» I’ve been an avid reader all my life.
» I have a BA in Linguistics.
» I’ve studied seven foreign languages.
» I taught reading for over two years.
» I wrote a grammar curriculum.
Words are really important to me.
In English, ‘surely’ and ‘for sure’ are adverbs and ‘sure’ is an adjective:
If you ask, you will surely get a discount.
If you ask, you will get a discount for sure.
If you ask, you are sure to get a discount.
In Singlish, ‘sure’ can be an adverb even without ‘for’, and you would never put the adverb at the end of the sentence; it goes before the verb:
If you ask, you will [for] sure get [a] discount.
Let this banner teach you to quit while you’re ahead.
“No MSG added” is fine, but “in all our food” doesn’t make sense. In fact it almost makes it sounds like there is MSG… in all the food.
Original:
No MSG added in all our food.
Recommended:
All our food is made without MSG.
No MSG added to any of our food.
No MSG in any of our food.
No MSG.
Haq-Insaf’s Eating House is a good place to get Indian food at West Coast. This is the back wall of the inside of the eating space in their shophouse unit.
Three things about it struck me.
So yeah. This is multiculturalism at its best… and most opaque.
The front of the box says:
Children may be awesome and scary to this direct but simple eight-feet reptile animal. After the fuel battery is activated by the salted water, the metal magnesium plate (3PCS) can successively provide the spider with 4-6 hours of power. Do to it is too real-like, the player may stop it during the time of playing. You can simply remove the fuel battery module and just clean it with running water, hang and dried it. All the material applied on this toy are environment-friendly, safe and clean. There is no any other toxic substance or waste. It won’t produce heat as well, which makes it absolutely safe for the children.
Unfortunately my picture of the side of the box was out of focus, so I can’t show you what it said. I’m sure it was hilarious.
The giant arachnoid is also available on Amazon.
As you might imagine, reviews are mixed.
According to the Chinese zodiac, most of 2015 is the year of the 羊. The word 羊 (‘yáng’) can refer to both sheep and goats, hence the confusion over what to call this zodiac year in English (sheep/goat/ram). Wikipedia kindly informs me that the most accurate translation of ‘yáng’ would be Caprinae, a Latin word corresponding to the biological subfamily that encompasses sheep and goats.
Therefore, I wish you a happy year of the Caprinae.
This sign should say ‘Pork Rib Rice’. The fact that it doesn’t proves that it’s not just children learning to read who confuse the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’.
The same taxi had two signs prohibiting eating and drinking. One said “no food and drinks” and the other said “no food or drink”.
“No food and drinks” is wrong. It assumes that the ‘no’ applies to one combined entity, food-and-drinks. One could imagine this syntax being valid if someone said, “You can’t come in, you have no suit and tie.”
It’s also weird that ‘food’ is treated as a noncount noun and ‘drink’ is treated as a count noun. It would sound slightly better, though still wrong, if the sign said “no food and drink”. Then I would, perversely, wonder whether it would be okay to have just food or just something to drink, as long as I didn’t have both. The ‘no’ doesn’t distribute, so “no food and drink” doesn’t mean “no food and no drink”.
Now I wonder why we don’t say “no food and no drink”. And what verb would you use? “No food and no drink is/are permitted in this taxi.”
I wonder why we don’t use ‘neither… nor’ on signs like this. “Neither food nor drink is permitted in this taxi” would be correct.
“No food or drink” sounds normal. At least, I thought it did. Now I’ve been thinking about it too much and everything sounds strange.
“No eating or drinking” would be good. It wouldn’t rule out someone bringing food and drink into the taxi, but perhaps that’s okay anyway. Certainly I’ve transported groceries, snacks and leftovers in taxis.
But not durians! Some taxis have signs specifically prohibiting them:
The reminder on the far right to “please state your preferred route” is to protect drivers from being scolded at the end of the trip for taking the surface streets when obviously going by the highway is faster, or for taking the highway when obviously going by the surface streets is cheaper, or whatever.
Oops.
It’s not like English needs the letter X anyway. Anything with an X in it could be spelled with some other letter or letters, usually ‘ks’ or ‘z’.
Of course, it’s possible to go too far in trying to simplify English spelling. It’s pretty much impossible not to, in fact, which is why no one since Noah Webster has really succeeded. (You have him to thank—or curse—for most of the differences between American and British spelling.)
A funny thing happened when I was reading this book.
What does this heading say?
I somehow read that as EVIL COMPANIONS. Because the ‘X’ looks like an ‘E’ and the period next to the ‘I’ makes the ‘I’ look like an ‘L’.
One reason why I think I was so ready to read ‘I.’ as an ‘L’ is that the print quality of the whole book was not so good, and letters or parts of letters were often missing. My eyes had gotten used to filling in ‘missing’ parts, and filled in an ‘L’ where there actually wasn’t one.
Reminds me of the time I misread ‘China Unicom’ as ‘China Unicorn’ early on when I was working for China Knowledge.
There’s a word for what happens when letters are too close together. Letter spacing is called ‘kerning’. Bad letter spacing is jokingly called ‘keming’.
This warning from the Singapore Police, spotted in a toilet stall in Cineleisure at Orchard is semantically equivalent to “Have you left all of your valuables behind?”
Although it is a somewhat plausible question, I think a better question would be one that has a slightly different meaning, less like “Have you left everything behind?” and more like “Have you left anything behind?”
