Nope, nothing to do with the Scott O’Dell book about the Navajo girl.
Instead, I give you a photo of the moon, apparently about to land on the tip of the iconic Singtel Tower on Dover Road.
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).
Singlish Stationeries
It is authentically Singlish to refer to “stationery items” as “stationeries”.
That’s because in Singlish it’s common not to pluralize countable nouns but to pluralize uncountable nouns instead.
Dinner at Haq Insaf’s Eating house
My husband and I went with his brother and his brother’s wife to Haq Insaf’s Eating House on West Coast Road (well, actually Jalan Mas Puteh) for dinner.
We had:
- home-made ice lemon tea
- lime juice
- massala dosai
- plain pratas
- chicken murtabak
- prata bomb
The food was excellent, as usual.
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.
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.
Chinatown Stroll
My husband and I went with his brother and his brother’s wife to The Loft on Smith Street for coffee and to Tiong Bahru Boneless Chicken Rice, also on Smith Street, for lunch. We also strolled around the area a little.
All the stalls are selling red and gold things with a rooster theme, since fairly soon Singapore will be celebrating the start of the Year of the Rooster.
I don’t have any photos of the rooster lanterns on New Bridge Road. The day was a bit rainy!
125 Ways to Make Money with Your Typewriter by David Seltz
The 126th way one can make money with one’s typewriter is, presumably: Write a book about ways one could make money with one’s typewriter.
I bought this book at a rummage sale in part because it was well made and thus physically pleasing: It’s a cloth-bound hardcover (those are rare these days); it’s in good shape for its age; the typography is charmingly old-fashioned. The book was produced in 1939.
I also bought it because I wondered whether the ideas were still relevant more than 70 years later, in an age when there are more personal computers than there ever were typewriters. What’s changed and what hasn’t? See below for examples, as well as when and why I read the book.
Continue reading 125 Ways to Make Money with Your Typewriter by David Seltz
