The Speak Good English Movement's new grammar book - PART 2

In this article, I will examine in greater detail one or two more of the many errors made in the new grammar book of Singapore's Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) called Grammar Rules. I will also perhaps take a peek into the thoughts of the writer or writers of this highly flawed grammar book. If you want to read PART 1 of this article, please click here.

Tense because of tenses.

In my previous post on the many errors in the new grammar book of the Speak Good English Movement, one Renfred Tay in a public Facebook posting objects to my use of the simple present tense 'give' in the first sentence below:

The Speak Good English Movement's new grammar book.

The Straits Times wrote yesterday about a new grammar book published by the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) and I promptly obtained one for myself. Here it is:

TEDxNUS, mind your language!

I got a message this morning from Facebook about an event which will take place tomorrow and it was probably sent to me because a friend of mine will be attending it. That's how Facebook works. I clicked on the link and was led to the homepage of TEDxNUS.

I don't know much about the watered-down version TEDxNUS but I do know that TED hosts a lot of very interesting talks, some of which I have viewed with great delight on YouTube. Whatever the quality of TEDxNUS may be, the very short write-up on its home page is a bit of a letdown: TEDxNUS can't even get its language right.

Singapore's English Movement in error again.

Elsewhere in this blog, I have explained why I no longer read Singapore's Straits Times but this afternoon, a friend referred me to a letter written by Goh Eck Kheng, the Chairman of Singapore's Speak Good English Movement, which was published in the Straits Times on the Forum page on 13 February. I have furnished  irrefutable evidence in almost 100 blog posts why I can justly conclude that anything written by the Movement is bound to contain some language error but when my friend first brought the letter to my attention, I thought it was rather presumptuous of him to expect that there would be grammatical errors in such a short letter. Writing a grammatically correct letter should not be an impossible task for anyone who has been through some basic education in English. To oblige my friend, I thought I should just cast an eye on a couple of paragraphs of the letter and I would then tell him if the letter was flawlessly grammatical. And it isn't flawless.

You may click here for the full letter in the Straits Times website. It's really a very short letter with only 11 sentences and for reasons which are beyond even my wildest imagination, each paragraph has only one sentence.

Liberal Loonies Linguistically Trumped.

I've been told that it's very hard to find a single educated person in the US and you can walk the entire length and breadth of this massive country for months without encountering a single literate person but I'm sure that's a cruel exaggeration. But it is a fact that whenever a person exposes his lack of education on an internet platform, he is more likely to be American. Years ago, on an Internet forum, a few Americans made fun of me because I spelt 'spelt' that way. They were insistent that 'spelled' was the only correct spelling for the past and past participle of the verb and anything else was an error.

What the dickens!

Acceptance of multiculturalism in the 21st century has brought about a spirit of tolerance that sometimes leads to amusing results in the study of grammar. While grammarians in the early 20th century were free to dismiss as barbarous illiteracy what appears to us today to be no more than a minor syntactic inelegance, grammarians these days hum and haw when confronted with an obvious solecism and they do all they can to excuse the error as an acceptable variant when it clearly isn't. In the same spirit of pusillanimity, linguists these days are quick to remind their readers that the grammar they write is descriptivist and they turn their noses up at the works of grammarians of a previous generation which they label as 'prescriptivist'.

Let's talk about old age.

When I turned 40, I sat in front of my birthday cake with four lit candles on it and I recited Yeats' poem to my kids, the crucial lines of which are:

National Errors

In many of my earlier blog posts, I have said scathing things about the Speak Good English Movement. And there is perfect justification for what some may wrongly see as my overreaction. In many of these blog posts, I merely expressed surprise and sometimes horrified shock that the Speak Good English Movement could be so incredibly wrong in almost everything they wrote. Click on the above link if you want to experience the same shock at what the Speak Good English Movement is capable of. Don't forget - these are the people who say categorically that 'Alan and George works as a team' is grammatically acceptable.

Sometimes it is possible to tell by someone's error where he's from. Some errors can be categorised according to national boundaries. What makes the Speak Good English Movement so peculiarly bad is not only do they make language errors that are commonly found in Singapore but they also make countless errors that no Singaporean ever makes. When it comes to English grammar and usage, the Speak Good English Movement is just irredeemably and hopelessly abysmal and as I have repeatedly said, the only decent thing to do is to disband the Movement. Singapore does not need an English Movement which is totally clueless about English grammar.

Most organisations aren't that bad. Yesterday, I received an advert in my letter box from a private school called Eye Level. It's a glossy colourful flyer.

Illiterate Graduates?

Singapore is a land of paradoxes. It's such a small island that you can't even run a marathon in a straight line without hitting the sea and yet it's a huge economic powerhouse and it tops the educational charts every year and is recognised as the country with the best educational system in the world.

But there are other paradoxes that Singapore can't be proud of. I have shown in more than 80 posts in this blog irrefutable evidence that the only thing Singapore's Speak Good English Movement knows about English grammar is perhaps the spelling of the word 'grammar'. Apart from that the Movement is totally ignorant of English grammar and usage and it has been giving erroneous grammar tips since the day it started and continues to dish out 'advice' on grammar that is so obviously wrong that I am compelled to dub it Singapore's Illiterate Movement.

