidency

When the author uses ‘eyes‘ in this title, he means ‘intends to pursue‘. Quite often, we use it as a phrasal verb ‘eye up‘ meaning the same thing.

There’s also some interesting vocabulary in the first paragraph where it is mentioned that Benigno Aquino would ‘run‘ for president. When we talk about ‘running‘ for a position, we mean trying to be nominated or selected for that position.

The next interesting phrase is in the third paragraph when it the place where his mother was ‘sworn in‘. When a president is ‘sworn in‘ he or she makes a vow to be loyal to the country and strive to be a good president. It’s basically the point at witch he or she accepts the presidency.

In the following paragraph, there is another interesting expression when the author mentions a forty-day ‘period of mourning‘. To ‘mourn‘ is when people show sorrow of grief about a someone’s death. Mourning customs and traditions vary but it is very common to wear black clothes during this time as an indication that one is ‘in mourning‘.

There is some more interesting vocabulary slightly later on in this paragraph:

He is set to lead the opposition Liberal party in the May 2010 polls, with Gloria Arroyo, the current president, mandated by the constitution to step down at the end of her six-year term.

The first interesting word here is ‘mandated‘, meaning ‘ordered’ and the other is the phrasal verb ‘step down‘ meaning to resign and allow someone else to fill the position. We sometimes use ‘step aside‘ to mean the same thing.

In the next-but-one paragraph, there are some more interesting words:

Joseph Estrada, the former president and movie star who was ousted from power in 2001 and subsequently jailed for plunder, has said he wants to run again.

In this paragraph, ‘ousted‘ means forced out and ‘plunder‘ means stealing. In this case, I believe it was government funds that he was alleged to have stolen.

There are just two more words I would like to look at in this article. The first is ‘tycoon‘ meaning a very wealthy, successful businessperson. It’s quite similar to the word ‘mogul‘ as discussed in this post. The last word is ‘polls‘ which we have also seen before in this post about the recent elections in Japan.