Does the sentence above look or sound correct to you?
The sentence above is an example of how Singaporeans like to add redundant prepositions to verbs. This entry reminds me of the lecture we had on 'leverage on'.
Other examples include:
Discuss about Source for Voice out Request for
I did a quick google search on the phrase "voice out" and google shows that "voice out" is a Singaporean thing.
Google.com If you noticed, the first link asked if "voice out" is correct. I read what people had to say and most of them said that it is incorrect and unnecessary.
Google.com.sg
Another example of redundant-ness is the case with colours. Singaporeans like to say things like red color, blue color when blue and red are already colours.
My friend couldn't decide which brand of potato chips to buy at Cold Storage so she asked me for my opinion and i jokingly pointed at the brand below and said, "well, you should definitely buy the real mccoy shouldn't you!!" and she looked at me and said "nice meh? i've never heard of that brand before!".
My expression from :D turned to -_-".
So, it is safe to say that the Real McCoy though a brand of potato chips remained only a brand of potato chips for my friend. She probably doesn't know the real meaning of 'the real mccoy' so she wasn't lexically primed and hence, unaware of the pun and motivation in naming the brand such.
The meaning of 'The real McCoy" as wikipedia explains:
"The real McCoy" is an idiom used throughout much of the English-speaking world to mean "the real thing" or "the genuine article" e.g., "he's the real McCoy". It is a corruption of the Scots "The real MacKay", first recorded in 1856 as: "A drappie o’ the real MacKay," (A drop of the real MacKay), and this is widely accepted as the origin.[1][2][3]
How it came to be "McCoy" is unclear – it is first recorded in this form in the US in 1908[4] – and the phrase is the subject of numerous fanciful folk etymologies.
My friend who just came back from London told me she was so tempted to buy Wellingtons when she was in Camden Market. But another friend didn't know what they were until we told her they were rain boots.
Wellingtons aren't new to me because I've read about them and seen them but it seems like this term is used mainly in the UK and NZ but not in SG which explains why my friend wasn't lexically primed so she didn't know what they were. And the term 'wellingtons' or 'wellies', unlike its US counterpart, 'rain boots', is not as semantically transparent which is probably why it requires some level of explanation.
And as dictionary.com, merriam-webster and longman show, the term 'wellingtons' is used mostly in the UK or NZ.
Dictionary.com Wellington boot n. 1. A boot extending to the top of the knee in front but cut low in back. 2. Chiefly British A waterproof boot of rubber or sometimes leather reaching to below the knee and worn in wet or muddy conditions.
Longman dictionary
wel‧ling‧ton also wellington boot [countable] British English a rubber boot that stops your foot getting wet
Merriam-webster
Main Entry: Wel·ling·ton Pronunciation: \ˈwe-liŋ-tən\ Function: noun Etymology: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington Date: 1817
: a boot having a loose top with the front usually coming to or above the knee —usually used in plural
Everyone, get your copy of The Ridge this semester!
So, i grabbed myself a copy of The Ridge because I was bored while waiting for my friend and now i know why NUS students don't bother reading it. There was a huge stack on the rack outside of the arts canteen.
Anyway, the topic on CNY goodies caught my attention (as usual, my obsession with food.) so i flipped to the page and the first sentence read:
"Being an auspicious race of people, Chinese are big on believing that we are what we eat."
"OH MY GAWD! Did i just read it right?!?!" was the first thought which crossed my mind. So i re-read it but unfortunately, i read it right.
Everything in that sentence is so wrong but let's put the number of grammatical errors and the issue of essentialism aside. Instead, we shall just focus on the word 'auspicious'.
I didn't know I brought luck to people around me or that other Chinese people bring me luck.
Isn't the correct word to use 'superstitious'? Why then was the writer primed the word 'auspicious' instead of 'superstitious'? Perhaps both words are primed together when CNY is concerned and the writer got confused?
But shouldn't the editor know any better? Or was 'auspicious' lexically primed for him/her as well?
Saw this 'poster' in one of the lifts in NUH advertising the upcoming seminars NUH is holding.
'Rejuvenate Intimacy' is the title of the workshop.
