The year 2000 was the pre-Internet era. When I saw the ad, it irked me that a business school that dared to call itself a university could not even write four sentences in an ad without a grammatical error. I wrote a letter to the Straits Times to highlight the error and I telephoned the editor. I was told that my letter would not be published. Something was said about the need to support the then new 'university' which was more accurately a business school. That was almost 20 years ago and I'm sure the burning question on my reader's mind is, has this business school mended its ways?
Here's what I saw on the 24 February 2019 Sunday Times.
Let me highlight a sentence in that ad:
This sentence has no place in an ad that is designed to persuade the potential student that SMU is the university he should apply to. It is disgraceful for any educational institution that conducts its lectures in English to print an ad with such a sentence and it can in no way be consistent with SMU's intention of telling its readers that it offers an excellent broad range of education. What kind of education can you expect to receive from a school that was wrong in its inaugural announcement in 2000 and again in 2019?
It's incredible that any English-speaking adult or even child could make such a fundamental grammatical error. I am more interested to find out what caused such a hideous error to escape the notice of the entire school. When a school takes up an expensive full -page ad which is designed to tell the world what a great school it is, it does not cursorily do a quick write-up; it's sure to scrutinize the entire ad for possible grammatical errors and it will weigh each sentence to ensure that it reads smoothly. Any error in it can hardly be attributed to carelessness. The error has to be the result of pure ignorance of grammar or perhaps the people who are responsible for this ad learnt their grammar from an erroneous source. What can this erroneous source be? We must remember that although business students and teachers are highly regarded for their business acumen and the ability to turn a ten-cent coin into a fifty-cent coin, a skill no doubt prized by those to whom the acquisition of filthy lucre is highly desirable, they may very well lack the intellectual strength one normally associates with the students and teachers of the more 'cerebral' academic subjects in a university. They are not the sort to make up their own grammatical rules. Whatever mistake they make must have come from some other dubious source.
Let me offer one suggestion. We'll never know for sure the source of SMU's embarrassing error but I have noticed this same error being taught and promoted by an organisation in Singapore that was started by the government to help the nation improve its command of the English language but, as I have shown in countless articles in this blog, is totally incapable of getting its grammar right. I'm speaking of course of the notorious Speak Good English Movement (SGEM).
SMU's grammatical error is hauntingly similar to one of the many errors of the SGEM. Did SMU consult the SGEM's appalling books on grammar which are notorious for dishing out tiny bite-sized morsels of linguistic errors to all their hapless readers? This is how insidious the SGEM is. It disseminates horrendous grammatical errors throughout Singapore through its books, website and Facebook page.
Let's see what the SGEM teaches on the subject-verb agreement. The SGEM's surprising inability to get its grammar right on this spans over a period of about ten years, as this error can be seen in the SGEM's book published in 2008 and also in its latest book on grammar, Grammar Rules, which it published just two years ago.
In a thin book published in 2008 by the Speak Good English Movement called ENGLISH AS IT IS BROKEN, the SGEM says this:
"Alan and George works as a team" is acceptable if we consider the two as "one team".I examined this in a previous blog post. Please click here for the article.
That's not all. This book by the SGEM also accepts the sentence There is a cat and a dog as 'good British English'. I dealt with this in another blog post - please click here.
Ludwig Tan, a consultant of the SGEM and its committee member, who is also the dean of the School of Humanities and Behavioural Sciences of the Singapore University of Social Sciences (an institution so new and unknown that nobody in my circle of family and friends has even heard of it) in a now defunct blog singled out this sentence written by a Singaporean journalist for comment:
Smiling and recalling something pleasant from the previous day help to make you happier...Tan, oblivious to his own linguistic shortcomings, many of which I have highlighted in this blog, proudly proclaims:
My preference, however, would be to treat it as a single activity, hence, Smiling and recalling something pleasant from the previous day helps to make you happier...You may read more about this peculiarity of Tan in my previous blog post: Click here for the article.
As you can see, the SGEM, like the priest at Holy Matrimony in church, has the power of joining two persons as one but even a priest can't make two persons so joined to take on the singular verb. And because treating two activities as one is Ludwig Tan's 'preference', the poor Straits Times journalist who used a plural verb is now in error. My grouse with Tan is not his treating of 'smiling' and 'recalling' as one, which I have no quarrel with. His wrong is in singling out a perfectly correct sentence by a Singaporean journalist.
You may think the SGEM would have wised up by now and the two books it published in 2008 and 2009 no longer reflect its current understanding of verb agreement but that's, sadly, not so. The SGEM's latest book on grammar published and distributed by the SGEM in 2017 gives support to this ridiculous error. I have dealt with this error of the SGEM's latest highly erroneous book called Grammar Rules in a previous blog post (click here for the full article) in which I showed the SGEM's ignorance of subject-verb concord even after 20 years of rolling along and repeatedly stumbling over basic English grammar rules and dishing out errors to all and sundry in Singapore.
What makes some people (thank God there are very few of them) commit such grammatical errors? In 1926, Henry Fowler while writing about this same subject-verb concord, referred to people who made such mistakes as 'young hounds' who are 'easily drawn off the scent'. Almost 40 years later, these words were echoed and endorsed by the great linguist Sir Ernest Gowers. But as Fowler put it, for most writers, 'this is a matter of carelessness or inexperience only'. I draw a huge distinction between those whose solecism is due to carelessness and those whose errors are the result of ignorance or a belief in an erroneous or non-existent grammatical rule. The errors made by the SGEM and Ludwig Tan are not the result of carelessness or inexperience. They are errors made after they have given due consideration to the matter. And they promote such errors as good grammar. This makes their error far more serious than an error due to carelessness. I can readily excuse the non-intellectual business mind in SMU which can interpret complicated stock exchange charts but is unable to distinguish between subjects such as 'bacon and eggs'. 'law and order' and 'calmness and confidence' on the one hand and the three disparate noun phrases in SMU's sentence on the other. You may say in SMU's defence that a business school cannot be expected to get its grammar right when it publishes an ad in the newspaper because grammar does not churn out cold hard cash which is all the business mind is interested in and I will have to throw in the towel. It's a valid excuse. But what excuse has an organisation that calls itself the Speak Good English Movement?
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