One's background does not matter but grammar does

I was running past this poster when I saw the glaring error and I had to stop to take a pic. This banner is huge; it's so large that I had to cross the road to take a photo that could capture its entire length. It must have cost a lot to print this. Inspiring thoughts of Usain Bolt that had kept me going at an Olympic pace dissipated immediately. This is the kind of error that makes you stop dead in your tracks. NUS, which is ranked the world's top ten, can't pretend that the need for brevity trumps correctness. 'Whatever' would have been an ideal substitute and every child of ten knows that where 'whatever' is the complement of the verb 'be', you can dispense with the verb and this is quite unlike 'no matter' which operates as a conjunction here.


For a full list of all the articles in this blog on language, particularly the egregious language blunders made by the Speak Good English Movement, please visit this page.

A NOTE ABOUT THE SPEAK GOOD ENGLISH MOVEMENT WHICH OUGHT TO BE DISBANDED BY THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

Of all the language errors made on this planet, those made by Singapore's Speak Good English Movement are the most shocking. To this day, I can't get over them. Can you believe that they've published a book which is a perennial best-seller in all the schools in Singapore and which contains an error on every page? In the book, they state shamelessly that "Alan and George works as a team" is grammatically acceptable. Can you believe that?