Embarrassing Ads by Private Schools

It can be pretty annoying to see your letter box stuffed with ads you take no interest in. Who delivers these ads and why is it that nobody seems to have seen the delivery men? Once I happened to be awake at about 5 in the morning and I heard a motorcycle stopping just outside my gate. I looked out of my window and I saw a man stuffing ads into my letter box. He then moved to the other houses down the road. Like a thief in the night, he operates at this unearthly hour.

Except for KFC ads (and I'm a huge KFC fan), I usually throw away all the other ads without reading them. Almost exactly a year ago, I got an ad from a private school that went by the name of Stalford. It amused me a little because everyone knows anything that sounds like 'Stanford' is a good name for a private school. There's one that calls itself 'Stamford' and you can't fault the management because they'll tell you that they were thinking of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, and it didn't once occur to them that their name would sound a little like Stanford University. And Stalford? Come on, 'L' is two letters away from the 'N' of Stanford, so where's the similarity?

There were many errors in the ad and I took a pic of it and forgot all about it until just the other night as I was going through some of my old photos and I saw Stalford's ad again.

What's really funny is this bit about their English and GP teacher.

In that short writeup, there are 4 language errors which I've indicated in luminous red. And it's a writeup about Stalford's English and GP department! Evidently, Mdm Rubie's 'secret of constructing essays' remained an impenetrable secret to the advertisers of Stalford.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Stalford's website and this time, they have a section that talks about their 'star tutor' who is another English and GP teacher.

A year ago, they wrote about Mdm Rubie having 'developed her own pedagogy'. Not to be outdone, their current 'star tutor' is now said to have 'devised her authentic set of teaching pedagogy', no doubt to differentiate this kind of pedagogy from the kind that has nothing to do with teaching and education. And they really should not use the word 'authentic' if they don't know what it means.

I'm just wondering if next year they will have a new English language and General Paper teacher who will be reported as having 'discovered, developed and enhanced a proactive [I'm surprised they left out this gem of business-speak] and holistic educational academic teaching pedagogy'.

Sex and the Church

What do you do when you receive your monthly church magazine? Most people just throw it away. But this month's magazine of my church has something that's really hilarious.

There's an article by a young father about how to be a good father. But the way he writes the article is truly hilarious.

This is what he writes which is sure to raise eyebrows. Mind you, this is in a church magazine.

This is what he says further:

And I don't think he's talking about sex therapists.  He goes on to give the following advice:

I find this particularly amusing because as far as I know, the Bible does not say a word about HOW God fathers anyone, not even his only begotten son, our Lord Jesus Christ. 

In the Gospel According to St Matthew, we are told that Mary was 'found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.' And the angel told Joseph that 'what is conceived in her (Mary) is from the Holy Spirit.'

I believe these vague and imprecise words are what led to some guesswork by the Mormon Church. From what I understand, the Mormons believe that there was some intimate union between God the Father and the Virgin Mary in order for Jesus to be conceived. But I'm not sure if this is nothing more than some scurrilous propaganda spread by mainstream Christians against Mormonism or if indeed the Mormons do advocate such a potentially blasphemous belief. If I'm mistaken, I apologise to all Mormons for this view which I must say is extremely common among most people. Just google it if you don't believe me.

But can the Mormons be blamed if indeed they hold such a view? I must confess that I have just deleted huge chunks of what I've written on this blog because I'm not sure if this subject is appropriate. Most of us have such a jaundiced view of sexual intercourse that we think anything that is even remotely connected to it must be filthy and sinful. But I'll heed the advice one of my readers gave me in an email to me. 'Please write more about language and less about religion'. And I think she's right. Nobody is offended when you criticise their language. Language is nothing more than mere words and a collection of noises whereas religion is potentially explosive. People get so worked up over it. Let's look at the language then and stay away from religion.

The writer of the article finally writes this:

This must be the first time I found an article in a church magazine so incredibly hilarious. I really think the church should employ a proofreader to go through all articles before distributing its monthly magazine to all parishioners.

The peculiarity of the language lies in the fact that while you can mother a child by looking after him and acting towards him like a mother, you can't say you are fathering a child by doing the same thing if you're a man. Fathering a child means an entirely different thing.

To father a child is, to use the delicate words of the OED, to 'procreate as a father.' But I prefer the more graphic description in the Cambridge Dictionary which simply says 'To father a child is to become the father of a child by making a woman pregnant.' What these dictionaries are trying to tell us and particularly, the writer of the article in the church magazine is there's a bit of the rumpy-pumpy in the whole idea, if you'll pardon my French. Don't talk loosely about fathering a child unless you really mean it. If what you mean is simply looking after a child, then say so.

As I've said earlier, you can talk about mothering a child if all you do is to act like a mother to the child and you can be as chaste as the Blessed Virgin herself. This meaning of 'mother' as a verb has been in use since the 19th century. But alas, there is no corresponding meaning for 'father' when used as a verb when all you want to say is that you are looking after a child like a father without any reference to 'making his mother pregnant', if I may borrow some of the words from the Cambridge Dictionary.

But there used to be a long time ago. From around the time of Chaucer and that's many hundred years ago, the word 'father' when used as a verb could also mean to act as a father to or to look after a child. But that meaning is now archaic and today, if you say someone fathers a child, it has only one unmistakeable meaning and it's not something you'd expect to read in a church magazine.


[EDITOR, 25 October 2015]: What I wrote above about the position of the Mormon Church is not incorrect at all. I've since looked up the internet on this matter and here's a good link that discusses the beliefs of the Mormon Church on the Incarnation of our Lord: CLICK HERE.

What's in a Name?

In the biblical story of creation, we are told that the first task God gave Adam was to name everything that was around him. Adam was to come up with a word for everything. But are names or words all that important? Each name is just a representation of an object and even if you alter its name, the object remains the same. Or as Shakespeare elegantly puts it, "That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet."

But would it? After centuries of usage, words do carry connotations of their own. I won't forget a function I attended many years ago as a student. I was seated next to an Indian lady who introduced herself to me as Dr Nalla Tan. The name immediately rang a bell. I asked her if she was the Dr Nalla Tan who wrote books on puberty for prepubescent children. I told her that my father got me one of her books just as I was entering the cusp of puberty. She asked me which book of hers I had read for she had written several. Without a moment's hesitation, I replied, "Below the Navel". She gave me a look of annoyance and replied coldly, "It's BEYOND the Navel".

I remember blushing to the roots of my hair as I muttered my apology. There's very little one could say to an author whose respectable book for children to learn about their own bodies had, with a single word, been turned into something of the same genre as Harold Robbins' or Sydney Sheldon's raunchy novels. We didn't say much to each other after that and I'm not sure now whether it was because the function had started or the iciness with which she greeted my faux pas had chilled the milk of human kindness within her.

