Cast your lot with me!

I can look back with pride on some of the house style-related changes in The Straits Times that I played a part in.

One was, way back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when I managed to get the correct name of a road sorted  out. Somehow I had known that the road in question was "Changi Coast Road" (it was fairly new then, I think). But ST's reporters kept filing stories that referred to "Changi Coastal Road".

Worse, the street directory that the newsdesk consulted gave that latter version. Sigh.

So, one night, after work, I drove out there to check out the signboard. Since then, the correct road name has been used.

Another change I managed to get done was the correct English rendition of Muis -- or Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura. For some reason, ST was referring to Muis in English as "Muslim Religious Council of Singapore". I can't recall how I knew that was wrong, but I approached a senior editor, Zainul Abidin Rasheed (now the Senior Minister of State, Foreign Affairs), and he did a check with Muis.

ST now refers to Muis correctly as the "Islamic Religious Council of Singapore".

My third "mission accomplished!" took much longer. I had started writing an occasional column on the uses and abuses of the English language in the 1980s and, in one piece, I insisted that "parking lot" is an American term that refers to what we here should call a carpark. The individual places where you slot your car in is a parking space or parking spot.

I did not succeed then in getting my interpretation into the house style book.

Meanwhile, I had left ST to pursue a Master's degree, after which I worked in government service and picked up a PhD along the way. I rejoined ST in 2006 but decided in September this year to work part-time. No regrets about having done that.

Ah, yes, did I manage to get "parking lot" banished as an Americanism? One day, I sent a note to the inhouse "language cop" -- copied to the editor -- strongly arguing my case.

My article below, titled "A lot to be said about a parking lot" and published in ST on 10 Aug this year, points out that it is now ST's (and Sunday Times') house style to use "parking space" or "spot". Some other issues are discussed too:

Fellow Singaporeans, the time has come. Let’s call a lot a lot and a parking space a parking space. Our American friends here (and fellow red-and-white Botak Jones and the others who have settled here) should chip in too and declare: “The parking lot is as yankee as apple pie.” So use it right.

Did you notice that The Straits Times has been getting it right for quite some time?

A parking lot, in American usage (it originated there) is, after all, what their Brit colonisers (and ours too) call a carpark.
But here in tiny never enough breathing space Singapore, you will find shopping malls that never fail to impress (yankee?) visitors with such signboards as “300 lots available here”.

Wow. One average-sized mall, 300 parking lots. How many spaces does each lot have? Now think of the similar claims made by the other malls here? How many cars does this nation-state – smaller than the Idaho airspace available to our United States-based F-15 fighter jets – have?

The use of parking lots as an unthinking substitute for parking spaces – or parking spots – is ingrained here.
I suspect a civil servant (probably the same chap who coined “void decks” for the empty decks in public estates, hence reducing a word of biblical immensity to just so-so) was the first culprit.

That act, perhaps to usher in some spanking new carpark in the early years, has since spawned lots and lots of public and private carparks with lots and lots of lots.
Can this linguistic misdeed be undone? I don’t know. There are so many signboards out there that have to be unfixed, if the people who matter cast their lot with the parking space believers.

There are, after all, so many other things in life that merit attention. But this little matter may well be a metaphor for how we here in cosmopolitan Singapore use the English language – actually, the “Englishes” we are exposed to.

We are already adopting a lot of American English, often without our knowing it. Truckers, for truck drivers, is one. Or heist. These words were once disallowed in The Straits Times.

But I believe the newspaper I work for did the right thing, in deciding to use parking spaces or parking spots.

While, as used locally, the American trucker still means the Standard English truck driver, we should have no truck with the widespread hijacking here of the American parking lot – in place of the better choice of words.
There is a lot to be said about the way Singaporeans use words. Many words or phrases have been mangled, as in the use of “off day” to mean “day off”. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Already, “please revert” and “please RSVP” are creeping in.
Will you cast your lot with me?