Year: 2017

Crave vs. crave for

It used to be normal to say “[someone] craved for [something]” instead of “[someone] craved [something]”. The former sounds like a mistake to me, as if the speaker meant to say “[someone] had a craving for [something]”.

I’m not the only one with this intuition.

The difference is whether the verb “crave” is considered transitive, thus requires a direct object to follow immediately, or is considered intransitive, in which case a prepositional phrase beginning with “for” is needed.

Modern dictionaries list only the transitive version (as above), or they list the transitive version first, followed by the less common intransitive version.

The “wrong” (historically more popular, intransitive) version appears in the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, aka Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, a respected work of literature in English:

It was all owing to his too affectionate nature, which craved for admiration.

The text refers to Mr. Darling, father of Wendy, John, and Michael.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

It’s as if Kafka decided to write a book with Carl Sagan, M.C. Escher, and Edwin Abbott Abbott (author of Flatland), and set it in China: You’ve got alienation, disillusionment, despair; satellite dishes listening for alien messages and actually receiving them; complex or impossible geometry, organisms passing from life to death and back again, meditative reflections and echoes of the self; and extrapolation that gratuitously passes beyond three dimensions… all of which is set against the backdrop of the bloody Cultural Revolution and conveyed in English that sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I found it hard to enjoy The Three-Body Problem because I found the book badly written on a macro level as well as a micro level and because I dislike some of the themes. It was only interesting to read because it was really weird. Specifics but no spoilers below.

Continue reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Healthy yet delicious Korean food

Whoops! The sign in front of this shop in the basement of United Square is implying that healthy Korean food is usually not delicious. I mean, okay, maybe, but that’s not what you want people to be thinking when they’re standing in front of your Korean restaurant at lunchtime.

What if they used “and” instead?

Healthy and delicious Korean food

Well, now it almost sounds as if they’re offering two different kinds of food, healthy Korean food and delicious Korean food, which still implies that “healthy” and “delicious” are incompatible.

They should just put the two problem adjectives in front of Korean with just a comma:

Healthy, delicious Korean food

The reverse order sounds okay too:

Delicious, healthy Korean food

Storewide sale in a narrow store

Far East Plaza is a warren of small fashion shops (and, sadly, fewer bookstores than it was when I arrived in Singapore in 2008).

Whenever I read the signs advertising promotions and discounts, I always laugh because there’s always at least one that says “storewide sale” in front of a narrow little shop.

I’m thinking, “Your store is—what, ten feet wide? So it’s not a very wide sale, is it?”

One could deploy the same pun in the context of discounts offered at “all outlets islandwide”. It’s not a very wide island, in the scheme of things.

Sakura Cuisine’s Saliva Chicken

I posted a photo of this restaurant before because the name seemingly advertised so many kinds of food. They’ve simplified the name—presumably not because they saw my blog post, but who knows?

Now they are promoting a dish they call “Saliva Chicken”.

The Chinese name of the dish is three characters (that’s the traditional one for chicken, not the simplified one):

口水雞
mouth water chicken

Note that there is no sure-fire way to determine how many characters in Chinese correspond to a “word” in English. If you take the first two characters together, they mean “saliva”, because that’s what “mouth water” is.

口水
saliva

The restaurant seems to be offering a chicken dish cooked with saliva (?!), but actually it just wants you to order the chicken dish that makes you salivate. If they’d named it “mouth-watering chicken” in English, the name would have been perfectly unobjectionable.

In my opinion, the problem is not that the Chinese language is hard, or that English is hard, just that translation is hard. All languages assign meanings in arbitrary ways. Why, after all, should we English speakers think that “saliva chicken” sounds gross, but “mouth-watering chicken” sounds delicious? This distinction is not meaningful in Chinese, any more than the distinction between “cow meat” (eew) and “beef” (yum).

Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie

Yep, that’s the name of the famous book. It’s not actually called Peter Pan!

I saw the play at least once long ago, and the Disney movie at least once not so long ago. I was curious to read the book. When I did, several things surprised me.

  • Disney didn’t change the story much; in the book as well as the movie, Nana is a dog, for example, and many other character, setting and plot details line up surprisingly well.
  • The Lost Boys and Peter Pan actually kill pirates. Descriptions of the fights aren’t particularly graphic, but the idea of orphaned children using sharp, deadly weapons on adults—on anyone—is disturbing.
  • The narrator is rather intrusive. Sometimes the effect is humorous, but sometimes it’s just annoying. Children’s books aren’t often written this way anymore.

More on characterization of Peter, Tinker Bell, Mr. and Mrs. Darling, and Hook below.

Continue reading Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie

Signatrer Dishes

Well, the photo is gorgeous, and the restaurant should definitely get credit for correctly pluralizing “dishes”, but that is not how to spell “signature”.

I think the mistake is a phonetic spelling mistake and not a manual typo. The consonant combination “tr” often sounds like “ch” (listen to yourself saying “treasure” or “train”), so I can imagine someone coming up with this by trying to spell what the word sounds like. The “tu” spelling pattern found in words like “nature/natural”, “picture”, and “adventure” is not all that common.

I took this photo outside a restaurant on Mosque Street in Chinatown. I think the restaurant was Chong Qing Grilled Fish. These onions are probably for flavoring the grilled fish.

In one corner of the menu were a bunch of Chinese characters and the English brand “Classical aftertaste”. I think “Classical flavor” was probably more like what they were aiming for. Or “Classic taste”, maybe.