Tag: English

The English language is a wonderful and terrible thing. Monolingual native speakers tend to take both halves of this characterization for granted. Not me.

Between/to vs between/and vs from/to

Take my word for it, this sign is about a discounted movie screening that is taking place “between 1pm to 3pm”.

Using “to” with “between” sounds terrible, but I know why people write this way because I’ve done it. You start out thinking about two times in one sense, then your thinking unaccountably changes before you finish writing what you set out to write. Gah!

When stating a range of times, here are some acceptable formats to use:

We are open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. [from/to]
We are open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. [to]
We are open 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. [en dash, not hyphen]
Drop off your donation between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. [between/and]

In the case of a movie screening, I definitely wouldn’t use “between/and” because the movie isn’t happening at one point between the two times mentioned, it’s happening for the entire length of time. I probably wouldn’t even use from/to, though. I’d probably use “start at” and “finish at”.

The movie will start at 1 p.m. and finish at 2 p.m.

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’!

Store vs. shop

I, an American, am now having trouble using the word “store” to designate the retail establishments in which you buy stuff; those are called “shops” in British English. Here, “store” means “storeroom” or “storage room”, though I doubt the short form “store” is used in the UK…

“Stores” can also mean “supplies” or “inventory”, but the word you’ll hear in shops here is “stock(s)”. If a shop has run out of a particular item, the shopkeeper will say something like “no stock” or “got no more stock already” or “stock finish already” and probably also make a waffling motion with one or both hands.

Interestingly, you can write either:

While stocks last!

or

While stock lasts!

but my guess is that the second one is far less common in part because the “sts” consonant cluster at the end is hard to say. I think it also makes sense to use the plural version of “stocks” because typically, the shop is selling individual items, not something measured in volume or by weight, so using the mass noun would be a bit strange.

“While stock last!” is just wrong, but that doesn’t mean nobody writes it.

Anyway, a ballpoint pen isn’t what I would call exquisite, Photoshop sparkles notwithstanding.

So anyway, today I chuckled when I saw a sign on a door near a public restroom that said “janitor store”. Surely it’s not a place to buy janitors, though with a bit of imagination it could be a place where janitors shop…

Stackable jewelry box with lots of great feathers

If you thought AutoCorrect only affected text messages, think again.

Whoever was responsible for inputting the marketing text that describes the features of this stackable jewelry box got as far as “feat—” and then took the first word that was suggested.

I mean, clearly this is not the result of a manual typo or a translation error. Some kind of auto-complete software seems to be a plausible explanation in part because this product is made in China, and as I understand it the way you type Chinese is:

  • you type the transliterated (Pinyin) spelling of the syllable you want, using the Roman alphabet and possibly a number for the tone
  • some predictive software shows you a list of characters that match the sound and possibly also the sentence context
  • you select the character from the list

I can imagine similar predictive writing software being used for English text if the writer isn’t typing on a phone but also isn’t a native speaker.

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.

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).

Shang Antique: Established Since 1984

Although Shang Antique only moved into this unit at the front of Tanglin Shopping Centre sometime within the last year or so, I am willing to believe that the business has existed from 1984 until now. However, they should use “Established” or “Since” and not both!

More below on why the sign is wrong.

Continue reading Shang Antique: Established Since 1984

Opaque

Once upon a time, I knew that ‘opaque’ had something to do with whether you can see through something, but I thought it was a synonym of ‘transparent’, not an antonym.

Since most things are not transparent, we don’t use ‘opaque’ nearly as much as ‘transparent’ to describe things; the opaqueness of material objects is assumed by default.

However, ‘opaque’ beautifully describes ideas that are somehow inscrutable—inaccessible because perfectly obstructed by some stark, looming, indifferent, featureless impediment.

If transparency is commonplace and opaqueness is abstract, translucence, the middle child, is enigmatic, shimmering and mystical. It evokes iridescent dragonfly wings and Tiffany windows.

Painstakingly

For the longest time, I understood how to use the word ‘painstakingly’ but I thought that the action embedded in the adverb was ‘staking one’s pain’ on something, which perhaps I thought meant something like ‘betting one’s life’ on something.

Why did I think that? Phonology interfering with morphology.

Once the two words ‘pains’ and ‘taking’ lost the hyphen between them, there was a tendency for the second syllable to absorb the consonant at the end of the first, according to the phonological principle that we automatically maximize syllable onsets. That is, if it’s possible to lump a group of consonants together, we do it at the beginnings of syllables, not at the ends.

In short, because English allows the consonant cluster ‘st’, the morpheme ‘stake’ naturally obtrudes and creates confusion as to the word’s actual underlying components.

Here’s an explanation and another example involving ‘st’.

In truth, the ‘s’ is ambisyllabic—has the quality of ambisyllabicity. It belongs to two syllables at once, even though it started out belonging to a single morpheme.