While using 'rejuvenate' isn't wrong since like revive and restore, it has the definition and idea of restoring something back to former state, i think this is where collocation comes into place.
To see if i was right and that most people do not use 'rejuvenate intimacy' together but rather 'revive' or 'restore', i did a google search and rejuvenate is not one of the options prompted.
Rejuvenate intimacy on the other hand yielded 39,000 results and all of them had to do with some sex detox book -_-" so that is not counted!
So i guess other people indeed do not use 'rejuvenate intimacy' but rather, use 'restore intimacy' in a relationship.
However, unlike 'restore' or 'rebuild', 'rejuvenate' has the idea of making something young again and restoring something its youthful vigour. You know how they always talk about young people and their raging hormones? Maybe by using 'rejuvenating intimacy', the organisers want to connote the idea of getting couples who are tired of each other after being so long together to when they were young again.
Was queuing up to buy food from this Taiwanese street snack stall and while waiting, I saw the URL of the company.
SNACKZIT?! SNACK ZIT?
No thanks. I'm not interested in eating zits! Imagine biting into a zit everytime you eat a fried mozzarella cheese stick or something and the cheese that oozes out reminds you of .....pus. EEW. i should stop being gross.
After going to the URL, i found out that the name of the company in English is actually Snackz It. Whose idea was it to name it Snackz It? The person probably did not realise how awful Snackz It looks together in its URL.
This reminds me of how people on IRC and MSN used to think it was cool to add 'z' or 'x' as a suffix to the last word of every sentence! I'm sure everyone is not unfamiliar to people who tYpE LiKe tHiS wOrZ.
Was shopping in Sasa with my friend when I came across Maybelline's new mascara - Maybelline magnum volum' express mascara.
The first thing which came to mind was Magnum ice-cream. HAHA.
Anyway, I thought using 'magnum' to describe lashes is a bit awkward. So i did a quick dictionary check when i came home and the results from longman and merriam-webster only had to do with guns and volume of a bottle. Eg from longman:
mag‧num (noun) [countable] 1. a large bottle containing about 1.5 litres of wine, champagne etc 2. a powerful type of gun that you can use with one hand: a .44 magnum
A search of the cobuild corpus revealed similar results.
However, it is not that I am unable to understand what 'magnum' means in '9x magnum lashes' despite it working as an adjective instead of a noun. It is not saying that the tube of mascara has 1.5litres worth of mascara but that their new formular is so powerful you'll get 9x longer, more volumunious lashes.
Oh and i just did a search on OED and it has an additional meaning of magnum which the m-w and longman don't. And this additional definition fits in nicely with the point Maybelline is trying to drive across.
Magnum adj.N. Amer.[Apparently developing from magnum force n. at Compounds] Unusually large or powerful; huge.
1987Random House Dict. 1158/1 Magnum, unusually great in power or size: a magnum spotlight; a magnum dosage. 1990People 14 May 133/2 Beneath that Dresden china exterior..is an ardent feminist with a magnum intellect. 1994Ontario Out of Doors Sept. 57/1 When you open the box, you can head directly into the field with a dozen magnum decoys (six drakes, six hens) in a handy totebag.
So yes, 9x larger, more powerful lashes which in this case powerful is used to mean flirtier longer lashes.
Captured this picture some time during CNY when everyone was hurrying to do their CNY shopping.
"What's blooming in the west" - probably an attempt to promote West Coast Plaza, a rather new shopping centre.
But to me, "blooming" here doesn't really fit very well. I use blooming mostly only to refer to flowers or a thriving business. So if i were to rephrase it to "What's thriving in the west" it sounds as though bacteria is taking over the other side of singapore!!
longman dictionary Bloom
1if a plant or a flower blooms, its flowers appear or open
2to become happier, healthier, or more successful in a way that is very noticeable:
She was blooming the last time I saw her.
