Category: language

» 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.

Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

Everybody Writes is a book that Derek Zoolander would recommend to “adults who can’t write good and want to do other stuff good too”. If you’re one of those, then, by all means, share and enjoy.

It’s not, or not entirely, Ann Handley’s fault that I found her book disappointing. For one thing, I had high expectations. I eliminated at least a dozen books on blogging from my Amazon cart before I decided to buy hers. For another thing, I was, simultaneously, reading a book on writing I much preferred, an erudite tome called Style by Joseph M. Williams. And anyway, I am probably not in the target audience. The subtitle of Part I, “How to Write Better and How to Hate Writing Less”, should have been an obvious red flag: I don’t hate writing.

The book has a lot of good reviews on Amazon, so some people seem to have found it useful, and even I got some use out of it—just not as much as I was hoping to.

More on what I disliked about the book as well as when and why I read it below.

Continue reading Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

Apparels vs Apparel

This sign at Marks & Spencer at Parkway Parade says:

20% off Ladies’ printed apparels & bras

It should say ‘apparel’, not ‘apparels’.

The sign also says:

Image for illustration purpose only

We can say “for the purpose of illustration only”, but because there’s no article, “purpose” should be plural in this case.

Upshot: The total number of letter s’s on the sign is correct. They just need to move the ‘s’ from ‘apparels’ to ‘purpose’.

Wait, I take it back. The word ‘apparels’ is on there twice. Gah!

Just so we’re absolutely clear:
Do not ever put an ‘s’ on ‘apparel’.
Or ‘clothing’.

‘Apparel’ is a mass/non-count/uncountable nouns (like equipment), and thus does not have a plural form.

Clothing shops sell apparel, not apparels, no matter how many individual items they sell or how many kinds of items they sell (ladies’ apparel, men’s apparel, kids’ or children’s apparel).

I suppose maybe it’s possible you could talk about a business importing a variety of ‘apparels’ from different countries, just as a chef could study the ‘cuisines’ of different countries, but I’m not sure whether anyone actually uses the word in this way.

Just assume that if you see the word ‘apparels’, it’s wrong. The word ‘apparel’ should be used instead.

Oh well. At least they didn’t write ‘lingeries’!

Ship or Sheep?

Earlier I wrote about the “his/he’s” distinction in Singapore, which corresponds to the “ship/sheep” distinction this pronunciation book refers to.

Apparently people have been struggling to differentiate these two words at least since the time of George Eliot. This is a passage from Middlemarch, published in 1872.

“I hate grammar. What’s the use of it?”
“To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood,” said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision.
“Should you like to speak as old Job does?”
“Yes,” said Ben, stoutly; “it’s funnier. He says, ‘Yo goo’—that’s just as good as ‘You go.'”
“But he says, ‘A ship’s in the garden,’ instead of ‘a sheep,'” said Letty, with an air of superiority. “You might think he meant a ship off the sea.”

Here’s a more modern take: a pun that requires the conflation of “Griddy” (the name of an F&B outlet at Our Tampines Hub) and “greedy”:

Arrival (2016)

I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. 

You can read this post on that site!

I’m so glad a friend who wanted to see it it invited me along or I would surely have overlooked this gem.

In Arrival, lonely linguistics professor Louise gets called in by the top army brass alongside your more typical math/physics guy to try to figure out how to communicate with the aliens in one of twelve lens-shaped black ships hovering over different parts of the world (the answer: coffee rings!), but the clock is ticking because the win/lose approach favored by the Chinese (and by some rogue American soldiers, for that matter) could result in catastrophic alien retaliation.

Arrival is not very actiony; there’s a lot of quiet drama in with the sci-fi. There are a couple of nice themes, but nothing overbearing. The film never even gets near the “hold hands and sing kum ba yah” cliche, which I perhaps was dreading. The black lenses recall Arthur C. Clarke’s monoliths, but that’s the only similarity Arrival has with 2001:A Space Odyssey. Nor did it have the nonsensical transcendent mystery of Close Encounters. Nor was it anything like Independence Day (1995). The movies it’s being compared to are all movies I haven’t yet seen (Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian).

The movie has been described as “sophisticated”, “intellectual”, “thoughtful”, “pensive”, and “cerebral”. That’s great. Quibble how you will about inaccuracies in the depiction of linguistics, the fact that Hollywood deigns to depict a linguist at all is nice.

I further approve of this movie because it didn’t announce that it has a heroine (rather than a hero). Arrival contains absolutely no obtrusive feminist rhetoric, spunky, defensive or otherwise. There’s just a likable woman smack at the center of the story. The heroine is played by Amy Adams, seen ten years ago in Disney’s Enchanted. The male scientist (played by Jeremy Renner, Marvel’s Hawkeye) for all his supposed skills, is just along for the ride.

It’s a wild ride, difficult to describe without giving the game away, somewhat like Predestination (2014). I’m also reminded of The Three-Body Problem, which also dramatizes the effect of aliens on humanity.

Since the not-fictional Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is part of the backdrop of the movie, I would like to point out that learning a new language—learning anything—does change your brain, but not like science fiction (or even the real Sapir and Whorf) would have you believe.

Watch on Amazon

Keep reading for a detailed plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Also see below for a brief comparison of the movie and the short story it was based on.

Continue reading Arrival (2016)

No-boarding and No-alighting Zones

The intent of this phrase is to designate zones in which people are permitted neither to get in a taxi nor to get out of one.

However, I think “no-boarding and no-alighting” is a whopping long phrase to use as an adjective in front of the noun “zones”. It’s so cumbersome that my initial inclination was to read it as an elliptical formation designating two different kinds of zones:

[Be aware of the] no-boarding [zones] and [the] no-alighting zones.

This would be analogous to a sentence like:

If the medium-size shirt doesn’t fit, let me know; there are bigger [sizes] and smaller sizes available.

Obviously there are no sizes each of which is both “bigger and smaller”; the adjectives are separate, and there’s a noun implied but omitted after the first one.

I’m not even sure the intended reading of “no-boarding and no-alighting zones” is syntactically possible, unless you hyphenate the whole thing, which would be ugly and probably violate most style guidelines:

No-boarding-and-no-alighting Zones

Since there’s a set of illustrations below the text, I think probably I would write it as:

No boarding or alighting in these zones.

Or, even shorter:

Do not board or alight in these zones.

Report suspicious individuals or items

… but not both?

Another problem with conjunctions!

The intent is:

Report all the suspicious individuals and all the suspicious items you notice.

But it’s getting confused with:

If you see a suspicious individual or item, report it.

It should say:

Report [any] suspicious individuals and items.