An ad by the Singapore Police Force

One has to move with the times. In this TikTok era, people don't read long sentences. They have short attention spans and if they do read at all, they only read the few words  that fit comfortably in a meme.  Anyway, the huge scam warning in the photo comes from the police themselves and there are two slip-ups in that short sentence!

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.  

You misunderstand me! I'm not in love with Ho Ching!

Recently, I received an email from a blog reader who made quite a ridiculous remark. He asked me why I had written no posts on Ho Ching's grammar. He asked me if I was in love with her! 

Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 3 (or Hell hath no fury like a woman who's told she's a grammar ignoramus)

Nothing amuses me more than to be chased by a Mother Goose with a rolling pin. And that's precisely what happened to me this morning when I woke up to see countless notifications from Quora. Veronica Curlette who is touted in her own website as 'Your On-Line English Language Teacher' posted on Quora, in reply to a question, her own analysis of a sentence that is so outrageously laughable that  I felt compelled to post a little article about it on my blog:  Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions.  That was on 4 November this year and I immediately posted the link on Quora so that Veronica could read it and realise how inadequate she is in dealing with questions on English grammar, a subject which I am persuaded she is pathetically ignorant of. After a few days, she replied on Quora and at first, I thought she was being dishonest because if she had some knowledge of grammar, she would most certainly have seen how wrong she was after reading that first article I posted. But I was wrong. She's not dishonest. She just has no knowledge of grammar.

I wrote a second article on this blog: Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2.  I wrote something brief on her Quora thread and gave a link but she must have removed my post because there is a note that says the comment was deleted. I then posted again on Quora and simply gave the link to my second article and urged her to read it. 

I thought that was the end of the matter but this morning, I was surprised to see that Veronica was hopping mad and she posted a few angry comments on her Quora thread. I don't want to write anything on her Quora thread that is more than a sentence or two because she will probably remove my post as she has already done. But from her angry posts, two things became abundantly clear to me:

1.  She really has no knowledge of English grammar - I'm speaking truthfully and I'm not taunting her, and

2.  She doesn't understand my earlier two blog posts but she can't be faulted since she has no knowledge of English grammar. I write my blog posts with the assumption that my readers are familiar with grammar. As I have always said, my blog is not a teaching blog.

Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2

In my last blog post, Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions, I wrote about the ludicrous errors made by Veronica Curlette, a Canadian English language teacher, in her online post on Quora. I posted a link to my blog post on her Quora post in the hope that she could see how inadequate her knowledge of English grammar really is. I have met many people who think that they understand English grammar just because they speak the language. They mistake their ability to speak a language for a knowledge of its grammar. Many people do not understand that there may be a huge chasm separating the two. I had hoped that Veronica will realise her own linguistic deficiency and will stop making incorrect pronouncements on English grammar. But her brief reply a few days ago on Quora tells me that she has not learnt the value of saying nothing when she knows nothing. This is what she writes in reply to me: 

Pronouns aren't conjunctions

If you have been following my blog, you will probably remember blog posts I have written of the common confusion between a conjunct and a conjunction (see A Conjunct is Not a Conjunction) or between an adverb and an adjective (see Adverbs Aren't Adjectives) but I would never have thought it was possible for anyone to mistake a pronoun for a conjunction.
NOTE: My blog post An Adverb is Not a Preposition is different - it's about linguists who are attempting to change the definitions of an adverb and a preposition. They are not confused, they are just being contrary.

In this quora question, one Veronica Curlette whose profile says she's a teacher of English in Canada for more than 25 years seems unable to distinguish a pronoun from a conjunction. Here's the quora question in bold, followed by the answer Veronica gives:

Progressing with the progressive

Too many people these days acquire their knowledge from the internet but the quality of such knowledge is dubious. It's true that you can learn a lot from the internet - I am the grateful recipient of life-saving knowledge from the web. Recently, I climbed up the roof of my house with the wrong ladder and I couldn't climb down. After that experience, I went on YouTube to arm myself with information on ladder safety and the many different kinds of ladders and I have just ordered (through the internet again) my new ladder which will be delivered tomorrow. That is the kind of knowledge you can gain from the internet. 

I don't normally read Quora but yesterday, I received an email from Quora on a subject that was of interest to me. So I clicked on it and I was brought to a whole new world that I never thought existed. It was a world of the blind leading the blind. Someone asked in Quora the question 'Why is it correct to say "I am having a party tomorrow" but incorrect to say "I am having class tomorrow"?'

