No, the humble comma did nothing.

In most instances, the humble comma has a good reason to remain humble. It has a role to play but as any linguist will tell you, there used to be a time when it made its appearance a great deal more than it does today. Advocates of the Oxford comma have ingeniously come up with the 'I saw the pope, a rapist and child molester' joke but it remains a joke and is only good for a laugh. Whatever anyone tells you, the absence of a comma is very rarely the cause of a misunderstanding. Where a comma is needful, the writer will assuredly supply one.

Recently, the Malaysian Court of Appeal gave a judgment in Malaysia's former Prime Minister Najib Razak's appeal and A. Kathirasen, a Malaysian journalist, published an entertaining article singing the praise of the humble comma with the sensational title How the Humble Comma Sank Najib's SRC Defence. Did the humble comma really do that?  

When technocrats and mathematicians rule.

Lee Kuan Yew once said, 'Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford'. He was not alone. There were a few other people who made disparaging remarks about the study of Literature. It's not surprising that a country that turns its nose up at the humanities will see its government filled with technocrats and mathematicians. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't want a dithering philosopher who can only think in abstract terms or a historian who is fixated on the past. You want someone with a good mathematician's mind who can grapple with any problem that crops up.  And that's precisely what Singapore has in great abundance. We owe our amazing success entirely to such a rational and competent government. But I am not interested in politics and economics. Let's turn our attention to something quite different.

This morning I saw this sign and I immediately took a pic of it:

MERRIAM, MERRIAM, QUITE CONTRARY - MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY IS WRONG AGAIN

In October 2017, I posted in this blog an article criticising Merriam-Webster's article on a point of grammar and usage. Not long after that, I wrote another blogpost, this time showing how shoddy Merriam-Webster (I will just call it 'Webster' hereafter for simplicity) is in its dictionary definitions. The first article reveals Webster's surprising weakness in grammar and usage and the second article exposes the Dictionary's inability to even get its lexicography right. 

Recently, I read another article by Webster which essentially covers both grammar and lexicography and I will show in this blogpost that the poor Dictionary has no comprehension of either English grammar or the basic lexicographer's work of word classification or the need to pick relevant examples from past literary works, something which respectable dictionaries such as the OED are supremely good at. You will see for yourself how seriously flawed this article of Webster's is. Although I will post excerpts of Webster's article in this blogpost you may click here if you want to read the article for yourself. 

It's all to do with the syllable.

Have you ever wondered why Bukit Timah Expressway is abbreviated to BKE and not BTE? The Land Transport Authority gives the following explanation: 

Interestingly, the acronym for expressways is derived from the first letter of the first two syllables followed by the first letter of the last word.

         You may click here to access the official webpage.

But nobody who has given the matter a thought has any need for an explanation. It's obvious to all of us. What is not so obvious is WHY they came up with such a strange system in the first place. 

Why would anyone attach so much importance to the syllable and ignore the whole word?

Death and bucket-kicking Part 1

'Death' and other words relating to death and dying are generally considered inauspicious and are not acceptable in speech or writing particularly during the 15 days of the Chinese New Year which begins tomorrow (which means I only have two and a half hours to work on this if I want to keep to tradition). However inauspicious the word may be to Chinese people, the Chinese language is straightforward in its description of death. It's simply 死 with no euphemisms to soften the blow of its inauspiciousness. 

The English language, however, is very different. If you include Old English and Middle English words, for the verb alone, English has more than 120 words for 'to die' if you accept the OED as accurate.

The language of death is very large in its scope and cannot be adequately covered in a few blog posts. Since time is of the essence and I have slightly more than two hours left before the stroke of midnight, I will begin by taking a quick look at a few words in this first Part of 'Death and bucket-kicking'. I can put my old undergrad books to good use by taking photos of some of the quotations and posting them on this blog post, especially quotations that include a few letters not found on my keyboard. I'm afraid I can only cope with Middle English from the late medieval period and if I do make references to anything before that period, which I probably won't, I'll merely be repeating what the OED has to say.