i said he said she said

I noticed with amusement one day that one of my subordinates had an electronic English-Chinese dictionary on her table. "What on earth are you doing with that?" I asked, trying to squint at her screen for those incomprehensible squigglings that I used to learn in school.

"Oh, I'm just using it to find synonyms for 'said' so I can write my minutes," she said.

Ah, minutes. I haven't written any in a while, but finding enough synonyms to lend variety to the script is one of the most pain-in-the-ass things for any secretary. I mean, there is only so many times that A said this, B replied that, C commented and D remarked. E opined and F averred while G stated his support. Finally, H directed and the meeting ended.

It reminds me of a recent discussion I had with Shadow over whether or not J. K. Rowling is a good writer. Shadow opined that she was not, because her dialogue is bland and puctuated with Harry said, Hermione said, Neville said etc, etc. No variety, no synonyms, no class. Then again, I retorted that I had never noticed this before, and likely neither had the millions of other readers that have made Harry Potted probably the bestselling book of the 21st century to date.

So as long as the storyline (or content) is good, who really cares whether you nuance all the comments from various people at a meeting. So the next time I write minutes, it shall just be said, said and more said. I'll see how that goes down, at least it will be a lot less headache on my part.

Bogglific words of the day: eastings (longest), stymie (most exotic), toenail (cutest)
(Click on the link to see a pretty cool site that ranks all Facebook apps by polularity.)

myself yourself itself

One of my colleagues has the most annoying penchant for punctuating all his sentences with the word itself. Whenever a sentence ends with a noun, he uses itself like a full stop. I cringe every time he is giving presentations.

Another more common plague that really gets to me is people using myself in place of "I" and yourself in place of "you". Singlish is inherently a lazy language, where people tend to drop words that do not add meaning (and in the process make sentences ungrammatical by proper linguistic standards). So it is incomprehensible to me why anyone would use words that have more syllables than necessary. It makes myself wonder if it is just my colleagues, or if it an ailment affecting Singapore as a whole.

Is it really that cool to be ungrammatical... what does yourself think?

english and singlish

At church today, a friend wanted to interview me about English for her school project. She asked all sorts of questions, which were mostly permutations of what is good English and what is bad Singlish. Together with my two sisters, we had jolly good fun coming up with one-liners for her questions. Here are two of my favourites:

Qn: Where can you find good English?
Ans: Where the dress code is above smart casual.

Qn: What is bad Singlish?
Ans: When you can't differentiate when to use lah, loh, mah, orh or not at all.

I want to blog about how sad I am that the GEP has finally been shut down.
I want to verbalise my thoughts on why it is important to continue to work hard for the country, even though for many of us we could easily settle for lower (but still decent) pay and much better hours.
But I just have no time these days.

death and chinese

It started off innocuously enough. She has a Chinese oral coming up, and her Chinese sucks. I can totally empathise, so we spent some time poking fun at the idiosyncracies of the language.

Zuo and You (left and right). If you can remember how to write them, can you remember which is which?

Dong, Nan, Xi, Bei (North, South, East, West). If you gave me a compass rose I wouldn't be able to label the points in Chinese for you.

Chun, Xia, Qiu, Dong (Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring). We all agree that Chun sounds like it should be summer, somehow. And isn't Xia obviously Autumn, when the leaves are falling?

We then branched out into more serious stuff, when I asked a question that has been on my mind of late: "If you were given the choice to renounce your faith or die, what would you choose?"

Awkward silence, so I continued, "It's not so totally impossible wat. Just last week the two Fox journalists in Lebanon were forced to convert to Islam or be killed. Next time you go to Bali, JI might catch you and give you the same options."

She piped up. "Just say you convert lah. Only need to sign the paper or something right? Then they will let you go." And of course, after that you could continue praying, going to church, etc. What's the big deal anyway?

So I said, "But isn't this the same choice the early Christians faced? Renounce your new religion, or be thrown to the lions. And many of them chose the lions. Or the Christians in China who also chose jail, torture and death rather than abandon their faith. Why didn't they choose this option if it is so easy?"

I guess it all boils down to what we truly, truly believe. If we know that we believe in the true God, and we are going to heaven, we should welcome any opportunity not just to proclaim our faith, but also to hasten our journey to a better place. If we truly believe, it would be a joke to renounce our faith to extend our time of suffering on earth. For surely that would be a betrayal of our principles. We would do as the early Christians did and sing hymns all the way to the end.

Easily said of course. But if it really comes down to that, I am still wondering what I would do.

irregardless

Oh my goodness! I can't believe it's actually a word. Well, if being in the dictionary qualifies it as a word.

ir·re·gard·less (r-gärdls)

adv. Nonstandard

Regardless.

---

[Probably blend of irrespective and regardless.]

Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.

I thought at first it was some bad habit my colleagues have been passing around. Then I realised that it afflicts the larger Singaporean population. And suddenly I see the truth: the evil Americans have been behind it the whole time.

just

Of all the common Singlish words, perhaps none irks me more than the usage of 'just'.

