RE-

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.



'Restore intimacy' yielded 501,000 results
'Revive intimacy' yielded 237,000 results
'Rebuild intimacy' yielded 167,000 results

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.

FRIED ZITS

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.

BIG BIGGER BETTER

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.

1987 Random House Dict. 1158/1 Magnum, unusually great in power or size: a magnum spotlight; a magnum dosage. 1990 People 14 May 133/2 Beneath that Dresden china exterior..is an ardent feminist with a magnum intellect. 1994 Ontario 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.

BLOOMING

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

1 if a plant or a flower blooms, its flowers appear or open

2 to 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
1 obsolete : 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 British Slang. (used as an intensifier): He's got his blooming nerve.

–adverb

5.Chiefly British Slang. (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.

BATHTUB OF SAUCE

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!

A LEG OF HAM

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.

OUCH

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:

urbandictionary.com：

panties in a wad 118 up, 6 down 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!