A single word could change the whole evening's atmosphere. But I really wasn't to blame. I wasn't being flippant. I had thought all along that the title of the book was Below the Navel. The book, as I recall, had drawings of the human anatomy and to my adolescent mind and I couldn't be faulted there, it was all about the region below the navel. It didn't once occur to me that the title of the book was really BEYOND the Navel.

As luck would have it, my knack of ruining an evening with a single word continued well into my adulthood. I was at a dinner with my wife and we were seated at a table consisting of visiting professors from the UK and a married couple of Chinese descent who were Singaporeans. The table conversation somehow drifted to stories of King James I of England and I regaled everyone at the table with an interesting story I had read about King James and a young man of athletic build. The Chinese woman found it hard to believe that James I was homosexual and she said, "Well, that's not in MY history book", to which I replied perhaps a little too quickly, "Your history book is probably expurgated".

It was only after the dinner that my wife told me that the woman was furious with me for having said that and she had kept silent for the remainder of the dinner while occasionally staring daggers at me and I had to be really blind not to have noticed it. And I really didn't notice it. My wife explained further that the woman probably misunderstood the word "expurgate" to mean something disparaging when that wasn't my intention. I had merely meant that a decent lady like her would probably not read books replete with accounts of the seedier side of life.

But a single word can sometimes be the cause of fun and laughter. Many years ago, I took an airport terminal train in the US with my wife and just before departure, there was a loud announcement: "This train will depart momentarily." My wife and I looked at each other and we burst into laughter. We were certain the train would depart for just a few seconds and return to where we started from. When I got home, I looked up the dictionary and to my surprise, I discovered that in the US, "momentarily" could also mean "in a moment" and not just "for a moment" which is the meaning of the word anywhere in the world outside America.

The world would be less complicated if Americans spoke English (and didn't invent their own language) and everyone understood what "expurgate" meant and writers of sex education books would just title their books BELOW the Navel as they should since, unless I'm very much mistaken about sex education books, that really is where their focus is.

Language, Truth and Hypocrisy

I have unintentionally pilfered two thirds of the title of AJ Ayer's remarkable book but I'll let the title remain because it suits the thrust of this post.

Just recently, I visited my mother and she was recounting stories after stories to me, many of which I paid hardly any attention to until she mentioned a recent "pot blessing" at her church. As a former altar boy and one who's thoroughly familiar with all the rituals of the Church, "pot blessing" rather floored me. What the devil is that? I'm familiar with the blessing of all kinds of inanimate objects from a large building to small items of jewellery but why on earth would a pot be blessed?

As it turns out, "pot blessing" is a common term in some church circles and it was first coined in the US, the land of fringe Christianity. The real word is "potluck" which also originates in the US. When my mother said she went to a pot blessing, it was only a potluck dinner she went to.

But why don't they say "potluck"? If you have moved in Christian circles for as long as I have, you will notice that there is a class of Christians who avoid all mention of the word "luck" or "fortune". To them, attributing anything to luck would be an affront to God who has a purpose for everything and controls everything. Whenever they encounter the word "luck", they change it immediately" to "bless". "Good luck!" becomes "God bless!" Although my mother is not that loony and she does say "Good luck" in her normal conversations, it's unfortunate that that monstrosity "pot-blessing" somehow crept into her vocabulary.

But this is nothing new. I have more than once been told that God was in charge of our destiny when I wished someone "Good luck", as if I didn't know that taking charge of people's destiny and, if I may add, often mucking it up, was a part of God's job description.

I'm familiar with the lengths we go to in order to whitewash our wrongs. When I was a boy, my friends and I would say we "disliked" someone when we meant we hated him. While our sentiments for the person were precisely what the word "hate" most accurately describes, we thought that by using a weaker word, we could free ourselves from the sin of hating another. Today, I see grown men and women doing the same thing I did as a kid and they seem blissfully oblivious to their blatant dishonesty.

The people who are quick to avoid the word "luck" seem quite at home with the days of the week. Pick any day. Tuesday is named after the god of battle Tiw in Norse mythology. This god is the same as Mars, the Roman god of war. "Wednesday" comes from Wodnesday and is named after the Germanic god Woden. Thursday is named after the god Thor (which most people today know best because of some Hollywood movie) and Friday after the Old English goddess Frigg, the equivalent of the Roman Venus. Saturday is of course named after the god Saturn. Even the Lord's day, Sunday is named after the sun which was once a god just as Monday is named after the moon which was once worshipped as a goddess.

Finally, the one word that takes the prize for hypocrisy must be "humble" used as a verb. In today's world, everyone, whether he's an Academy Award winner or a school prize recipient, no longer says he's proud to receive the award but rather, he's "humbled" by the award. But what I read in this month's church newsletter emphatically takes the cake. This is the title of the article:

It's an article written by a woman who attended a workshop to help those with financial difficulties. She was moved when she heard the stories of those who were struggling to make ends meet. But this is how she described her feelings:

I have removed anything that might even remotely reveal the identity of this good woman. The purpose of this blog post (like all my other posts) is not to single out any one specific person or to criticise him or her in any way. I'm more interested in the bigger linguistic picture but I have no choice but to take my examples from real publications.

What we have here is a woman who says she was humbled to hear of other people's financial challenges. Does she mean that she was moved? Or saddened? Or even that irritating word that is overused in Christian circles - edified? Perhaps she was edified by tales of how people in worse financial circumstances than she could continue to trust in the Lord? The English language is rich with a wealth of vocabulary that is capable of describing every single emotion that the human heart can feel. She was certainly not humbled and should not have used that word.

Why do people say they are humbled when they are clearly not? Now, I'm not talking about that good woman but I'm focusing my attention on the rest of the world including Oscar Prize winners. The reason is obvious. They are being hypocritical. It's the same old "I dislike him but I don't hate him" line that I used to mouth as a pious Christian boy who carried the silver candlestick to the altar every Sunday. It's the same "I hate the sin but not the sinner" line we hear from adult homophobes who love victimising the LGBT community and other defenceless minority groups but are too self-righteous to admit the truth.

When someone says, "I am humbled to receive this Award", what he really means is "I'm ecstatic to receive it but as a rank hypocrite, I want everyone to think of me as the paragon of humility even at this proud moment of my life."

Any living language is susceptible to change. As the world's most used language and one that has long transcended geographical boundaries to become the world's only neutral language that is not anchored to any one national culture, English undergoes such a rapid change that no book can definitively spell out all the current changes in the language. These changes which affect not only grammar and syntax but also the meanings of words are usually caused by ignorance of the English-speaking public. The masses who are not so knowledgeable about the niceties and nuances attached to each word,  are apt to use a word in a way that is contrary to standard usage and over time, that incorrect usage becomes standard usage. I have no doubt that one day, the dictionaries will add a new definition to the word "humble" to allow for such a hypocritical use. And it will be a change brought about purely by our hypocrisy. 