Longman even shows that blooming/bloom is usually associated with gardening and plants:
merriam-webster Bloom 1 a: to produce or yield flowers b: to support abundant plant life 2 a (1): to mature into achievement of one's potential (2): to flourish in youthful beauty, freshness, or excellence b: to shine out :glow 3: to appear or occur unexpectedly or in remarkable quantity or degree 4: to become densely populated with microorganisms and especially plankton —used of bodies of water
transitive verb 1obsolete: to cause to bloom 2: to give bloom to
Blooming
Etymology: probably euphemism for bloody
Date: 1879
chiefly British —used as a generalized intensive (blooming fool)
dictionary.com
–adjective
1. in bloom; flowering; blossoming.
2. glowing, as with youthful vigor and freshness: blooming cheeks.
3. flourishing; prospering: a blooming business.
4.Chiefly BritishSlang. (used as an intensifier): He's got his blooming nerve.
–adverb
5.Chiefly BritishSlang. (used as an intensifier): not blooming likely.
Hmm.. But maybe the people who came up with the advertisement thought that the starting of a new year is like a bud blooming into a flower? Somewhat like moving into a new stage of life.
!!! I suddenly thought of the phrase "Blooming prosperity" and i did a google search and it appears that people do use it that way! So, maybe that is the intended meaning of the advert! Prosperity is blooming in the west so people might want to go there and rub off on some of that prosperity!
But still, "blooming prosperity" seems quite weird, definitely not a commonly used phrase by native EL speakers. I think it's a translation of the Chinese saying, 花开富贵.
I received a Jumbo restaurant voucher a few days ago (spend $150 and get $50 off. OH MY I’m definitely going for it!!) and printed on it was a description of their famous chilli crab.
“Award winning chilli crab Bathed in a zesty and tangy chilli sauce An iconic dish that is truly Singapore “
Bathed. Do you think “Bathed in sauce” sounds weird? "Bathe" connotes to me that whatever is in the sauce, crab being the case here, is going to be soggy, not flavourful and … just plain wet. Like someone drenched in the rain and has her limp hair all over her face.
So I did a cobuild and british national corpus of bathed but there weren’t any results of bathed and sauce together. They showed mostly “the sky was bathed in moonlight/sunshine” and “bathe wounds”.
However, the results from the corpora seem limited. Maybe they’re a smaller version because it’s free? Or maybe the corpora are only collected from a limited sources like travel/fashion magazines, books, blogs etc. so the lexis of food is left out. So, I googled “bathed in sauce” and there were 133,000 results! Apparently the use of “bathed in sauce” is used quite frequently in the lexis of food!
Anyway, I was thinking, as a Singaporean I wouldn’t describe the sauce in chilli crab as zesty and tangy. It feels like the blogger, Mr Brown’s “parody” of trying to order Ba Chor Mee in English. But I guess Jumbo Restaurant is trying to reach out to the angmohs.
Award winning chilli crab Damn shiok!
See. Singlish drives the point home perfectly fine and no circumlocution needed!
Was looking at my friend's SEP photos and saw the phrase "hammin' it up".
The photo has been removed for obvious reasons but as you can read from the comments, everyone in that picture looked really happy and was having fun.
The guy who used the phrase "hammin' it up" was unexpectedly, American. I should start watching trashy American shows. If this phrase appeared on Wheel of Fortune, I would have never been able to solve the puzzle.
As usual, google came to the rescue! Apparently there's a song by the title "hammin' it up" too. And the explanation given for "hammin' it up" by urbandictionary.com is:
hamming
Making a complete balls up of a particular situation, or event.
I kept hamming up my chances of scoring with Angela!
So i guess "hammin' it up" means making a complete fool of oneself but i have a feeling it also means "living it up" but i'm no native speaker of AmE and its slang.
I was browsing my favourite forum and was reading the ebay horror stories when i came across the phrase "panties in a wad". Probably a slang in AmE but never heard of it before. I think i watch too little American TV!
You can read what happened by clicking on the picture to make it bigger but to simplify the story, what transpired between buyer and seller was that the buyer didn't want to complete the deal out of ebay in case it happens to be a scam because she won't be protected by ebay/paypal. So, she didn't reply the seller and when the seller emailed her to tell buyer off for wasting her time, buyer explained ebay rules and said that seller has got her "panties in a wad".
