Horn/Honk

A more standard word would be honking (poster in a North-East Line station).  While horn is often used as a verb in Singapore (e.g. He keeps horning at me), in other varieties of English, the same idea is expressed as to sound the horn or to honk.

Diffused/Defused

The verb needed in both cases was defused (Today 27 June 2011).  Both diffuse and defuse are commonly confused, almost certainly because they are near-homophones.

Defuse (/ˌdiːˈfjuːz/) means ‘to stop a possibly dangerous or difficult situation from developing, especially by making people less angry or nervous’ (Oxford Advanced Learner’s), and is clearly the meaning intended here.

Diffuse (/dɪˈfjuːz/), on the other hand, means ‘to spread something or become spread widely in all directions’.

Verbal

The word verbal is often imprecise in meaning. Most people use it to mean ‘spoken’ or ‘oral’, so a verbal agreement is one that is spoken and not written down.

Pedants, however, insist that technically it means ‘involving words’ — that is, it may be spoken or written. This broader meaning of verbal may be usefully contrasted with non-verbal, for example a nod to indicate ‘yes’.

No Outside Food

In Singapore, signs like the above are very common.  You’ll find them in restaurants and cafés whose owners, perhaps understandably, want to restrict the use of their tables to their customers.  In this context, the term outside food refers to food bought elsewhere, i.e. not from the restaurant or café displaying the sign.  It may also be used as an antonym of home-cooked food.

Among campaigners for good English in Singapore, there is a sense that the above message is non-standard and hence to be discouraged.  The following sign appears to be an attempt at expressing the same message in Standard English.

I am not entirely sure that this is an improvement, for it does not sound very idiomatic either, i.e. not something a native speaker (however you choose to define her or him) would say.  Perhaps it is necessary to recast it more radically, as any one of the following (or variants thereof):

These tables are for the consumption of food purchased/bought here only.

These tables are for our customers only.

Only for the consumption of food purchased here.

Only for food purchased here.

Not for the consumption of food bought elsewhere.

You’ll probably agree that this little exercise is a good example of a cure being worse than the original ailment!  Note that, by comparison with any of the above, the original message, No outside food allowed, is beautifully concise, precise and immediately comprehensible, at least in Singapore.

Punctuation

(a)

(b)

Can you, at a glance, tell whether each abstract (from Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans) is from a British or an American publisher?

The answer is that (a) is from an American publisher (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000) and (b), from a British publisher (Faber & Faber, 2000).

Quotation marks are usually the most obvious clue: Americans prefer double quotes, whereas the British prefer single quotes: compare “interrogating” and ‘interrogating’, for instance.

A second difference is the placement of the full-stop: compare “such an odd bird at school.” with ‘such an odd bird at school’.  American practice always has the punctuation inside the quotes, even if a fragment is being quoted (as here), whereas in British practice it depends on whether the punctuation was part of the original quote, a grammatically complete sentence, and so on.

A third clue to (a) being American is the full-stop in St. Dunstan’s: American editorial practice generally uses full-stops in abbreviations; by contrast, modern British practice has largely dispensed with them altogether.  In older British practice, however, full-stops were used in all abbreviations except contractions, i.e. the first and last letters of the full word were retained.  Hence, Dr for doctor but Prof. for Professor.  (However, to avoid confusion, St. was used for street and St for saint.)

Surprisingly, the word judgement in the US edition retains the British spelling, with the e as underlined — perhaps to keep the British identity of the protagonist.  In British English, judgement is used in non-legal contexts, and judgment in legal ones.  Hence, In my judgement, this judge is not qualified to pass judgment on this case (but judgment in both instances in American English).

–ise vs –ize

Are criticize, analyze and televize American spellings?

Some quick answers: criticize is also possible in British English (BrE); analyze is found only in American English (AmE); and televize is possible in neither.

There is a widespread misconception that –ize is AmE and –ise, BrE.  It is worth remembering, however, that –ize has been in the English language since the 16th century — long before the founding of the United States of America as we know it.

