» 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.
This is a box of longan fruit. The longan is a kind of fruit related to lychee and rambutan. The text on the box says:
Fresh Longan
Longing for longans… grab a handful of this sweet, fleshy fruit and enjoy it’s exotic taste!
The box contains some truly tasty fruit, but it’s a shame that its punctuation is rotten.
The word ‘recipient’ sounds weird here because normally (I would think) a recipient is a person, and the instructions are obviously talking about a thing (a container or ‘receptacle’). The words ‘recipient’ and ‘receptacle’ are related but I think there’s good reason not to treat them as interchangeable.
See also: ‘recipe’, ‘receipt’, ‘reception’, and ‘receiver’.
I would say a ‘receiver’ is more typically a thing (a telephone receiver or a piece of audio equipment, for example), but in American football a receiver is a person. Go figure.
I’m told that in the UK there’s a school level called ‘reception’ that corresponds to Kindergarten. That sounds hilarious to me because I think of a reception as a fancy party, like the kind you have after a wedding, so my mental image of ‘reception’ doesn’t require or perhaps even permit four-year-old children.
This is the perfect cue for that variously attributed quotation about Brits and Americans being “one people separated by a common language”.
On the Singapore classical music station, I am hearing the phrase “as well as” used in place of “and” before the last item in a series.
…an opera full of passion, sacrifice as well as beautiful arias…
This misuse of “as well as” irks me at least as much as the host’s pronunciation of “genres” as “John Rez”, which I didn’t even understand the first twenty times I heard him say it.
Let’s look at another example with “as well as”.
I read fantasy, science-fiction, romance novels, as well as literary fiction.
This is just a list of four items. The sentence should just use “and”.
I read fantasy, science-fiction, romance novels, and literary fiction.
If the sentence is going to contain “as well as”, then it should say:
I read fantasy, science-fiction, and romance novels, as well as literary fiction.
Now the sentence isn’t just a list; it means, “Of course I read literary fiction. However, in addition, I also read fantasy, science-fiction, and romance novels!” The list of three surprising genres is followed by the one obvious genre separated by the phrase “as well as”.
Here’s another correct example of how to use the phrase “as well as”:
I, as well as my dad, am allergic to cats.
This sentence doesn’t just mean, “My dad and I are allergic to cats.” It means, “Not only is my dad allergic to cats, but guess what? I am, too!”
And yes, though maybe you think the verb sounds weird, coming, as it does, right after “my dad”, it should indeed be “am” and not “is” or “are”.
The upshot here is that the phrase “as well as” is NOT a fancier version of the word “and”. When I hear it used that way, the I feel like something is missing, unbalanced, and off-kilter.
But hey, don’t rely on my intuition. Ask the internet. Here is a particularly good set of explanations that adds a surprising note about -ing verbs, as well as upholding what I’ve already said:
Basically, this book is full of meaningless trivia on a subject I happen to like. It was amusing but not deep or scholarly.
I learned, among other things, that:
Bought it cheap in Colorado.
Genre: nonfiction (reference / language)
Date started / date finished: 08-Jul-16 to 17-Jul-16
Length: 202 pages
ISBN: 9780785825289 (hardcover)
Originally published in: 1995
Amazon link: Do’s and Taboos of Using English around the World
This is a sticker on the inside of the window in a taxi. It says:
NO ADMIN FEE & GST
when you pay with Dash!
Even assuming you like the ampersand in this font (I don’t), the conjunction needed here is ‘or’.
(No admin fee) and (no GST) => No (admin fee or GST)
The sign that says “no food and drinks” is also wrong for the same reason.
However, “Don’t leave your handphone & wallet behind”, assuming we find ‘handphone’ acceptable, sounds fine, since ‘handphone’ and ‘wallet’ can easily be considered a pair of items that would be forgotten together.
I would rewrite that as follows.
Records show that 50% of the items reported lost in taxis are mobile phones and wallets.
On the other hand, I like the ampersand on this half of the sign much better. Even if it is crowding the descender on that letter ‘y’.
Good writing is self-effacing.
Personally, when I’m critiquing fiction, I find it very, very difficult to evaluate things like character, plot, and pacing if there are a lot of distracting technical errors.