Women and Horses

There are many words in any language which are either openly sexist or sexist in their etymology. In a book I'm currently reading on the etymology of English words and the history behind them, a question arises as to whether the word "bridegroom" is sexist in meaning. The author discounts as "crazy" the explanations some have given for the origin of the word - one who grooms the bride or gives her the value of a horse.

Photo of horses I took a couple of months ago.

In the Anglo-Saxon version of the Gospel of St John, the word used for bridegroom is brydguma. We know what bryd or bride is but what on earth is guma? It's perhaps clearer when brydguma was spelt bredgome in 1340. From my own rather sketchy knowledge of Middle English poetry, gome means man. And it's not just gome. Any student of medieval literature will recall the headache we all had over the dozen or so words for just "man" or "knight" alone and they include, if my memory serves me, tulke, segge, wight  and many more I can't now recall; the weird-sounding ones being from dialects such as the Lancastrian dialect of Middle English. But gome means man and even though I've not read medieval poetry for ages, I can still remember that much. To cut a long story short (and etymological stories can be pretty long), "bridegroom" simply means the bride's man as the author of the etymology book suggests. That's what he says but I hold an entirely different view and that's not the end of the story, as I will explain later.

The anti-sexist sentiment we see today has gone overboard with changes made to the hymns we all love. Let me give examples from famous Christmas carols. "Good Christian Men" has been changed in some hymnals to the effete sounding "Good Christian Friends". "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" is avoided in some groups because they can't change the word without doing violence to the tune. In the Christmas hymn the whole world loves "Joy to the World", the line, "Let men their songs employ" is altered so that the word men is replaced with all. Just try singing that and you will see that it doesn't feel the same. And there are countless more hymns destroyed by extreme feminism. I've even heard of suggestions to change the name of the Holy Trinity to the blasphemous "Cloud, Rock and Holy Spirit" because "Father" and "Son" are of course too sexist for some people.

This is all quite unnecessary. Language, like religion and culture, is a good reflection of our human history. Of course any language that has a history exceeding a mere 50 years is bound to be sexist. The Chinese language is one of the oldest languages in the world and it has continued relatively unchanged for a few thousand years. The word for "woman" is written hieroglyphically as someone who kneels. The word for "good" is written to depict the kneeling woman carrying a child. And for "peace", we see that same kneeling woman caged in a house. But nobody has suggested that these ancient characters be changed to something that reflects our non-sexist worldview today.

When I was a boy, the sentence "Every child must drink his milk" was the only correct form because "every" is singular. As I grew older, I had to say "Every child must drink his or her milk" because how could we be so sexist as to exclude girls among the children? Soon people got tired of the additional words and it's now common to say "Every child must drink their milk", never mind the fact that "every" is singular. It's always wiser to sacrifice grammar for political correctness.

My point is you can't change everything. You've got to make up your own language from scratch if you really want to rid a language of all traces of sexism. Sure, bridegroom may simply mean a bride's man but what about the word "bride"? Etymologists will quickly point out that the Old English bryd comes from Old Frisian bred or breid, Old Saxon brud (Dutch bruid), Old High German brut and Old Norse bruthr. But what do these words actually mean? This is what the author of my etymology book does not explore.

The root word really means "one owned or purchased". Some etymologists believe it also has some link to cooking so I suppose a broader view would be a bride is someone who is owned or purchased to do the cooking. I'm tempted to think (although I'm sure I'm etymologically flawed) that the word "bride" has some link to the word "bridle". My Middle English vocabulary has shrunk considerably after years of laying off medieval literature but I do know that "bride" also meant "bridle" in Middle English and in the mid-19th century, "bride" carried the additional meaning of a bonnet-string and that was the time when all women wore bonnets. If I allow myself to be a little more imaginative and I think of the bonnet-string as a bridle (both were called "bride"), I suppose the idea of a bridegroom as one who bridles the bride as a groom does a horse isn't all that far-fetched.

If I were a woman, sexism in language would not bother me one bit. You can't change history and language is a reflection of what we were once like. If I were a woman, I would want a constant reminder of how far we have come from the days when women were bridled and in this respect, language serves as a most effective memorial of what it used to be and how much women have triumphed. Far from denigrating women, sexism in language is a woman's badge of victory.

Poor Raffles Girls' School!

I love a good fight particularly when I'm right and have truth and right on my side and there is no fight that I await more eagerly than a spirited and angry reply to this post in my blog: Singapore School Anthems Part 2.

For almost a year, there was total silence to that post and then one day, I got this one-sentence comment from someone who presumably wanted to defend her favourite school anthem. But the one sentence contributed nothing whatsoever and I replied to it promptly.

Miss Anialet Tan made no further response. After that reply of mine, she withdrew into silence which was a shame. I was hoping some plucky Mother Goose with a large dose of that mindless loyalty to the school would grab her rolling pin from the kitchen and confront me. I didn't have that long to wait. One Mother Goose recently came feverishly at me but I only saw it a few days ago after returning home from abroad. I will post her comment verbatim but I will break it up into segments so that I can respond to each point she raised. This woman who calls herself Caesium writes:

To be exact, the song was an old British war hymn. It is also the school song of a few other British schools; one example is Clydebank High in Scotland. Link: http://abbotsford.typepad.com/abbotsford/2012/06/from-high-olympus.html. It is true that the anthem is plagiarised, save for the last stanza and the refrain which were added by RGS to the old war tune.

I have googled this ridiculous song and all I can see is that this is a song of a school called Clydebank High School in Scotland. Let me tell you a little more about Clydebank High School. It's a pretty new State school or what we would call a government school. It started in 1872 with only one qualified teacher and it was meant to be a school for the children of shipyard workers in this western part of Scotland. I will say more about the location of this school later. I have a lot of respect for a school built for working class children but if I must plagiarise a song the way RGS shamelessly did it, I would be careful not to pick the song of such a school. It's inevitable that while a school for the children of shipyard workers may have admirable strength in many areas of education and character building, a firm grounding in the classics (such as Greek mythology) or even in English grammar may not be something it can boast of. And why should it? So please don't misunderstand me. I do not fault Clydebank High School at all and I will reiterate my view that any school that is built for the children of labourers deserves our profound respect.

But I fault Raffles Girls' School for plagiarising the entire lyrics of the song of this working class school. If you must steal, be clever and steal from a more appropriate source.

Caesium continues to say this:

However it is not true that it is ungrammatical and inaccurate. Nobody said the sacred fire referred to the Promethean flame. That you think it is only proves RI's regrettable influence over the perception of RGS and nothing more. 