While –ize is standard in AmE, it is also used by many BrE writers.  Reputable British publishers such as the Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Longman and Macmillan, and newspapers such The Times, prefer –ize on the grounds that it is closer to the Greek root –izo (whereas –ise is French).

There are many words, however, which cannot, for etymological reasons, be spelt with –ize: advertise, advise, arise, circumcise, compromise, excise, exercise, improvise, incise, merchandise, premise, promise, revise, supervise, surmise, surprise and televise, to name a few.

Another point to note is that words ending in –yse cannot be spelt –yze in BrE, even by writers who prefer –ize: for example, analyse, catalyse, and paralyse.  (These spellings retain the s from the noun forms analysis, catalysis, and paralysis.)  In AmE, however, only –yze is used: analyze, catalyze, paralyze.

Hence, –yze is the only true AmE-only spelling, whereas –ize, though used chiefly in AmE, is hardly an American spelling since it has been in continuous use in BrE for the past five centuries.

Casanova

The spelling cassanova in the headline (Straits Times, Internet edition, 20 August 2009) is wrong: make it casanova. The term is used in English to mean ‘womanizer’, a reference to the eponymous Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, reputedly the ‘world’s greatest lover’.

In Italian, casa nova would literally mean ‘new house’, whereas cassa nova would mean ‘new cash’ or ‘new (cash) till’.

Well Qualified

‘Could this be Singapore’s most well qualified taxi driver?’ asks the Straits Times (18 August 2009) of Dr Cai Ming Jie, who holds a PhD in molecular biology from Stanford.

This is a misuse of the term well qualified — a taxi driver who is well qualified for his job may have many years’ driving experience, hold certificates in defensive driving, be an approved tour guide, and command some foreign languages in addition to the local languages. But holding a PhD in molecular biology would probably not make him a better taxi driver.

Perhaps the Straits Times meant most highly educated.

Linguistic Coincidence

If you know German, the above headline may be mildly amusing, because Putin is a close rhyme for German Puten (plural of Pute), meaning ‘turkey hen’.

Incidentally, in French, Putin would be pronounced as putain, which means (among other things) ‘prostitute’.

Who’s The Christian Here?

In Singapore, the term Christian applies only to Protestants, and not to Catholics, so a Christian person is either a Christian or a Catholic.

Singapore Christians may therefore find the above, from the BBC website, surprising, since it features three Christians: the Pope (Roman Catholic), the singer Bono (who was raised as both a Catholic and Church of Ireland Anglican), and the Archbishop of York (Church of England).

Car Park vs Parking Lot

In British English (BrE), drivers park their cars in a car park — or what American English (AmE) speakers call a parking lot.

In Singapore English (SgE), both terms are used, but with an interesting difference: the building or area where cars are parked is a car park (as in BrE), but each parking space is a parking lot.

As the picture (Straits Times, 30 March 2009) above shows, there are three cars in three parking spaces — or, in SgE, three parking lots (hence the plural). Indeed, the caption reads:

Ladies-only lots at Furama Riverfront Hotel are conspicuously painted pink so as to set them aside from the usual lots. Out of the 278 lots there, seven are set aside for women. The lots are located near the entrance to the hotel lobby.

Contrast this with the caption in the example below, from Time magazine (13 April 2009):

Cars may be sitting on lots like this one in Michigan, but should sell as the GDP rises.

As Time is American, it uses AmE parking lot for BrE car park.

Telling It Like It Is

Strange. When fares go up, posters never warn passengers of ‘higher bus fares’ — instead, they invariably use the weasel words ‘fare adjustments’.

‘Naiveness’

According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, there is no such word as naiveness (Channel News Asia, 4 May 2009) in English.

Make it naivety or naïvety (from French naïveté).