One easily fixable error I often see is this one.
Whenever I see this mistake, I feel as if I have been stabbed in the eye.
That’s the name of a folk song sung by Steve Seskin*. The chorus goes:
The seconds turn to minutes
The minutes into hours
The hours into long, lonely days
This waitin’ on you, darlin’
Is takin’ all my will power
I keep countin’ all the moments you’re away
One Mississippi, two Mississippi
Without you, girl, I’m blue Mississippi.
It struck me that people who don’t live in the U.S. probably don’t use ‘Mississippi’ to count the passing of seconds. The only other placeholder I could think of was ‘one hundred’. But there are lots! What’s strange is that some have two syllables, some have three, some have four, and some have five, so surely they’re not all equally accurate…
I wonder what words people use in other languages?
*I met Steve Seskin while I was on Qwest West in 1998.
The trademarked name on this “High-speed USB 2.0 extension cable” is “MYE Meiyuer Cables”.
Students of Romance languages might be forgiven for thinking ‘Meiyuer’ is a kreative spelling of the word ‘meilleur’ meaning ‘better’ in French, because that double ‘ll’ sounds like a ‘y’ and it’s a plausible positive-connotation company name.
Okay, so probably this Chinese company did not choose a Romance language name. What does it mean? I dunno, let’s ask Line Dict.
This tool, which I love, by the way, is coming up with the name of an opera composer named Étienne Nicolas Méhul, because ‘Meiyuer’ is presumably as close a transliteration as is possible. But I guess I didn’t really expect the dictionary to tell me the meaning of a brand name.
Probably the company name uses ‘měiyù’ meaning ‘good reputation’? But it could also be using the characters for ‘beautiful jade’… Hang on, why don’t I just look up Meiyuer, the company, online?
Ohhhh, now I’m getting flashbacks of the editing/fact-checking job I had that involved looking at a lot of Chinese companies’ websites. They’re practically all red and clunky looking with ugly fonts, bad punctuation and English that ranges from unintelligible to unintentionally poetic…
Anyway, this company’s name in characters is 美鱼儿, which is pronounced ‘měiyúér’, and in English apparently means ‘beautiful fish child’. (I’m still mystified.)
‘(Little) Mermaid’ is close (but no cigar).
(小)美人鱼
(xiǎo)mĕirényú
Interestingly, it seems the company uses both the traditional and simplified versions of the characters… maybe because Guangdong borders Hong Kong, where traditional characters are the norm.
The point of all this was to say that in Singapore, I’ve noticed a tendency to make acronyms using one letter for each syllable rather than each word, because in Chinese, all the syllables are (more or less) considered separate words.
For example, if you look at the word Meiyuer, you probably wouldn’t split it into MYE, right? Unless you knew pinyin, in which case it’s obviously Mei Yu Er, even though they didn’t write it that way.
Oh, you thought I had something to say about the cable itself?
Nope.
This sign has five languages on it.
Lots of signs here have English, Malay, simplified Chinese and Tamil on them, since those are Singapore’s four official languages, but that fourth language is relatively unusual…
I’m pretty sure it’s Thai.
Pluralized uncountable nouns are a pet peeve of mine. The one that’s most frequently publicly wrong is ‘equipments’ because it’s posted at every construction site, and there are a lot of construction sites.
equipments
apparels
cutleries
furnitures
cuisines (meaning ‘dishes’)
slangs, jargons
I’ve also noticed uncountable nouns being used in the singular, which is just as wrong.
a bread (meaning ‘a bun or roll’)
a paper (meaning ‘a piece of paper’)
There are many words that are countable about half the time and uncountable about half the time, which I’m sure doesn’t tend to help people to understand the underlying distinction.
effort / efforts
content / contents
experience / experiences
praise / praises
detail / details
instruction / instructions
input / inputs
dialogue / dialogues
Recently I saw an email from a marketing agency in which the text of the ads was referred to as ‘ad copies’ instead of ‘ad copy’. Ack, no.
Fighting such errors may be impossible in the long run, because in principle there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to say ‘equipments’, and obviously people here already feel perfectly free to do so. Until uncountable nouns die off completely, though, you’re better off knowing how to use them correctly.
