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Category Archives: Linguistics
Singapore and Bilingualism
I have decided to come out of hiding and say my 2 cents — bilingualism is not a mistake. We ask why our citizens don’t seem to be able to handle both languages well – lapsing into some form of bastardized English AND Mandarin. Is it a policy failure? Evidently not – see, National Education [...]
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TVMobile is sexist
or they are stupid. I was on the bus on Wednesday and I was joylessly glancing at yet another Just For Laughs program on TVMobile when I spotted this insane quotation running on the footer: “Freedom is the emancipation of the arbitrary rules of other men.” One, is this quote addressing men only? Two, arbitrary [...]
Mooncake
Today I took out my Mum’s mooncake mould. My 3-year-old niece saw it and we had an interesting conversation. Her: What is it?Me: This is for the mooncake.Her: Where is the moon? All right. How do I explain that there’s no moon in a mooncake? Like how a shortcake isn’t short, and how a fairy [...]
Hiragana
Yesterday I was coerced into buying a textbook to learn hiragana, which is the syllabic alphabets that make up one of the 3 writing systems used in Japanese. (Katakana and kanji are the other two.) In the book I am provided space to practise my penmanship. I feel like a nursery student all over again [...]
Should
I am beginning to hate the word shall (and its derivatives) more and more. You may wonder how can anyone hate words. People just do. Like people who hate expletives like fuck, I hate the word shall. To me, shall must join the ranks of dirty words. I refer to the sense that denotes “expressing [...]
Hawk?
My tuition student didn’t know what a hawk is. I told her it’s a big predator bird. And then she asked, “how is it related to hawker?” HAHA. I had a good laugh. I never looked at it that way. So I had to try to explain how language is so arbitrary, CAT has nothing [...]
Excessing affixation
I’m quite befuddled by two cases of excessive affixation I’ve observed. (1) Obligated vs. obliged. Recently I’ve been hearing some instances of obligated from my classmates. Is there a different meaning to these two words? Or different connotation? I don’t feel any difference between the two of them. I always prefer to use obliged. (2) [...]
Unputdownably
Just now I was looking at a book description on the net when I saw the book being described as “unputdownable”. I went, WOW, since when was that a word? So I had to turn to the “authorities”. Webster claims it is an adjective synonymous to riveting, used for describing books and the first instance [...]
13 years and going
Yesterday evening I met 3 friends whom I have known for 12 years, since 1997. The four of us make it a point to try to meet a couple of times a year to update each other on our lives. We went to a Korean restaurant along Mosque Road at Chinatown, called Togi. They serve [...]
I Speak English Because I Can