What Lucien Wong, Singapore's Attorney General, wrote

Many years ago, in the middle of work, my then secretary entered my room to ask me if 'organise' should be spelt with an 's' or a 'c', or at least that was what I thought I heard. I told her there was no 'c' in 'organise'. She repeated what she had said more carefully. 'Should "organise" be spelt with an "s" or a "zee"?' I asked her why she called it a 'zee'. All self-respecting citizens of this country were taught from the cradle to call a zed a zed. She eyed me as if I was a fossilised specimen from the Jurassic Period and said haughtily, 'That is so passé! Stylish people today call it "zee"'.

When I was a boy, it was drummed into me that Americanisms were to be avoided at all costs. Saying 'will' when I meant 'shall' would invite a sharp rebuke from my grandfather, 'Let's not pretend this is America.'

But any linguist will tell you that given time, Americanisms always conquer the entire Anglophone world simply because American English is simpler and less sophisticated, has fewer distinctions, is more tolerant of illiteracy and has that charming 'anything-goes' philosophy. The will/shall distinction that my grandpa used to chide me for not observing, vanished not long after he died.

Can anything that is less sophisticated be more stylish? Anyone who has not buried himself in the sand for the past ten years must know that what my secretary said is true of the people in Singapore. News readers seem to suddenly acquire an American accent. I have heard quite a few young people especially women who have not even been to the Land of the Free speak with a crisp apple pie accent. A couple of years ago, I was on the Deutsche Bahn and this Singaporean family consisting of a loud woman, her rather silent husband and her aged parents entered my carriage. The loud woman stood next to the toilet and explained to her mother in heavily accented American English how to operate the electronic buttons in the toilet. The poor mother looked at her husband who seemed equally lost and said in Hokkien, 'I don't understand.' I was tempted to translate to her what her daughter had said but something in the daughter's demeanour warned me not to interfere. Anyway, it was none of my business.

And if you have been to Yale-NUS College in Singapore you can easily be forgiven for thinking that there is an unwritten rule prohibiting British pronunciations on the premises. Every student there seems to put on a fake American accent with varying degrees of success. Some of them can't even get their basic grammar right but this fake accent can be heard ubiquitously from every nook and cranny on the campus.

But so far, I have only spoken about unimportant people who put on a fake American accent for a myriad of reasons that may include a need to be stylish, as was my former secretary's reason for calling 'zed' 'zee', But what about the movers and shakers of our country?

Early this morning, I saw this on Yahoo News which quotes Attorney General Lucien Wong:

The person who referred me to this piece of news was agitated for a different reason. I don't think he was bothered one bit by the Americanism uttered by Lucien Wong. I must confess that I don't read much American literature and the first time I came across such an anomalous use of 'absent' was when I read what Robert Burchfield had to say about it in a book on English grammar and usage.

There was a time when grammarians expressed themselves with much energy and pomposity when they came across Americanisms. In 1906, the Fowler brothers wrote, 'The English and the American language and literature are both good things; but they are better apart than mixed.' In 1926, Henry Fowler writing about the American use of an English word dismissed it as an 'undesirable alien' and he warned his readers not to allow it to displace long-established words.

Linguists today are very much aware of the need to be politically correct. Where Fowler was not afraid to castigate the use of a word as 'feminine or childish colloquialism', linguists today are averse to labelling a usage as wrong. Burchfield when commenting on the prepositional use of 'absent' which is an American peculiarity, praises it as an example of the 'pleasing fecundity of American English' but as far as usage goes, he acknowledges that it remains exclusively American. A famous Australian linguist goes so far as to try to give it some support by comparing it to the Latin ablative absolute construction absente (quo). But most linguists agree that such a use of 'absent' is uncommon outside the US and the Australian linguist concludes that 'there is scant evidence of it in British English.'

Even in the US, such use of 'absent' is quite a recent linguistic phenomenon. Its first use was in 1944 in US legal documents and it was only in the 1970s that it gained general acceptance in the US.

Should we use 'absent' in this way in Singapore, bearing in mind that we are thousands of miles away from the closest American shore? I'm reluctant to give my opinion on the matter especially after I was most cruelly put down as passé by my former secretary. It's really up to you but I would rather heed what Alexander Pope says with incredible foresight and wisdom:

Be not the first by whom the new are tried
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.