Just a short one – Have you noticed the meaning change in the word branded in Singapore in the electronics market? Each day when I see a print advertisement from electronics and appliances stores, I can’t help but notice how they pitch their items as Branded TV, Branded Camera, and these items proceed to be…
This post pertains more to Mandarin speakers who listen to MandoPop. I’m not sure when the trend started, I would suppose it came together with the likes of Wang LeeHom, the first few ABCs (American Born Chinese) returning to the Chinese music industry. Yes, I’m talking about a somewhat Americanized Mandarin accent. Consider words like…
I have been subscribing and listening to the Daily French Pod via iTunes for a few days and I really quite like it. It’s a good refresher for the French I supposedly learnt a couple of years ago. Each podcast is about 5 minutes long, and each deal with a sentence that sums up certain…
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…
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…
That line from local playwright Haresh Sharma’s latest play, Model Citizens, hit home when I attended the play earlier this year. The context of that line in the play occurred when a trilingual Singaporean, who speaks English, Mandarin and Malay was confronted by a Mandarin-speaking monolingual as to why she chose to speak English to…
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…
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…
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…
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…