What I wrote in my blog post has nothing to do with any influence from RI.  Here is an excerpt of what I wrote about the "sacred fire" gaffe that RGS made:

Apart from linguistic problems, the writer is obviously unsure of her Greek mythology. Writers of school anthems must be careful when they want to introduce elements from Greek mythology into a song. If they do it clumsily, they can appear pretentious and silly. They must not do it on the misguided understanding that it will imbue the song with a respectability it otherwise lacks. You can't make a rotten song great by throwing in the names of Greek mythological figures especially when you know nothing about Greek mythology. My sympathy is actually with RGS. I understand why this was done. RGS is closely related to Raffles Institution (RI) which is Singapore's top school. The RI anthem makes a direct reference to Prometheus but it is done in a subtle and tasteful way. The reference to Greek mythology in the RI anthem lends further depth to the meaning of the song and it enhances the beauty of the song. RGS, ever envious of RI's superiority, probably felt that it should not be left far behind and so it threw in Greek mythological references without a firm grounding in mythology. That may have moved the RGS anthem writer to write "On us the sacred fire descends" but then she should have read up more about this fire before she comes up with this gaffe: 

 The magic fire that moves the gods to love us. 

When Prometheus stole fire and brought it to men, the gods were far from being moved by feelings of love. If the punishment they meted out to the thieving Titan is anything to go by, love is the last emotion they felt.

Caesium claims that the "sacred fire" in the RGS anthem did not refer to Prometheus' fire. But she says nothing more. That's because just like her school, Caesium knows nothing of Greek mythology. What sacred fire or magic fire is there that "moves the gods to love us"? If your knowledge of Greek mythology is zilch, you cannot make up your own sacred fire and claim that it's what moves the gods to love us without identifying in the first place what this fire is. That's precisely my point. You cannot make up your own story and try to insert it into Greek mythology just because you are clueless about the Classics.

Next this volatile liquid Caesium writes:

Further, the Bible is not the definitive grammar guide. I suggest you look to the Oxford English instead for linguistic advice, which states "In the 15th century, when 'you' had become the dominant subjective form, 'ye' came to be used as an objective singular and plural (equivalent to thee and you)."

This is hilarious. Did the clucking hens not teach her how to think rationally? I have not said anywhere in my article that the Bible is a definitive grammar guide.  My precise words are that the Bible (KJV or AV) "gives the best illustration of how one should use 'ye'..." but of course Caesium is so wooly headed that she's unable to distinguish an "illustration" from a "definitive grammar guide". But I would not have expected more from this Mother Goose.

"Ye" used in the objective case only became common for a very brief spell and by the time Shakespeare wrote his plays and particularly in the 17th century, the use of "ye" as an objective pronoun decreased in literary language but it was still common in conversational language and in dialectical usage (which is precisely what I wrote in my blog).

This is what I wrote verbatim in my blog:

While still on the first stanza, we next see one of the most jarring lines (it's hard to decide which is most hideous since every line seems to be jostling for that honour) 

Rise, sisters, rise, the world is all before ye 

In standard usage, "ye" is the archaic form of the 2nd person plural pronoun in the subjective case. In standard archaic English, "ye" has from its first usage been nominative. There are of course later instances in the past where its use in the objective case is recorded but in these instances, such use is almost without exception colloquial or dialectical. 

The Authorised Version of the Bible gives the best illustration of how one should use "ye" but this is hardly useful to most of us who are quite content with using the good old "you" (or perhaps I should say the newer "you"). But we always have in our midst those who think they can spice up their lacklustre writing with a few archaic expressions and these are the people who should take heed of the following highly instructive sentence from the Bible which illustrates quite comprehensively how one may properly use "ye": 

If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? 

If Madam RGS-Composer (that's the honorific Chinese language teachers love to use) had read her Bible diligently, she would have written "the world is all before you" and the hope and rousing beauty that this line evokes in its Miltonian simplicity would have been spectacular.

I always like to do a bit of investigative work and get into the mind of the writer just to see why she wrote what she wrote or as Jeeves would put it simply, to get to the psychology behind the problem. Why did she write "ye" when "you" would have been so much more elegant? 

My guess is she had probably been reading the Scottish poem called "The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond". 

Oh, ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road, 

And I'll get to Scotland afore ye; 

But me and my true love will never meet again 

On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond. 

Notice the use of "ye" in the objective case? "And I'll get to Scotland afore ye". I've already explained that "ye" used in this way can be found in dialectical writings and it is easy to see many examples in Scottish poems. But I really doubt very much if any respectable girls' school will want to fashion their school anthem after "The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond" especially when for the rest of the anthem, we see failed attempts at Greek mythological allusions. The two just don't make good bedfellows.

What I wrote is absolutely correct and now that we know that RGS stole this song from Clydebank High School, what I said about "The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond" is spot on. Clydebank High School is only about 10 miles from Loch Lomond. But of course this poem is hardly what a respectable girls' school should look to for its guide on English usage when writing its anthem.

Next, Caesium writes this:

A song is in essence a poem and in poetry one aims not to be too literal. Thus 'the glory' is a proper noun known only to the singer. It should in fact be read as 'the Glory'.

Although I'm the last man on earth to be a sexist, I must confess that I cannot help but gravitate towards sexism whenever I read what Caesium writes and I'm so tempted to declare that she sounds so deliciously feminine in her imbecility.  I have met a few women who are perfect dunderheads like Caesium and these women tell me that they write poems. Many featherheaded women who have no firm grounding in grammar think it's all right for them to take to poetry-writing because poetic licence can excuse their shoddy grammar. But poetry-writing is not for fools and illiterates. What Caesium has written above is so outrageously incoherent and deliriously wrong that I cannot believe she wrote it without blushing as any decent woman should when she knows she's writing bunkum. She does not even know what a proper noun is.  This is how I explained in my earlier blog post why the first sentence of RGS's anthem is incorrect:

The very first sentence is elliptically jarring. 

From high Olympus flows to us the glory 

The glory of what? That's probably on everyone's lips when he reads the first line of the anthem of Raffles Girls' School. We saw in Part 1 the strange tendency of the ACS anthem in leaving out an article in a sentence but here, the addition of the article leaves the reader hanging in midair. What the writer probably means is "Glory flows to us from high Olympus". That would be grammatically more acceptable but it doesn't cure the sentence of the pervading sense of childish hubris that informs the entire anthem. It reminds me of a loud bungling supercilious little girl who doesn't know how to be tasteful in her boastful speech. This reference to Olympus is pretentious and falls flat particularly when there is no reason to speak of it in the first place. I'll deal later with this tiresome need of the anthem writer to force a bit of Greek mythology into the song and I'll suggest what I believe is the reason for this need. I love to get to the psychology behind the problem. But more of that later when I discuss the anthem's allusions to Greek mythology.

Caesium says "the glory" is a proper noun! She doesn't even know the parts of speech and that, mind you, is elementary English.  Capitalising it does not cure the sentence of a glaring ellipsis. But if she doesn't know what a proper noun is I'm sure she doesn't know what I'm talking about. Didn't the clucking hens in RGS teach her simple English grammar? "Thus 'the glory' is a proper noun known only to the singer" must take the cake as the looniest sentence I've ever read in all my life.

Next, Caesium writes this:

Lastly, I am aghast that you have never heard of the phrase 'heart to heart'. You remind me endearingly of Polonius. I rest my case.

