I tend to notice mistakes on signs. Sometimes the mistakes make me feel frustrated, but usually they fall somewhere on the spectrum between interesting and hilarious.
… 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.
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
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.
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).
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.
Terrible photo, great advice. In four languages.
Value Life. Act Responsibly.
In context, the message means: do not jump in front of the MRT train.
The sign has no doubt been there a while. It used to be that the above-ground MRT stations had exposed tracks; now they have these gates that only open when the train arrives.
Still, we are reminded that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Update (22 Nov 2017): Here’s a more cheerful looking photo:
I’ve posted about errors in signs declaring business hours before. A giant European home furnishings company you may have heard of is among the businesses that have gotten it wrong.
Why should the phrase be “open daily” and not “opens daily”? Because one is idiomatic and one isn’t; or if you prefer, “open daily” has been idiomatic longer, since the sign is, itself, evidence that “opens daily” has become idiomatic in Singlish.
The best I can do for a usage citation is a couple of dictionary entries for “daily”, which give “open daily” as an example, suggesting that this is the most natural and intuitive phrase, as far as dictionary writers are concerned.
Then there’s the fact that the phrase “opens daily” gets Google 253,000 hits whereas “open daily” gets 10,800,000. The images for “opens daily”, in comparison to the images for “open daily”, are telling, too.
(New can of worms: I see that there are signs for “open everyday”, which should be “every day” because “everyday” is an adjective…)
Leaving aside calls to authority and statistics, the syntactic difference is interesting. “Open daily” uses “open” as an adjective, and “opens daily” uses “open” as a verb. We want to know when the business is open. We do not care when the door of the business is opened by some employee with a key. The emphasis is misplaced.
There is a further confusion lurking under the surface, which is that when we do use “open” as a verb for a business, we sometimes mean it in the sense of “to launch” or “to open for the first time”. So the phrase “opens daily” makes it sound like maybe the business is having a grand opening every day, which is ridiculous. Grand openings are not everyday occurrences.
You can use “open” as a verb if you really want, especially in a sentence rather than as a notice on a sign. But I think the verb needs a strong contextual justification.
Example Business
Opens at 9:00 a.m.
Closes at 5:00 p.m. Monday to Thursday
Closes at 3:00 p.m. on Friday
The Ikea sign is particularly bad because of the colon.
Opens Daily: 10am to 11pm
The text suggests that the door is opening (and closing) continuously from ten in the morning to eleven at night! Why? Because there are two adverbs modifying the verb “opens”: the word “[once] daily” and the phrase “[from] 10am to 11pm”. The first can legitimately indicate when the business opens; but the second is meant to say when the business is open.
This is what I think the sign should say:
Open Daily
10 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Georgia-Pacific is a paper company headquartered in my hometown, Atlanta, Georgia. The Georgia-Pacific Tower, a pink granite building shaped like three tiers of steps, came into being about the same time I did. It’s my favorite skyscraper in the city. I was in it once, way up high, for a job interview.
Now. The sticker that says “Please tear sideway”, spotted on a Georgia-Pacific paper towel dispenser in a restroom in the Singapore General Hospital complex, did not come from where I came from. I don’t know where it came from, but it did not come from Georgia.
There aren’t as many of them as there used to be.
Since the picture is too far away and blurry, you’ll have to take my word for it that these are the steps for using this Downtown Line fire extinguisher:
- [pull out the pin, presumably]
- AIM AT BASE OF FIRE
- SQUEEZE LEVEL TO DISCHARGE
- RELEASE LEVEL TO STOP
(I’m pretty sure they meant “lever”.)
Hang on, I’ve got a slightly better photo:
Here’s the extinguisher in my lift lobby (which says “lever”):
