Does 'a while' always mean a while?

I sometimes read trashy alternative news reports from dubious 'news' sites because they somehow enter my feed. Only such sites will report on the TikTok postings of people who really don't know much about the subject they talk about. A few days ago, one such dubious site reported on the TikTok post of a woman who says she's from Montana and has lived in Singapore for the past 10 months. In the post, she talks about 'the hardest Singlish phrase' she's encountered. She recounts the story of a medical appointment she had. She was told by a nurse, 'Please go have a seat, wait a while and the nurse will be out to collect you'. She says the nurse said it with a friendly smile and since she isn't a confrontational person, she just sat down, but 'inside, [she] was flabbergasted'. She was upset that the nurse could say that with a smile on her face. She goes on to say on TikTok, 'Doesn't she understand what she just said?' 

Mind the translation Part 3

I first posted Mind the translation! in which I explained that SMRT's notice 'Berhati-hati di ruang platform' was incorrect and did not at all convey the meaning it intended. I then took a photograph of the notice on a train in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I posted the correct translation used there in this blogpost: Mind the translation! Part 2. 

I thought that was the end of the matter until one day, as I was travelling on SMRT's train in Singapore, I noticed to my amusement that SMRT had changed its 'Mind the gap' notice to this:

Mind the translation! Part 2

My last blog post attracted quite a bit of criticism from readers who felt I was not equipped to comment on Malay grammar and vocabulary. The sole objection that my readers have is my ethnicity. Many readers are of the view that only ethnic Malays speak the language perfectly and can tell what is wrong with a sentence written in Malay. That's as stupid as saying only the English can teach English and if Bernard Shaw is correct, the English are the last people you should turn to if you need help on the English language.  

Mind the translation!

This evening as I was riding on the train, I noticed the usual warning 'Mind the gap' translated into Malay. Although I have no scholastic expertise in Malay grammar, and Malay isn't my native language, I have a reasonable grasp of it and I can analyse its nahu with reasonable competence. And the translation is wrong.

When hypercorrection forces an adverb to become an adjective

About a week after I posted this on my blog, a reader informed me that the OED had myriads of examples of 'I feel badly' with presumably the same meaning as 'I feel bad'. The rational part of me could not accept this because as long as 'feel' is used as a copular verb, there is no way an adverb could follow in that manner. It would make nonsense of the sentence. However, 'feel' is an unusual word in that apart from its copulative use, it can also function as an ordinary main verb. Because of the semantic uniqueness of 'feel', might 'I feel badly' be synonymous with 'I have a bad feeling', with 'badly' not functioning as a subject complement, which it cannot under the circumstances? But it still sounded to me as a very odd way of saying it. I was very tempted to dismiss it as a case of hypercorrection that went on to be accepted as correct by reason of its frequency of use.

Frankly, you should say nothing if you know nothing

I was very much surprised when following my last blog post Grammar Ignoramuses Strike Again on Quora, Frank Dauenhauer whose laughably erroneous Quora post I commented on, reacted with seething rage. He made furious comments on that post (you may read them for yourself - just click on the link above) and he also sent me an angry email. He then posted on his Quora page my entire blog post (which is fine - I have nothing to hide) and he tells his Quora followers that he has been "savagely maligned" by me. Why he went ballistic escapes me totally.

As I informed him, every word I wrote in that blogpost is true. When I call someone a grammar ignoramus, I am merely stating a fact. And quite apart from that mistake made by Frank in his Quora answer, I have other evidence that corroborates my assertion that he is ignorant of grammar. If you have been following my blog, you should know that this was not the first time I pointed out Frank's errors. He has made many errors, some of which are pretty outrageous. It's hard to tell which one of his errors takes the biscuit but I am fairly certain what I am about to reveal to you in this article will have many of you in stitches.

Grammar ignoramuses strike again on Quora

A lot of people I know are quick to admit they know nothing about Physics but hardly anyone will readily say they don't know English grammar. I'm sure I have looked into this before elsewhere in this blog. I most certainly have offended quite a lot of people when I call them 'grammar ignoramuses'. But they really are. Most people are ignorant of English grammar. That is a fact and I have given in this blog examples of cabinet ministers in the UK who were stumped by journalists' questions on simple English grammar and I have also mentioned the reason for this. In the 1960s, linguists very wrongly advised against teaching English grammar in schools and this advice was adopted all over the world where English was taught. Although they are now redressing this huge mistake in the UK by reintroducing grammar in schools, it is not wrong to say that most English-speaking adults today are grammar ignoramuses.

But unlike Physics ignoramuses who do not profess a knowledge in Physics, let alone pretend to teach anyone Physics , grammar ignoramuses really believe they are grammar experts. I used to think they were dishonest but I am fairly certain now that it's a kind of benign mental state that makes a person believe he has a vast knowledge in grammar when he is really utterly ignorant of it. They are honest but they are ignorant and they don't even know that.

You can see this in Quora, an internet-based forum where people ask questions and those who think they know the answers give their response. I have mentioned Frank Dauenhauer before in this blog post: Query Quora. That Frank knows nothing about English grammar is obvious. He can't even get his part of speech right and that's kindergarten-level grammar. Here's what he posted on Quora slightly more than a week ago in response to the simple question, 'Is it "I feel bad" or "I feel badly"?':

To gym or not to gym

The first time I heard this word 'wrongly' used was some years ago when my son's friend told me he liked 'to gym'. Since then, I have seen 'gym' used as a verb with all its inflections by mainly youngish people. Although I must confess I absolutely detest such an abominable conversion, I cannot turn a blind eye to how rich the English language has become through this process of verbing over the centuries. There are many examples of fairly recent verbs that originated from nouns and we use them every day without batting an eyelid. One such verb which I use liberally is ‘text’ which today can only be used in the context of sending a message on the mobile phone. It has the advantage of brevity. 'Texting a friend' is much shorter than 'sending him a text message' but brevity alone does not guarantee acceptance of the usage of a word, especially when the usage sounds suspiciously modern. Why then do I (and presumably you too) find ‘text’ more acceptable than ‘gym’ when both words are used as verbs?

Query Quora

It boggles the mind why anybody would bother to ask a question on grammar in Quora. Quora is one of those websites where anyone can give his opinion on any question even if he has absolutely no knowledge of what he is talking about. I have previously dealt with errors in Quora in four separate blog posts. These are errors that you wouldn't have expected a child to make:

1. Progressing with the Progressive - the same Frank Dauenhauer appears in this post.

2. Pronouns aren't conjunctions  which is hilarious because Veronica Curlette about whom I wrote posted a comment and tied herself up in knots and that obliged me to write a further blogpost:

3. Pronouns aren't conjunctions Part 2 and as if that wasn't enough, a furious Veronica made a further comment, this time citing the dictionary but what's really hilarious was she didn't realise that she had confused a sentence example in the dictionary for the definition!  Naturally, I had to write, rather cheekily if I may be allowed to admit, a further blog post:

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

But people don't learn from their mistakes and these grammar ignoramuses continue to fill the limitless pages of the internet with the fruit of their ignorance. I was alerted to this Quora posting on 3 March but it's hard to address all of them; there are thousands of Quora postings on grammar and sadly, the only people who seem eager to give their answers are all ignorant of grammar. Here's the 3 March Quora post:

Hardly a humble celebration.

I made a prediction 7 years ago in a blog post that our innate hypocrisy would ensure that words which didn't mean what we really intended to say would soon acquire new meanings. Just two days ago, the Queen said she was 'humbled and touched' by the celebrations.

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: