I saw something funny on Facebook. A friend’s friend’s album description is so … wrong. The troublemaker word of the day – spike in the third line, used in the context of “purposely to spike u” (i.e. some actions taken to intentionally make someone irate). I balked when I saw the wrong word spike instead of spite. Was the writer thinking of spiking a drink, or was he really intending to drive a spike through my friend?

Being the smart aleck who has an explanation for everything, I indeed have an explanation for this. See, in Singlish (or Colloquial Singapore English), many speakers do not properly innunciate the last sound in a word. To speak technically – the coda of the final syllable of words are unreleased. For example, words involving sounds like p, t, k are most susceptible to omission. Consider how one says lip, shit and lick in Singlish; there is no final puff of air at the end of the word. This is the abovementioned bad pronunciation. Unreleased sounds are really, not fully realised and it is difficult to tell two sounds apart, like lap and lab. The t and k sound roughly sound like each other when unreleased, resulting in a propensity to treat one as the other, as in the case of spite and spike. Hence the gaffe.

This is a video made from one of Stephen Fry’s podcasts on Language. It essentially touches on the topic of Grammar Nazis and how people no longer use language to derive pleasure.

Listening to the podcast, I sometimes am guilty of being a Grammar Nazi, at least for the fun of it. Some grammar mistakes crack me up, and I joke about it. I’m not a crazy pedant armed with sharpies to correct signs – I believe that is bordering on illegal in this country. From a linguist’s perspective, Grammar Nazis invariably swear by Prescriptivism. What authorities and grammar books dictate as correct and therefore the only forms that should exist. I love how Fry said – correctness has nothing to do with clarity. How true. Which reminds me of sometimes how people claim I always sound like I know what I’m talking about, since I’m so clear, that they can’t tell if I’m correct or not. To that I jokingly reply I don’t know if I’m correct either. Self deprecating for group solidarity. What a shame, what a shame.

Pardon my digression. Fry goes on to talk about how the dichotomy of right and wrong language is at best similar to right and wrong clothes – guided by context, convention and circumstance. In light of that if you can argue that the context of being on the internet demands Netspeak, I will accept that and stop mocking teenagers.

In this case, I shall call her stupided.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so mean. I mean, it’s got to take some guts and what, forward-looking spirit to add -ed to an adjective, right? People worthED remembering – I can’t even begin to make sense of this. How does adding -ed add any information to what she’s trying to say?

She’s right though, they could write a story, but decided not to because spellcheck keeps telling them they can’t add -ed to an adjective. They should not write a story in any case, so that’s one consolation.

“A Happy Journey Starts Like That“

Seriously?

Shouldn’t it be “like this”? As in, a happy journey starts this way as opposed to that way? I don’t know. Like That sure sounds less acceptable to me. It’s so… lyk dat if you catch if you catch my drift.

Another thing, WTF, are all the words part of one big title? As in, why initial capitalize ALL THE WORDS?

Well, one simple explanation is that whoever designed and wrote this poster is as tasteless as the ones who came up with the campaign in the first place.

“Scientific mechanism that blocks the basic factor which causes the color penetration and dark spots and clarifies the skin to its original white and transparent skin.”

Seriously?

Color penetration, like penile penetration, perhaps? And what’s with the unnecessary determiner the?

And I suppose we all have WHITE skin like MJ and transparent skin like …. I don’t know, the exhibits at The Body exhibit at the Science Center.

Really iffy this product. If they can’t afford a good translator they can’t afford to have QC at their factory. That’s what I think.

A new shop at Far East Plaza. HORRIBLE NAME. What is rondavous anyway? A bad case of rendezvous?

KL said maybe they are intentionally misspelling it to tell people the correct pronunciation.

Nah-ah. If it’s rondayvoo I can understand. But this is … plain wrong. How am I even supposed to pronounce it, ron-dah-voh-uus? ron-da-vahs like the ou in enough?

Then again, maybe, just maybe it’s French. Rond-à-vous. Meaning “round at/with/to you”. Great way to tell your customers they are fat isn’t it. Great way, then, to start a new shop selling lingerie. (And psst, it’s not lon-jer-ray or whatever your fancy secondary school teacher taught you.)

RIPE – FOR GOOD EATING.

As opposed to bad eating?

And mind you, this was spotted at COLD STORAGE (one of the priciest supermarkets in Singapore) at CLUNY COURT off Bukit Timah, one of the priciest estates in Singapore.

On hindsight, maybe it’s intelligible to the domestic helpers?

Seriously. How could the managers of the supermarket allow this to happen? Obviously someone bought cheap stickers. Obviously this someone can’t really tell if it should be “good for eating” instead of “for good eating”. But someone else didn’t QC the stickers on the fruits. Shame on them.