Umlaut


OK, this one isn’t even about English but it concerns something that crops up often enough in English newspapers to merit a mention: Sueedeutsche Zeitung is wrong; make it Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

When German words and names containing vowels with umlaut (a pair of dots) cannot reliably be typset (for example, in non-German news reports and in Internet addresses), the convention is to add an e after these vowels: hence Kaese, Loesung and Fruehling for Käse, Lösung and Frühling (meaning, respectively, ‘cheese’, ‘solution’ and ‘spring’).

Hence, Süddeutsche (south German) is spelt Sueddeutsche, even in the online version of the German newspaper (and indeed its URL, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/).

In German, the umlaut indicates that a vowel is fronted, e.g. from back rounded /u/ to front rounded /y/, the result of an historical process of assimilation.

However, in other languages, for example French, the umlaut indicates that two adjacent letters are not digraphs (two letters giving a single sound), but pronounced separately, e.g. naïve, Citroën. This convention was once even extended to English, so that cooperate was typeset as coöperate in order to indicate that the first syllable was not to be pronounced coo. Nowadays, this function is, of course, more commonly served by the hyphen.

Abbreviations/Initialisms, Contractions, Acronyms

The New Paper writer SM Ong complains that ‘[PMET is not] even a word, but an unpronounceable acronym’ (New Paper on Sunday, 1 March 2009).

Of course it’s unpronounceable — it’s not even an acronym!

‘Abbreviation’ is the general term for any shortened word. It comprises contractions, abbreviations/initialisms, and acronyms.

Contractions are words that have been shrunk in the middle, e.g. Prof, Mr, Adm. (American usage has a full stop at the end of all of these, whereas conservative British usage uses a full stop only if the full form of the word ends in a different letter: hence Prof. for professor and Adm. for admiral, but Mr for mister. Current British usage, however, has largely dispensed with full stops.)

Abbreviations formed from initials and which are not pronounced as words are known simply as abbreviations or initialisms. In Singapore, common abbreviations/initialisms include ERP, MRT, PAP, CPF and COE.

Acronyms, on the other hand, are abbreviations/initialisms which are pronounced as words, e.g. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations).

Some abbreviations in Singapore are initialisms for some speakers and acronyms for others. For instance, some people say ‘mert’ for MRT (apparently in jest) and ‘nell’ for NEL — for them, these would be acronyms rather than initialisms.

Against the Objectification of Women

To mark International Women’s Day on Sunday, 8 March 2009, the Sunday Times ran several articles honouring women in Singapore.

So it was somewhat ironic that an unrelated article carried the headline, Imported wives suffer the crisis. The word imported can only suggest that the wives in question are material goods to be traded, owned and even discarded.

The headline could have read: Foreign wives suffer the crisis. It would have been a little less precise, but a whole lot less offensive and dehumanizing.

Typo


An interesting typo in the Independent (5 March 2009, online): a harrowing site instead of the correct sight.

We know that site and sight are homophones (words that sound identical), but since the incident involved a bulldozer, was the writer thinking of construction site, perhaps?

Weasel Words
The Land Transport Authority and Nets claimed (Today, 1 November 2008) that problems with cashcards were due to ‘incompatibility’.

They must think Singaporeans are fools. If the faulty cashcards were indeed ‘incompatible’ with in-vehicle units, then what exactly were they compatible with?

Gone are the days when things just worked.

Ambiguous Sentence


This Straits Times (9 October 2008) headline, though perfectly grammatical, amused me because I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that the writer meant he spotted a very young insect (e.g. baby fly vs adult fly). This interpretation has the noun phrase a toddler fly, with a as determiner, fly as head noun, and toddler as noun premodifier.

The intended meaning was, of course, that the writer saw a toddler go up in the air when turbulence hit the Singapore–Perth flight. Here, the noun phrase is a toddler, and fly is a non-finite verb.

Semicolon

‘Only a few are culpable, most are decent folk’ (Straits Times, 13 September 2008).

The comma is too weak a break; use a semicolon instead. Or join the two clauses using a conjunction: Only a few are culpable but most are decent folk.