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:

I will just ignore 'everyday' which may very well be a type-setting problem but I am pretty sure whoever wrote this is someone whose head is filled with physics formulae, Economics charts and graphs, and mathematical equations and I mean really tough equations that come complete with sigma, lamda, sine and cosine. And of course he scoffs at language and literature. He may run a country well but he can't construct a simple sentence without sounding like a mathematician. 

More than 7 years ago, I felt compelled to write a blog post (Click here if you want to read the full blog post) in response to what I read in a best-selling book on the English language produced by both Singapore's Ministry of Education and the Speak Good English Movement. It was a short answer to the question whether one should say 'Use your brain' or 'Use your brains'.  Here is the answer given in the book which is (let us not forget) a book on English usage: 

Is it not clear that the writer is better off teaching Biology than English? Did you know there were three parts to a brain? I bet, like me, you always thought the brain only had the left and right hemispheres and apart from that, you knew nothing else about the human brain. 

What Singapore should do is what I have advocated for almost ten years. Get rid of the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) and recall all publications by them because, as I have shown elsewhere in this blog, you will not be able to find a single page of any SGEM's book or website that does not teach an erroneous point of grammar or usage. If you think I'm only exaggerating, just visit my blog page in which I listed all my blog articles on the subject. I assure you you will be outraged when you see the kind of errors they make and you will agree with me that the least our ruling technocrats should do is to disband the SGEM even if they don't hold language and literature in high regard.