This is another statement that can only spring from an unthinking person. I'm avoiding the word "dumb".  Let's see what I wrote exactly and you'll see why I think Caesium's statement reveals the kind of muddle-headedness I cannot tolerate.  Here's what I wrote in my blog:

There are many instances where the writer of the RGS anthem leaves the reader befuddled as to the intended meaning. For example, in "So heart to heart we'll scale the heights of learning," what is meant by "heart to heart"? I'm tempted to think Madam RGS-Composer meant "side by side" which would appropriately highlight the solidarity and camaraderie of the girls. In the Mandarin Chinese language, the word for heart is liberally used in just about anything you can think of. The anthem writer availed herself of the same liberty when she wrote this anthem.

At no point did I say that I had not heard of the term "heart to heart". I merely asked what "heart to heart" meant in the line in the RGS anthem "So heart to heart we'll scale the heights of learning". Of course everyone knows what "heart to heart" means. As in a "heart-to-heart talk", the term means candid and intimate. It has no application here. And yes, if I may allude to the same play, Caesium reminds me of Ophelia who spoke inanities at the height of her delirium.

Is there another Mother Goose from RGS who might want to grab the rolling pin and come at me? I'm ready for you, 'sisters in learning and sisters at heart"!

MINDEF holds Pride Day Celebration!!!

Lately, homophobic and hate-filled people have generated a great deal of publicity and more people have become aware of the life and struggles of the average gay person, particularly if he lives in an oppressive and intolerant society. Apple Inc, in solidarity with and support of the LGBT community, just posted a video of its participation in the San Francisco Pride Day celebration.

"June 29, 2014 - Thousands of Apple employees and their families gathered to celebrate our unwavering commitment to equality and diversity."

As you can see in Apple's official video, thousands of their employees carrying rainbow flags marched in unity with many other participants in the San Francisco Pride Day on 29 June.

That's Apple Inc in the US.  What about companies in Singapore? Do they celebrate Pride Day? How about a Singtel Pride Day? I suppose you are going to say that's not going to happen in the next hundred years?

Now, let me tell you this. When I saw the Apple video, I was immediately reminded of what I saw 5 years ago. It was a hot day and as I was walking aimlessly in a shopping centre in Singapore. minding my own business, my attention was suddenly drawn to some loud music and dancing and I saw a gay and jolly celebration right in front of my eyes. I read a large banner that explained the reason for the celebration and I couldn't believe what I saw! I just had to reach into my bag for my camera and to assure myself that I was not seeing things. I'll let the photos do the talking. As you know, photos don't lie and I can vouch for the fact that these photos are genuine and have not been altered in any way.

Guess who organised the Pride Day fetivity? No, not Singtel. The organisers are arguably the most macho Ministry in the entire Cabinet. It's MINDEF itself! The Ministry of Defence saw fit to hold a MINDEF PRIDE DAY and mind you, this was as early as 2009 and some 5 years before Apple Inc participated in its first Pride Day celebration.

Take your time to look at each of these photos. Don't you think the dancing and festivity are lively and colourful enough to rival even San Francisco's Pride Day celebrations?

Next time, if you read the blogs of netizens that run down Singapore (as they usually do) and if you catch them denouncing Singapore for its conservative and homophobic stand, just show them these photos. I don't believe even the US Armed Forces hold a Pride Day celebration. That's how progressive and tolerant Singapore is. Like Apple Inc, we in Singapore celebrate our unwavering commitment to equality and diversity.

Can you please show me the way to the euphemism?

I consider myself a tolerant man but there are three things I can't stand.  The first is the excessive and unnecessary use of the euphemism.  I see the euphemism as an anachronistic devise cooked up by puritans in the 16th century and is rightly classified in the same category as the lunatic act of covering up the legs of pianos in the Victorian era because they were thought to be "too suggestive".

My second pet peeve is the careless misquotation of a famous saying to which one has easy access.  Certainly when a Christian organisation such as a chapel of a Christian Mission school quotes the Holy Bible, I expect it to make no mistake whatsoever.

The third thing I positively detest is the increasingly popular use of the ellipsis.  I have a hunch that those who use this are either too lazy to complete their sentence or are too unsure of their grammar to write in full.  Sometimes, the three-dot ellipsis (...) is used in lieu of the full stop by writers afflicted with the Michelin-star syndrome who view three dots as superior to one.  How many times have we all seen someone write on his Facebook wall, "Look at this..." when he meant "Look at this."?

When I saw this banner placed in front of a school and it didn't surprise me in the least that it was THAT school, I was miffed to see all three of my pet peeves in that single ugly poster.

This is a poster put up by a chapel of a Christian school with the intention presumably of inviting passers-by to attend chapel services.  The quotation comes from, as the poster clearly indicates, John 7:37.  If you were a motorist, like me, who were passing by the school on a speeding car as I was and you took a fleeting glance of this poster as I did, what would your impression be?  I immediately and quite rightly too thought this was a deliberate truncation of the original verse because the quotation doesn't just end with an honest full-stop and not even the usual three dots of an ellipsis but FOUR bold large dots that seem to be screaming "We're hiding something!!!"

When I first saw the poster, I chuckled to myself.  The words of the son of Sirach in Ecclus. 24:21 (yes I know that's the Apocrypha but we aren't all militant fundamentalists, are we?) flashed in my mind,

"They who drink of me," says Wisdom, "shall thirst again".

There we have it - "drink of me". 

Elsewhere in the Holy Gospels, we hear Jesus saying "...whoever feeds on me, he also will live ..." John 6:57. 

Now, it's "feed on me". 

Who can blame me when having called to memory such holy verses, I thought the words the designer of the poster lopped off were "of me" and the verse should read "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink of me."  What other function can the four dots have if they don't act as an ellipsis?  Can I be blamed for thinking that the words were deleted for the same reason that the legs of a piano were covered more than a century ago? I thought it likely that they wanted to avoid a situation of school children giggling at the poster which was designed to have an evangelistic impact. The designer was wrong not to quote the Bible faithfully and to add three misleading dots to the original single full stop. He should have known better than to subtract or add any jot, tittle or, if I may add, dot to the scriptural quotation.

Human beings are a peculiar species.  We don't mind doing a whole lot of things but we are ashamed of putting them in words.

Sometimes, instead of using the euphemism, blank spaces are used in print.  Victorian novels are notorious for putting blank spaces within a word, eg. "I can't bear his d____d impudence."  But swear words beginning with the letter "d" are all that you will see in Victorian novels.  Modern novelists do not have the same ridiculous scruples, even when they are using swear words that begin with the letter "f".  But most people are careful with the word in print.

We defecate every day but we think it's inappropriate to say it in words. Excrement and its synonyms are usually avoided but for some reason, it's more acceptable to spell out in full all these words that mean the same thing as long as that word doesn't begin with the letter "s".  We can say with impunity excrement, crap, faeces, droppings, poop, dung, excreta and turd but try saying "shit" and a lot of people I know will blush with shame.