During grad school, I had to do a lot of seminars and class discussions. My Spanish classmate once commented to me how it was really funny how everyone would interject into the discussion with the same opening phrase. The Korean, the German, the Nippon, the Spaniard and of course each American would always precede a comment with the same few words. For the Singaporean, these few words were, "I was just wondering ..."

Having become self-conscious about it, I began to hate it when it slipped into my speech. In the Singaporean context, it seems to come naturally to us to be self-deprecating, or to downplay the weight of comments that we give, or the demands we make. Yet everytime I hear it from my mouth or the mouths of others, the unbidden thoughts slips into my mind: if it is just so unimportant, why do you bother to say it at all?

Perhaps this is a direct clash between my American schooling and my Singaporean upbringing. Take a listen, everybody says it. And everytime I hear it, it is like someone scratching a chalk board with their fingernails.

If you have a sense of deja vous reading this, you may have come across my previous thoughts on a related topic. You may also like to read Huichieh's analysis.

If you are back here to read the update on my thoughts on ministerial salaries, I'm sorry. I really have been thinking about it, but generally too tired and no time to sit down and write another long blog entry so it will have to wait.

i think

I endured a rather gruelling conversation after dinner today. It was with a friend of a friend; a hyperactive kid with strong opinions, a sharp mind and a very fake exterior (or so I thought). I attribute the latter to his thick American accent, because I think anyone who brings an accent back home is simply out to prove some kind of point.

Nevertheless, the words of a dignitary I had lunch with recently came to mind: make friends with as many people who are different from you as you can. This kid was certainly different, maybe we could be friends.

Somehow, the conversation drifted to the use of the words "I think" as a figure of speech. It was interesting to find some commonality in our distaste for these words. He said that this was a sign of weakness - if you think something it means you don't know. It means you are incompetent.

My own personal gripe was that these words are redundant. If you are giving an opinion, you can just state it. No one should misconstrue that you are giving facts, unless you specifically cite an authoritative source. If I say, "LKY is baiting the opposition parties to run for election in a GRC so they will lose everything", what else could this be but my own personal opinion? Even if I were to substantiate this claim with a 20-page academic paper, it would not be a fact. So why bother to start any sentence with "I think..."? It only serves to weaken the argument because it discredits the self-assuredness of the speaker.

The next time you are in a discussion, especially with a bigshot. Take a listen and see how many people start their spiels with "I think".

what word?

I have a friend that I will describe, at best, as an infrequent blogger. Her very last post was on a word she had come across - a term for that situation when you find yourself grasping for a word; you know the meaning, and sometimes you even know the first letter but you just can't articulate it. You know the feeling.

Since she posted that, I often went back to her blog because everytime I had that sensation I would think of the word, but I couldn't remember the word either because it has damn lot of letters and syllables. Almost as bad as decheemanise. I often think that whoever coined the term definitely had a wicked sense of humour with an overdose of irony.

Anyway one day the diaryland database suffered a catastrophic failure and her blog was wiped out. So now I have no recollection of the word, and neither does she. Would anyone in the know kindly enlighten me?

singlish

After reading this excellent discourse on Singlish on Singapore Angle, I have realised that I am, in fact, bilingual. In the PM's own words:

"It is much easier to speak proper English all the time, than to speak sloppily most of the time, and then switch to proper English for formal occasions. Because to do the latter is almost like learning two languages."

Since I'm pretty good at switching from English to Singlish, and discounting my other language inabilities, I guess I am effectively bilingual.

My own experience is that even Singaporeans like myself who choose to speak perfect Queen's English can still be unintelligible to foreigners. It really boils down to two things: accent and speed. I read somewhere that Singaporeans are the 4th fastest speakers of English in the world, so we need to slow down. And with regards to accent, I used to think it unpatriotic to bastardise my speech pattern just to be understood, but after a while convenience won over nationalism.

Singaporeans can also write very well. In my freshmen writing class, one of the students who did a peer review on my paper told me she thought I was the best writer in the class. That came from a person that had me flipping the dictionary several times to grade her own piece. This experience is not unique and I think we do owe a gratitude of thanks to the MOE system teaching us how to properly structure and present ideas in writing.

But perhaps the biggest issue to address is that while Singaporeans are conversant and even fluent, few of us are articulate. Anyone taking classes with high components of class participation knows we get creamed by Americans all the time. Even the dumb ones. Because they are willing to go out on a limb and express even half formed ideas - and they somehow manage to fluff their way through and sound ok. While we are trying to put together an oratorical masterpiece, someone else comes along and steals the glory.

It's great that the government recognises that our English is not always useable on a world stage. But to develop the next generation of successful global citizens, we really need to work on presentation skills and public speaking as well. Lah.

spiel

spiel ( P ) (spl, shpl) Informal n.
A lengthy or extravagant speech or argument usually intended to persuade.

I was looking up the spelling for this word when I discovered I've been using it wrong my whole life. I've always used it as a "short spiel" but from the definition, that's clearly an oxymoron.