Recently, I posted a photo of a poster in the National University of Singapore that contained a surprising error.  Shortly after that, I posted another illiterate poster this time from the Land Transport Authority. Just yesterday I took this pic of an ad by NUSS (the National University of Singapore Society) which proudly calls itself on its website 'The Graduate Club'. The ad appeared on a shuttle bus in NUS:

What my crystal ball says about the new era of President Trump

The world will soon be abuzz with news of the world's most fashionable First Lady of all times. She will be what Lady Diana used to be but without any of Diana's many problems. She has poise, charisma and incredible good looks. She is one of those women who look fantastic from any angle and at any moment of the day. She will be the next major trendsetter in the world of fashion.

The English language is alas inadequate in describing such a woman succinctly. The only word I can come up with that fits such a description is 'Trumptastic'. I predict it will be the first new word to be accepted by the OED in 2017. It's not a word you can use lightly on just any pretty woman. To be Trumptastic, you've first got to be 'unbelievably beautiful' (if I may borrow her husband's favourite phrase). 'Trumptastic' can only be used to describe a woman of exquisite beauty and elegance. And in recognition of her husband's love for superlatives and perfection, the word must always be spelt with an initial capital or, better still, all letters in upper case and it should be followed by no fewer than three exclamation marks - TRUMPTASTIC!!!

Puzzling prepositions? Why grammarians should stop being contrary.

No, there's nothing puzzling about the preposition. The OED and all other English dictionaries are very clear on what a preposition is. It's just that sometimes, some grammarians think they need to spice up grammar a bit and that's when they do funny things.

Let's look at these sentences:

1. He came after breakfast.
2. He left before I had drunk my coffee.
3. What did you do it for?
4. He felt bad, for he knew he was wrong.

Grammar is just a game

I've been wrongly called a pedant when nothing can be further from the truth. Those who know me well know that I don't care in the least about grammar. When I blasted Singapore's Speak Good English Movement in about eighty posts or so on this blog, I did so only because the Movement has repeatedly shown itself to be totally ignorant of basic English grammar and yet it insists on telling others they are grammatically wrong when they are not. It is this blatant idiocy of the Movement that I had to address in those posts.

But I do not generally go about telling others they are wrong grammatically however much they may have flouted the rules of grammar. That's because I don't give a toss about grammar. Grammar is nothing more than a game with a set of rules that get altered every few years. It's a game in which the goal posts are repeatedly moved about according to the taste and fashion of usage.

Let's look at a simple example. For decades, many school children were told off for using some conjunctions as conjuncts. I can speak about this with some passion because I was rebuked as a schoolboy by my English teacher for doing precisely that. But I didn't just take it lying down. I cited Sir Ernest Gowers in my defence but to no avail. My teacher was a stern and inflexible woman with a beehive hairdo and as you probably know, a teacher with a beehive hairdo usually doesn't budge an inch once she's decided on something. So I was obliged for as long as she was marking my exam scripts to comply with her 'superstition' which is what Gowers calls such a non-existent grammar rule.

Is the Queen's English really the Queen's English?

I was reading the newspaper last night when one sentence caught my attention:

If you want to read the entire article, it's the 29 September 2016 news report by Channel News Asia

Whether you are annoyed by this sentence depends a lot on your age, education and upbringing. Henry Fowler gives many instances of such a usage from seemingly educated sources and slams it as 'illiterate'. Eric Partridge, without any discussion, dismisses it as unacceptable and says that such a construction 'rings false'. Frederick T. Wood in his then hugely popular Current English Usage simply calls it 'incorrect'.

Illiteracy in Singapore - the Land Transport Authority

ABBA was wrong?

I sometimes snoop around to see what others are saying of me. I'm generally not bothered one wee bit about other people's opinion of me but sometimes, curiosity gets the better of me. But it's always just curiosity and never concern.

Breaking news: The Speak Good English Movement is finally disbanded.

No, I'm afraid we haven't got such luck. The Movement which I have dubbed the Illiterate Movement is still tenaciously clinging on to its position.

As I have said elsewhere on this blog, Singapore's Speak Good English Movement is incapable of writing a single correct sentence in English. That's an exaggeration of course. What I meant is they are not capable of writing two sentences in English without some serious error. But one thing is clear: all the English tips they have given so far are wrong. Every week I screen-save the English tips they post on their Facebook page for my future blog postings and I can do this without even having to read what I'm saving because I'm so certain that whatever it is they publish is sure to be erroneous.

And I'm right. The real breaking news is what they published on their Facebook page just two hours ago:

Unable Inability

Recently, my phone gave me some trouble and I sent a text to my wife and kids to tell them that I might be uncontactable. As I was texting to them, I decided to type 'incontactable' instead just to see their reaction. One of my kids immediately replied, 'You mean "uncontactable"?' That gave me the opportunity to launch into a full explanation which, because of its length, I did by email. You see, quite apart from the peculiarities of the 'in-' and 'un-' prefixes, the word 'uncontactable' itself is rich with interesting little nuggets of history.

Why the green great dragon can't exist

Just a few days ago, the tweet of Matthew Anderson, the editor of BBC Culture, went viral and now, everyone is talking about it. You can read it on BBC Trending. He posted an excerpt from Mark Forsyth's book which I read last year and it's a book which I enjoyed tremendously. I do not like to filch photos from the internet and so I've taken my own photo (from my own book) of the same excerpt posted on that tweet:

One's background does not matter but grammar does