My husband collected as many bills and coins as he could on his trip.
See below for photos.
Continue reading Bills and coins from Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia
Year: 2017
Plural noun adjuncts
I have seen this sign hundreds of times. It says:
24 Hours Hot Line
That’s a perfect example of a plural noun being used to modify another noun, like “cutleries station”, except that “hours” is a legit plural and “cutleries” is not.
I think the sign should say
24-Hour Hot Line
or maybe
24-Hour Hotline
because I think it’s better to modify nouns with singular nouns, even when there are twenty-four of the noun in question.
On an unrelated note:
I don’t know why Singapore phone numbers often don’t have hyphens where I’d expect to see them. I think we Americans pretty consistently put a hyphen in 1-800, and we put them after the first three digits of a seven-digit phone number, so I always expect to see one after the first four digits of the eight-digit phone numbers here. Sometimes there’s a space, sometimes there’s a period (“full stop”), sometimes there’s just nothing.
The missing epicene pronouns of English
This advertisement depicting a couple on a cruise ship says:
Where Everyone Gets What They Need
As a writer of English curriculum materials for kids, I’ve become incredibly sensitive to singular/plural agreement. I think demonstrating careful matching between subject and verb (or pronoun and antecedent) is particularly important in a place where plurals are often neglected (due to the influence of Chinese, which mostly doesn’t have plurals).
If I weren’t so sensitive, I might not have noticed that “they”, which is grammatically plural, refers to “everyone”, which—despite sounding vaguely plural—is grammatically singular.
We tend to be forgiving of this kind of thing, if we even notice it, because it’s hard to phrase the underlying idea any other way.
Shall we have a go? We can stick in singular pronouns, or we can make everything plural.
Where Everyone Gets What He Or She Needs
Where All People Get What They Need
Yuck. Neither of those is half as natural as the original, though it would help if in the second one “people” were changed to something like “travelers”.
It gets worse if there’s a possessive. Imagine if the sign said:
Where Everyone Gets What They Need On Their Holiday
Now we’ve got a whole new problem:
Where Everyone Gets What He Or She Needs On His Or Her Holiday
Where All Travelers Get What They Need On Their Holidays
The double pronouns are now even more cumbersome. No marketer cares enough about syntax to prefer the “or” version. Even I don’t like it.
Meanwhile, in the pluralized version you start to have problems matching up travelers and holidays. They don’t necessarily all need the same thing or go on the same holiday, but some of them do, so are we considering them as individuals or as a group? It’s ambiguous.
There exists Y such that for all X, X is at Y and X gets what X needs on X’s holiday.
Less ambiguity is exactly what we’d have if mathematicians wrote ad copy, and this precise version is lovely in its own way, but they don’t.
All this awkwardness is the fault of English for not having “epicene” (gender-neutral) singular pronouns—words that mean “he or she”, “him or her”, “his or her”, “his or hers” and “himself or herself”. We used to use masculine pronouns in a kind of universal sense, but whether or not the masculine pronouns are still intended to be heard as universal, they no longer are.
People have invented new pronouns to fill the gap, but unless and until some particular set catches on, we’re going to keep seeing the plural gender-neutral pronouns used as a singular ones.
I can accept singular “they”, and singular “them”, “their”, and “theirs” along with it, I suppose, but it will require a whole extra level of tolerant laxity for me to be able to countenance the ugly chimera “themself”. If “they” can be singular, surely “themselves” can, too!
Chijmes sunset
Wikipedia says:
CHIJMES is a historic building complex in Singapore, which began life as a Catholic convent known as the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus and convent quarters known as Caldwell House.
I took some photos there.
Red Cliff II (2009)
Red Cliff was released as one (not very admired) edited movie, but it was also released in two glorious full-length parts. I wrote about the first part already; this is my post about the second part.
Considering the two movies as parts of a whole, it’s not surprising that the first one is more playful and triumphant and the second one is bloodier and more sombre. The theme of the first movie is that David Can Beat Goliath; the theme of the second movie is that War Is Bad. I think the two parts work well together, and I liked both movies.
Keep reading for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
The Complete Plain Words (2nd edition) by Ernest Gowers
Reading this British book published in 1978 (a revised version of the 1948 original) was like going on an archaeological expedition in a foreign country. The English recommended by the author differs from my own for reasons of both time and place.
