People can have many talents but many such people are not many talents... got that?

Political salaries... moving on

The PAP, thanks to masterful presentations by PM Lee and DPM Teo in Parliament, has steered the political salaries issue to a conclusion that most thinking Singaporeans can accept for the next five years. There were anomalies in the structure being superseded, the most glaring being the excessive remuneration of the President. That has been fixed, satisfactorily to some, but not enough to others.

And the issue of what exactly is talent, ie, that which can be made fungible into political service of distinction, remains an elusive one.

But we have to move on.

Above all, the debate has opened the public's eyes to ramifications below the surface tensions. I think PM Lee's remarks, below -- especially on whether we can get the best possible future PM for Singapore -- are not to be taken lightly:

"Can a future PM continue to get the best and most committed people to serve as his ministers? In fact, can we get the best possible future PM for Singapore? How can our pay system support this important goal? And if we have a pay system which supports this, how can we get Singaporeans to accept that?"

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The Noose is one of my favourite Channel 5 programmes. The website xinmsn has kindly provided this link, which kicks off with the must-view "Visit to Singapore by the North Korean leader", from an earlier episode:

http://video.xin.msn.com/browse/catch-up-tv/the-noose5?videoId=ac8216d4-5c90-4352-884c-60aea8019f6d&from=sharepermalink&src=v5:share:sharepermalink:uuids

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When it is not talents but talent, when you don't just anyhow "probe" someone, when you don't do drugs in a headline, etc...

This headline above (apart from its grammatical errors of using "attracts/retains" and not "attract/retain") makes the common error of using the countable noun "talents" for the collective noun "talent". A person may have many talents (he can sing, cook, assemble a nuclear bomb, etc) but many people with such multiple abilities are just simply "talent", as in this correct headline below:

Likewise, you'll want to use the word "probe" (in place of "investigate") carefully, whether in text or headlines. This text copy is bad...

The offending part says the woman lawyer in question "had been slapped with four charges by the Law Society and probed by a disciplinary tribunal".

This headline below (previously posted) is also self-evidently bad:

It is true that headline writers are always on the lookout for short words, given that space is a constraint. But there is an art to it, and it requires sensitivity to nuances or unintended meanings. This use, below, of "drugs" to substitute for "pharmaceutical products" definitely did not work!...

And, last but not least, for the longest time I have been telling reporters we do not need to use the pompous phrase "members of the public" in their text copy (let alone headlines!). Then along comes this headline:

All that is needed is for this headline to read thus:

Snatch thief nabbed
by 3 passers-by