Some countries have a more heightened sensitivity to such words.  In the US, the word "toilet" is taboo.  "Bathroom" which is quite a different room from the toilet is frequently used as a euphemism for toilet although why one needs a euphemism for "toilet" is something I can't quite understand.  "Restroom", "washroom", "WC" and "convenience" are common substitutes for "toilet".

In the US, this obsession with the euphemism invades even schools.  The humble rubber which is found in a pencil box in any schoolboy's bag is given a fresh new name in the US.  It's called an eraser.  Rubber is a common slang word in the US for a condom and I suppose they don't want teachers to be confused if a young child asks for a rubber in the middle of an important examination. They are known to be quite precocious there and from statistics Durex publishes annually, Americans are the world's largest purchasers of that prophylactic product.

Le coq - symbol of France

Of all the unfortunate denizens of the animal kingdom, the cock has the most ill-fated and star-crossed name and it should not surprise anyone that while in Europe, "cock" in English and "coq" in French raise no disapproving eyebrow, over in America, people generally recoil with puritanical revulsion whenever the word is heard and a new name was coined as long ago as the late 1700s for this hapless fowl.  We know from the OED that the word "rooster" first emerged in American vocabulary around the time America got its independence in the late 18th century.  Because it's coined from irrational shame, "rooster" is a word with a weak etymology.  All birds roost and not just the cock.

What poppycock!

Singapore School Anthems Part 2

We have awarded the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM AWARD (click here)  and have scoured many school websites in search of the RUNNER UP to the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM.  Many school anthems are rather nondescript; they aren't very good and neither are they so terribly rotten that they are worthy of a mention here.  These school anthems aren't featured in my blog.  I've got to have a limit on the number of school songs to write about in this blog and only the top two and bottom two school anthems will be presented in great detail.

But this does not mean that I have not looked at many other school anthems. Just to show you that I have been doing my homework, I'll give an example of a school anthem that is typical of many school anthems which are rather middling and they are not very good or very bad.  The example I'll pick is that of Marymount Convent School, a girls' school.

The song consists of a few short simple lines that one would expect because of their simplicity to be at least flawless in grammar and usage but alas, that is not the case.  Desiring always to be just in my judgment and mindful of the possibility that the school could have misprinted the lyrics, I googled the school song and was led to an excellent performance of it by a lady with a beautiful voice called Geraldine Png.  Here is the screen capture of the youtube performance of the anthem of Marymount Convent and the same erroneous sentence can be seen here:

Nobody who has an elementary knowledge of the English language can possibly defend that sentence as grammatical and I'll be insulting your intelligence if I take up space on this blog to explain why it's wrong.

[EDITOR: Very shortly after I posted this article, I received three separate calls from my friends who told me that they could not see anything wrong with this sentence and one of them hastened to inform me that he was not in any way unintelligent.  Of course not.  I didn't mean it that way. 

Here I will explain to all my intelligent readers why the line is wrong.

Ever to thee we will abide 

The word "abide" used here has the archaic meaning of "live" or "dwell".  When used in this sense, the correct preposition is "in" and not "to".  

The anthem writer, if I may add a little facetiously, bearing in mind always that she might very well be a nun, should have taken more care in her Bible reading since this word with its archaic meaning is liberally sprinkled all over the first 10 verses of St John's Gospel in the 15th chapter.  In fact, in those ten verses, we see "abide" repeated some ten times or so.  "Abide in me and I in you", "He that abideth in me and I in him...", "If ye abide in me and my words abide in you...", "ye shall abide in my love" and many others. 

To use the preposition "to" instead of "in" with the word "abide" is very unusual. If I may go into the psychology behind the error, my guess is the anthem writer was thinking more of TURNING to the school.  She very likely had in her mind "Ever to thee we will turn" which would have been correct.]

This is typical of many school anthems which consist of short unassuming lines and they would have been reasonably passable if not for some glaring grammatical mistakes.  Why these schools did not bother to run through the lyrics of the song with a competent English language teacher is something I can't understand.

But these songs aren't outrageously rotten and they don't come anywhere near winning the RUNNER UP award for the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM.

What then am I looking for in a school anthem that is worthy of the second most rotten award ?  The anthem has got to stand out for being really bad.  If you have read Singapore School Anthems Part 1, you will recall that the recipient of the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM was guilty not just of plagiarism but it even failed to make the minor necessary changes to the lyrics in order to adapt the words to the school.  It's the ultimate in rottenness and I can't even conceive of anything worse than that in a school anthem.

That is the most rotten school anthem.  Here we're looking for the runner up. It can't be as bad as the ACS anthem but it's got to be outstandingly bad.

I've already mentioned in Part 1 that I have in my mind some categories in which points are given to the school.  Grammar, language, elegance and musicality are essential components.  For a long while, I could not find a school anthem that is bad enough for this runner up category and I was about to give up and focus my attention on the good school anthems when I stumbled upon a school song that fits the bill perfectly as the second most rotten anthem.   This school song is so badly written that it took me quite a while to get into the shoes of the composer in order to understand what it was that he (or more likely, she) meant to say in the first place, so incomprehensible and garbled are her sentences.  Here we have it -

The RUNNER UP AWARD for THE MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM goes to

RAFFLES GIRLS' SCHOOL

Before I begin, let me stress once again that the school anthem is not a reflection of the quality of the school.  I embarked on this exercise with a view to moving away from all this talk about "good schools".  Instead of adding to all the stressful talk that is currently going on about which schools are better or give superior education to students, I decided, purely with the intention of taking the heat out of schools, to zoom in on something which isn't all that crucial and for which no current teacher or headmaster needs to bother about because these anthems were written by their predecessors who have long left the world of the living.  This is a fun exercise which I hope will bring the smile to your lips.  In any event, everyone knows that RGS is indisputably one of our finest girls' schools in Singapore and this award does not in any way detract from its excellent academic credentials.  All the same, it does have a terrible school song.

Now, that I've settled that point, let's examine the school anthem.

I must admit I was totally flabbergasted when I first chanced upon the lyrics of this school song.  I couldn't believe my eyes that this was the RGS anthem.  I had to check the school's website just to be sure it wasn't a joke posted by some student of a rival school.  Everything is wrong about this anthem.  The music is awful but I have already decided from the start to pay the least attention to the musicality of the anthem because this can be highly subjective.

Let's look at the grammar.  The writing style tells me immediately that it was probably composed by a Chinese language teacher in the school.  The writer hasn't got a proper grasp of the rudiments of the English language and she lacks the linguistic sensitivity in weighing which of two words is more apt in a sentence.  This is a handicap very commonly seen in Chinese language teachers and I'm really not criticising these fine teachers whose strengths lie in the highly complex Chinese language which the Guinness Book of World Records tells us is the most difficult language in the world to master.  It may just be pure speculation on my part but I'm fairly certain the song was composed by a Chinese language teacher and why RGS picked a Chinese language teacher for this task is a mystery.