In some passages, the author of The Complete Plain Words speaks of the changes in the language that will inevitably take place in the decades to come; it’s almost as if he’s conversing directly with me, forty years in his future, at the same time that he’s conversing with his predecessor, thirty years in his past.
Our national vocabulary is a democratic institution, and what is generally accepted will ultimately be correct. I have no doubt that if anyone should read this book in fifty years’ time he would find current objections to the use of certain words in certain senses as curious as we now find Swift’s denunciation of ‘mob’. (53–54)
See below for what I learned, what stood out, and what I heartily agree with, as well as when and why I read the book.
Continue reading The Complete Plain Words (2nd edition) by Ernest Gowers
Red Cliff (2008)
Shortly after we moved to Singapore in 2008, my husband and I bought a big flat-screen television. The movie Red Cliff II was being used to demo the screens in all the shops we visited, so we named our television “Cliff”.
Until now, though, neither of us ever watched either of the two movies. I decided it was time to check them off the list of DVDs we own of movies we’ve never seen.
There’s a version that combines the two movies into one; that’s not what we’ve got. We’ve got the two-part version of Red Cliff that was released in Singapore. The audio is in Mandarin and English subtitles are available.
Honestly, though, half of the movie doesn’t even have subtitles because nobody’s talking, thus there’s nothing to translate.
I am starting to think that maybe a lot of Chinese movies have a common plot structure that requires a long buildup in which we go around meeting all the characters and forming some kind of alliance, so that later each of them can do whatever he’s known for doing as part of the group effort to overcome the enemy. I called this “collect the whole set” in Kung Fu Yoga, which I recently watched, but Shaolin Soccer also took what I thought was an unusually long time to get going. Maybe it’s not unusual after all.
I could try to make some kind of point about individualistic vs. collective social philosophy (or about martial-arts mashup movie titles), but I think it would be misplaced. Chinese movies with a group of protagonists still have a central hero, and Hollywood movies sometimes have a group or coalition of protagonists. The difference I’m noticing is a superficial one of how long it takes to meet all the characters: a quarter of the movie, or half of it. In either case, the midway point marks a significant upping of the stakes.
Keep reading for a plot summary with SPOILERS as well as a list of the main characters and a surprising observation about one of them.
A la carte buffet
If you thought “a la carte” was the opposite of “buffet”, think again!
I think the idea is that you pay a fixed price (in this case $25), and then you get to request as many things as you want from the buffet menu to be brought to your table.
I heartily recommend Jang Won Korean Restaurant. I’ve never ordered the a la carte buffet, though; I always get the dol sot bi bim bab (hot stone bowl fried rice).
What about that adverb phrase?
All Day Available
should say
Available All Day
because this is short for “Our a la carte buffet is available all day”.
The adverb phrase “all day” modifies the whole statement, so it would have to go at the very beginning or the very end, and it’s better to put it at the end because “all day” is what we want to emphasize most, and whatever is at the end of the sentence is what gets the most attention.
See also Baekseju.
Wait, hang on, this “no smoking” sign is at Jang Won too.
Singapore in a nutshell
On the left there’s a very traditional-looking Chinese restaurant. On the right is a minimalist, modern, black-and-white hotel lobby. Old and new, cheek by jowl.
The yellow sign on the restaurant door says “FOR RENT”, though.
Ah well. At least the hotel made the outside of the building look good.
Lehigh mug is lihai.
The Mandarin expression 厉害 (lìhài) means ‘awesome’ or ‘powerful’, among other things.
I heard the expression several times while watching Kung Fu Yoga, so when I next looked at this mug, I saw it in a whole new light, even though I’ve had it for years.
I toured the New Jersey plant belonging to Lehigh Press (a Von Hoffmann company) at some point when I was working in the production department of Princeton University Press (2005–2008).
The place was full of huge, expensive German printing machines and stacks and stacks of different kinds of paper.
The company printed the book cover (but I think not the pages) for some of our titles. They also printed Harry Potter book covers!
Before we left, they gave us some company-brand swag stuff like this mug, plus samples of things they’d printed with fancy techniques.
Lehigh Press closed down in 2008.
It was home to the country’s largest vacuum collator, an assembly-line machine that uses suction force to stack sheets of printed paper or plastic film in order.
That was awesome.