From the context, i deduced that buyer said seller had her "panties in a wad" because seller was being bitchy and pissy as if she (sorry to sound crude) had a wedgie and was feeling uncomfortable like she had something between her ass.
To see if my interpretation was right, i googled "panties in a wad" and realized that it wasn't. "Panties in a wad" means:
to get all upset over something trivial, as if one's underwear has rolled up into an uncomfortable ball between one's butt cheeks
Cheri: "Did you see what he did to my iPod? I can't believe he put that song on there." Bobbi: "Oh don't get your panties in a wad over it, you can always take it off."
And wordreference forum even showed a similar expression in British English which is "to get one's knickers in a twist".
I can't wait to use this expression to replace making a mountain out of a molehill!
I went with a friend to watch The Blind Side last week before it stopped showing in all the cinemas and the movie was great!! Thanks for the recommendation, Prof!
Anyway, somewhere in the movie, the male lead, Michael Oher used the phrased “totally hosed”. Have never came across it so didn’t know what it really meant.
I can’t remember the exact way he used the phrase in the movie but it was in the context of something like if you’re unpopular with your friends in school or if you let people know you’re a mummy’s boy, you’re totally hosed! From the context I inferred that totally hosed probably means like ‘you’re dead’ or ‘you’re screwed’, somewhat akin to having committed social suicide.
So I quickly googled the phrase when I came home and apparently “hosed” is rather productive!
Screwed.
in the 'Dude. You're screwed.' sense.
Sometimes also means Stuck.
"You did what?! Hosed, man.
"When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless it's really a meteorite hurtling to the earth which will destroy all life. Then you're pretty much hosed no matter what you wish for. Unless it's death by meteor."
the MIT version: to be completely mentally and physically exhausted from completing some form of academic work typically within the last 8 hours of it being due.
Man I am hosed, I stayed up all night finishing a pset.
HAHA I can’t believe they have an MIT version of this. But apparently not everyone agrees ‘cos they had 135+ but 99-.
to be intoxicated. to be drunk to the point of memory loss and the possibily of pissing the bed becomes high.
If we drink all these 40's we're gonna be hosed.
While googling for definitions of hosed, I also found out that it is used a lot and rather often when it comes to matters pertaining to the computer, internet etc.
Hosed: Totally screwed or technically disabled. Usually used in reference to a malfunctioning computer app or program. Generally personalized - "I'm hosed" rather than "This is hosed."
Saw this sign outside NUH telling visitors what they or should not do when they visit patients.
Look at the last line. Abusive visitors and patients? How does abusive fit in here? I initially thought it meant visitors and patients who are coarse and vulgar, who will hurl vulgarities or physically abuse the nurses if they do not get their way. My friend, a speech therapist ever got punched by her patient because he didn’t want to take his medicine so I was thinking along this line and this is usually how abusive is defined (see definitions below).
Dictionary.com
1.Characterized by improper or wrongful use: abusive utilization of public funds.
2.Using or containing insulting or coarse language: finally reprimanded the abusive colleague.
3.Causing physical injury to another: abusive punishment.
4.Relating to or practicing sexual abuse.
Longman
1.using cruel words or physical violence:
Smith denies using abusive language to the referee.
He became abusive and his wife was injured in the struggle.
OED
1.Wrongly used, perverted, misapplied, improper: in Rhetoric, catachrestic.
2.Full of abuses; corrupt. arch.
3.Given to misusing, ill-using, perverting. Obs.
4.Employing or containing bad language or insult; scurrilous, reproachful.
But when I saw the Chinese translation, it had no hint of abusive visitors or patients. It merely said 有权拒绝不合作的访客进入医院 which is translated as they have a right to deny uncooperative visitors entry into the hospital.
So why “abusive visitors and patients”? Maybe the hospital was thinking along the lines of “abuse of rules”, but abuse of rules has a different meaning – it means misusing or using the rules inappropriately (definition 1 on dictionary.com and 1&3 in the OED); something like trying to beat the system. So perhaps the people at NUH misunderstood the meaning of “abuse of rules” and used it wrongly or were primed differently so it sounds weird to me in this context.
She was blooming the last time I saw her.