The very first sentence is elliptically jarring.

From high Olympus flows to us the glory

The glory of what?  That's probably on everyone's lips when he reads the first line of the anthem of Raffles Girls' School.  We saw in Part 1 the strange tendency of the ACS anthem in leaving out an article in a sentence but here, the addition of the article leaves the reader hanging in midair.  What the writer probably means is "Glory flows to us from high Olympus".  That would be grammatically more acceptable but it doesn't cure the sentence of the pervading sense of childish hubris that informs the entire anthem.  It reminds me of a loud bungling supercilious little girl who doesn't know how to be tasteful in her boastful speech.  This reference to Olympus is pretentious and falls flat particularly when there is no reason to speak of it in the first place. I'll deal later with this tiresome need of the anthem writer to force a bit of Greek mythology into the song and I'll suggest what I believe is the reason for this need.  I love to get to the psychology behind the problem.  But more of that later when I discuss the anthem's allusions to Greek mythology.

While still on the first stanza, we next see one of the most jarring lines (it's hard to decide which is most hideous since every line seems to be jostling for that honour) -

Rise, sisters, rise, the world is all before ye 

In standard usage, "ye" is the archaic form of the 2nd person plural pronoun in the subjective case.  In standard archaic English, "ye" has from its first usage been nominative.  There are of course later instances in the past where its use in the objective case is recorded but in these instances, such use is almost without exception colloquial or dialectical.

The Authorised Version of the Bible gives the best illustration of how one should use "ye" but this is hardly useful to most of us who are quite content with using the good old "you" (or perhaps I should say the newer "you").   But we always have in our midst those who think they can spice up their lacklustre writing with a few archaic expressions and these are the people who should take heed of the following highly instructive sentence from the Bible which illustrates quite comprehensively how one may properly use "ye":

If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?

If Madam RGS-Composer (that's the honorific Chinese language teachers love to use) had read her Bible diligently, she would have written "the world is all before you" and the hope and rousing beauty that this line evokes in its Miltonian simplicity would have been spectacular. 

I always like to do a bit of investigative work and get into the mind of the writer just to see why she wrote what she wrote or as Jeeves would put it simply, to get to the psychology behind the problem.  Why did she write "ye" when "you" would have been so much more elegant?

My guess is she had probably been reading the Scottish poem called "The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond".

Oh, ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road,

And I'll get to Scotland afore ye;

But me and my true love will never meet again

On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.

Notice the use of "ye" in the objective case?  "And I'll get to Scotland afore ye". I've already explained that "ye" used in this way can be found in dialectical writings and it is easy to see many examples in Scottish poems.  But I really doubt very much if any respectable girls' school will want to fashion their school anthem after "The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond" especially when for the rest of the anthem, we see failed attempts at Greek mythological allusions. The two just don't make good bedfellows.


There are many other glaring errors in the anthem and they are too numerous for me to list them all here.  The error we see in the first line is repeated in some of the other verses.  For example, "The fire by which the will attains". What does this even mean?  It sounds like a word-for-word translation from another language, presumably, Mandarin Chinese which was what Madam RGS-Composer taught in the school.

There are many instances where the writer of the RGS anthem leaves the reader befuddled as to the intended meaning.  For example, in "So heart to heart we'll scale the heights of learning," what is meant by "heart to heart"?  I'm tempted to think Madam RGS-Composer meant "side by side" which would appropriately highlight the solidarity and camaraderie of the girls.  In the Mandarin Chinese language, the word for heart is liberally used in just about anything you can think of.  The anthem writer availed herself of the same liberty when she wrote this anthem.

Apart from linguistic problems, the writer is obviously unsure of her Greek mythology.  Writers of school anthems must be careful when they want to introduce elements from Greek mythology into a song.  If they do it clumsily, they can appear pretentious and silly.  They must not do it on the misguided understanding that it will imbue the song with a respectability it otherwise lacks. You can't make a rotten song great by throwing in the names of Greek mythological figures especially when you know nothing about Greek mythology. My sympathy is actually with RGS.  I understand why this was done.  RGS is closely related to Raffles Institution (RI) which is Singapore's top school.  The RI anthem makes a direct reference to Prometheus but it is done in a subtle and tasteful way.  The reference to Greek mythology in the RI anthem lends further depth to the meaning of the song and it enhances the beauty of the song.  RGS, ever envious of RI's superiority, probably felt that it should not be left far behind and so it threw in Greek mythological references without a firm grounding in mythology. That may have moved the RGS anthem writer to write "On us the sacred fire descends" but then she should have read up more about this fire before she comes up with this gaffe:

The magic fire that moves the gods to love us.

When Prometheus stole fire and brought it to men, the gods were far from being moved by feelings of love.  If the punishment they meted out to the thieving Titan is anything to go by, love is the last emotion they felt.

Quite apart from all this, every line in the anthem is shockingly inelegant.  The chorus, "Sisters in learning and sisters at heart / Life lies before us, here's luck to the start" is simply hideous and coarse and is really inconsistent with the kind of school RGS really is.

The RGS anthem suffers from what I would term the "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" syndrome.  Some coffee shop owners think they can increase their business by giving their shop a name that smacks of antiquity.  The writer of the RGS anthem craves respectability for the school anthem which is decent enough and one can't fault her for that.  But the way she goes about doing it only serves to win for RGS the Runner Up prize for the Most Rotten School Anthem. 

Singapore School Anthems Part 1

There has recently been a great deal of hype and angst about schools in Singapore and the government is scrambling to assure us all that every school is a good school.  I have written a lot about schools in Singapore and I'm sure I have ruffled a few feathers especially of those who may have misplaced pride in some schools but the time is right for us to forget the academic records of schools and focus on something quite inconsequential, trivial and lighthearted - the school anthem.  The school anthem doesn't really mean much. If a school is unfortunate enough to have a rotten anthem, it may be saddled with this disgraceful yoke on its neck for a long time to come because schools don't normally alter their anthems.  But a bad anthem is no indication that the school is bad, as we shall see soon enough if you follow my blog on to Part 2.

Let me begin with the worst school anthem.  How bad can an anthem be?  It can't be that difficult to write a school anthem and I'm sure I can sit down for no more than a couple of hours and come up with something quite respectable. The fact that some of these schools have rotten anthems does make one wonder what the school administration was up to when some teacher or, as is usually the case, the school principal came up with his or her own composition.  But these are usually former teachers or former principals who are long dead, so please understand that I'm casting no aspersion on the current crop of teachers and principals who are all wonderful people and are perfectly able, at the drop of a hat, to write the most glorious anthems.

But really, how bad can an anthem be?  What makes a school anthem truly bad?  Naturally, because it's to be sung, the musicality of the anthem is important.  But I will attach less importance to music since I have to admit that this is one area that can be rather subjective and besides, whatever I used to study for my ABRSM Music Theory exam is all forgotten.  But any one of us can judge the language or grammar in a school anthem and we don't need to have a training in music theory for that.  We can also judge an anthem by looking at its choice of words.  This is different from its grammar.  For example, if the lines are largely in iambic pentameter  and we see a stray line "We in our youth try to acquire knowledge" which will immediately strike anyone as jarringly ugly and inelegant and that's because the metre is broken even though it's grammatical.  Perhaps "Despite our youth we'll scale the heights of arts" would be a great improvement.

But for the bottom-of-the-heap school anthem that wins our "Most Rotten School Anthem" award, we don't even have to examine the metrical structure of the lines.  Such a close scrutiny of the metre may only be necessary when we want to decide which of two great school anthems should win our coveted top prize for Singapore School anthems.

I will begin with the worst school anthem and work my way to the best, so please look out for future parts in this series.  I will be guided purely by aesthetics, poetry, grammar and less so, music.  I will be purely objective and I will give my reasons and you are free to disagree with me if you think I am wrong.  Just post your comments on this page below.

Which school takes the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM award?  Such an anthem must not just be grammatically wrong.  It's got to be worse than that. And there is one school anthem that has just about everything you can think of when you want to look for a really rotten school anthem.  This anthem doesn't just get its grammar wrong, it does something truly shocking - it steals its song from elsewhere.  You probably think I'm being a bit harsh and the school merely "borrows" the tune of another song but no.  This is outright plagiarism in that not just the tune is stolen but the lyrics as well.

Now, you're probably wagging your finger at me in disagreement.  How can anyone plagiarize the entire lyrics of another song?  Yes this school anthem does precisely that with the exception that it sneaks its name in where someone else's name appears.  I will present the facts and leave you to be the judge.

It's with a heavy heart that I denounce the anthem of a school that I should feel something for but since I have decided to be purely objective so here it is -

The MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM award goes to:-

ANGLO-CHINESE SCHOOL

(or ACS, as they would rather be called)

This school anthem is shamelessly a shocking plagiarism of the Canadian anthem "The Maple Leaf Forever".  It is shocking in that not just the tune was stolen by ACS but the lyrics as well. I'll just say a few words about the Canadian anthem.  "The Maple Leaf Forever" was written by Alexander Muir in 1867, some 19 years before ACS was founded.  In the song, we hear of "Wolfe, the dauntless hero", a reference to James Wolfe who captured Quebec from the French. It's not surprising that the song was not picked to be the official national anthem of Canada because its strongly pro-British stance would be objectionable to French-speaking Canadians but it was one of the songs considered for the national anthem and it is still widely sung today and is generally known as the unofficial national anthem of Canada.

Click here for the lyrics of this beautiful national anthem The Maple Leaf Forever and do a mental comparison with the ACS anthem (note: the music is identical):

You would have thought that a school that filches a national anthem would of course get its grammar right so on my score board, the school should at least pass the grammar category.  But not so for ACS.  With the ACS anthem, we don't have to go very far.  Just look at the second line of the anthem: "Oldham dauntless hero came".

The very first time I heard the ACS anthem, I felt strangely uneasy and I got a copy of the lyrics to see for myself if it really was printed as it was sung.  I'm sure all of you had that same feeling.  It's because we get this sense that there is something grossly wrong about the anthem.  It's the problem we have when we are drafting an email hurriedly and we copy and paste from wikipedia onto our own text and we fail to read through the email and click "SEND".  When we finally read through the email, we wish we could edit it but it's already sent. But folks, this is a school anthem we are talking about and not a personal email written in a hurry!!!

Leaving out an article in a sentence is common in Singlish but I have to remind myself that this school anthem was written in 1926 by a teacher called Henry Hoisington.  This was before Singlish even came into being.  Why then was the article left out in "Oldham dauntless hero came"?  Bishop Oldham, a great man for whom I have the highest respect, is of course the founder of Methodism in Singapore and the founder of ACS.  It is only when you look at the Canadian national anthem from which this line was copied that you will understand the reason for the error.  In the Canadian anthem, the line is "Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came".  Presumably, Hoisington, thinking to himself that since "Oldham" has two syllables while "Wolfe" is monosyllabic, felt he had to remove a syllable from that line and he must have decided that the article "the" was dispensable.

Whatever Hoisington taught in ACS in 1926, one hopes that he didn't teach the poor students English or English literature.  Anyone who reads poetry knows that you can always abbreviate the article the to th' so that you don't count it as a syllable.  It's a little like a grace note in music.

But Hoisington goes on to remove the article in other lines in the ACS anthem.  I just have to glance through the lyrics and I see a few examples: "emblem" stands by itself without any article but the most hideous error must be "the Land of Rising Sun".  I know a young boy who sang it as "the land of Rising Suns".  The poor lad is at least grammatically correct even if he badly needs a lesson in geography and possibly astronomy.

The other line that brings deep furrows to the brow is this:

No discord e'er will sever

You immediately look at the preceding line to see what it is that discord won't sever.

Our hearts our hopes our aims are one

No discord e'er will sever

This is inelegant even though it's not ungrammatical.  You sever chords, ties, bonds and knots but you don't sever hearts, hopes and aims.  Again, all you have to do is to look at the Canadian anthem and you will see why plagiarism can bring disgrace to your school for a very long time to come.  If you must plagiarize, at least put in the effort to tidy up the parts that differ from the source from which you stole the lyrics.

In the Canadian anthem, the lines are

And may those ties of love be ours

Which discord cannot sever

There you have it.  The original song talks about not severing the ties of love which is a perfectly correct usage.  Shame on Hoisington not only for plagiarizing the music and lyrics but also for making no necessary changes to the lyrics to ensure that the school anthem doesn't sound like the theme song for Jack Neo's future movie, "When an Ah Beng Copies a Song".

It's only fortuitous that Hoisington picked the Canadian anthem for the ACS anthem. He might very well have chosen a more famous national anthem and today, we'll all be laughing away every time ACS students sing with pride and gusto (which they will no doubt do in blissful ignorance of how rotten their anthem is):

God save our ACS

Long live our ACS

God save our school

Send her victorious

Happy and glorious

Long live to be our school

God save our school.

EDITOR:  In case you think I'm just doing a spot of ACS-bashing which I assure you I'm not, in Singapore School Anthems Part 2, I will be presenting the Runner Up Award for the Most Rotten School Anthem to a school that is famous for its high academic achievement.  It is a school loved and respected by all Singaporeans and parents will give an arm and a leg to see their child in the school.  I have only recently heard the anthem of that school (obviously the school would do well to take pains to conceal its anthem) and it's astoundingly ROTTEN!!!  Stay tuned for Singapore School Anthems Part 2.

NOTE: Singapore School Anthems Part 2 is now posted on this blog.