An adverb is not a preposition.

When I wrote Puzzling prepositions? Why grammarians should stop being contrary four years ago, I did not fully understand the extent of Bas Aarts and Geoffrey Pullum's linguistic perversity. But since then, I've had the benefit of reading Bas Aarts's book and I've also leafed through Pullum's grammar. Something else happened recently that rekindled my interest in this subject.

A Conjunct is not a Conjunction

In answer to a teacher's question what a conjunction is, a young child replies with some confidence that it is the sign you see at a road junction. That is what I read a long time ago in a newspaper and I can't now remember if it's a true story or just a joke but I am fairly certain that if you direct this same question to the general public, quite a few people will not be able to define a conjunction correctly. I get a lot of emails sent through this blog but because there are so many of them, I usually make no reply although I skim through as many emails as I can. Recently, I read some of the older ones and I noticed that curiously, quite a few of my readers have questions that relate in some way to the conjunction.

One reader is confused why in a list of what appeared to him to be correct sentences,  he was told that the only correct sentence was

Adverbs aren't adjectives

I have often wondered why so many people have apparently insurmountable difficulties in getting their parts of speech right. And some go into hypercorrection mode and commit hilarious blunders.

This morning, the Straits Times published a report about a commotion at a bubble tea cafe. It was just hours before all bubble tea cafes were required by law to close owing to the deadly pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China and has now spread to the entire world. There was a long queue of customers when an argument took place between a delivery man and the cashier at the bubble tea cafe. Here's the news report.

Should English grammar be taught again after 60 years?

Yesterday morning, I saw this on Channel News Asia:

Goh Chok Tong v. Tan Cheng Bock - Is MSN reporting fair?

I am the last person to take an interest in politics but there are times when the gross injustice of what I see on the news repulses me and compels me to say something in defence of an innocent party who is wronged. This was precisely how I felt when I read this article which appeared on MSN two days ago: Tan Cheng Bock maintains a dignified silence despite Goh Chok Tong’s persistent digs.

When a linguist writes ungrammatically.

I must make it clear that I generally do not care much about grammar and correctness. People who know me well will readily testify that such 'correctness' and I are worlds apart and  never the twain shall meet but when a teacher of linguistics at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) writes an article in the local newspaper about Singlish, you will doubtless accept that I can't be faulted if I expect her to write grammatical sentences which are clear and unambiguous. That is the least anyone should expect of a teacher of linguistics.

When a friend on Facebook referred me to an article in the Straits Times written by one Tan Ying Ying,  Associate Professor of Linguistics at NTU, I read it immediately because I could see that unlike Singlish bashers (and there are many, particularly language ignoramuses such as that disgraceful Speak Good English Movement), she accorded some respect to Singlish and regarded Singlish as a colloquial form of a Singaporean language and I totally agree with her there. But I was disappointed to see that her article did not do justice to the weighty subject of her discussion because it was fraught with errors of all kinds, some of which I am prepared to attribute to an oversight on her part but others of which I cannot help but suspect to be errors which are more serious than mere carelessness.

Oh! It's that exceedingly exasperating 'escalate' again!

This afternoon, I used for the first time the messaging service of a telephone company to ask for its technician to check my telephone line. A time was fixed and when I asked if I could take it as confirmed, this was the reply I received:

THE SPEAK GOOD ENGLISH MOVEMENT FINALLY LISTENS TO ME. BUT IT'S TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE.

I posted this article on 17 February 2019 and as it is my invariable practice whenever I criticise the Speak Good English Movement on my blog, I went to the SGEM's Facebook page and posted a link to this blog and I also posted an unequivocal statement that the SGEM was once again wrong. I do this all the time: whenever I post something against the SGEM, I inform it of what I have done on its Facebook page or on its website.  

The next day, I discovered that the SGEM had removed the video along with what I had posted from its Facebook page.

Ungrammatical Grammarly

One thing I usually have to do on this blog is to remove any comment which is nothing more than an ad for the person posting the comment. There is an app called Grammarly that advertises itself as a great grammar checker. I usually don't bother to see how bad such apps are; I just know they are rotten. And I know people who pay for such an app are foolish and gullible. Recently, Grammarly posted a comment on one of my blog posts - LTA's Illiterate Poster - and it's nothing more than an advertisement for the Grammarly app. But what's really shocking is Grammarly can't even ensure that the grammar in its advertisement for its grammar checker is correct. This is what it posted in the comment section of my blog post: