Psst, want CEO title? Or fancy being a tuinalogist?

Only in Singapore, I suspect, you can have this "CEO" label. You can have it almost at once if you made the application yourself. If someone else, very likely a family member, made the application for you, it used to take about six weeks for the approval.

But now, local media reports say, it will take just two weeks. CEO in this case stands for "Casino Exclusion Order". It bars the person so named from entering either of the two integrated resorts' casino. Guess you have just lost interest in applying for this CEO vacancy, huh?

Don't despair, if you still want a fancy title. Aspire to be a tuinalogist!

Some bit of preamble first. Once upon a time, there were sinseh in Singapore (as there were pak hong chia, kok kok mee, etc, but I digress). Sinseh were the traditional Chinese healers (I don't recall the word "medicine" being used as a descriptor). East was east and West was west and no one ever confused these folk with western-trained doctors, just as dentists then were those "bare-foot" chaps you took a risk with if you wanted your teeth pulled out cheaply, typically in Chinatown.

(My father, bless his dearly departed soul, once did a do-it-yourself tooth extraction job on me -- the kind you see in Lil' Abner type cartoon strips, but again, I'm digressing.)

Anyway, back then, you went to a western-trained "dental surgeon", either at a government or a private clinic, to have your dental treatment done in a less scary way.

These days, those unlicensed cavity decapitators are long gone. So, in today's context, "dentists" are the western-trained guys. And you can see a new genre too: dental specialists, as you would see medical specialists if your ailment warrants it.

The term sinseh has long gone too. But the folk who used to be called as such have undergone some sort of training or understudy in "traditional Chinese medicine" and are now called either "traditional Chinese medicine practitioners" or "traditional Chinese medicine physicians". There is a statutory board that registers and regulates them (some 2,400 in all).

They are in the news now because a number of them have upped their status ante and refer to themselves as "TCM specialists" in certain fields. Some, for instance, claim to be TCM oncologists. Wow. The yin and yang of cancer! The government has decreed that TCM practitioners/physicians cannot claim to be specialists since, even in China, there is no such accreditation.

So, what about tuinalogist?

I thought this extract from The Straits Times report (4 Jan, page A3) was classic black humour:

A check of the Eu Yan Sang website [Eu Yan Sang is a well-known listed TCM chain that has modernised and has TCM clinics] turned up a description of a Mr Ge Ming as "a tui na specialist" who can treat conditions like sports injuries and cervical, thoracic and lumbar problems.

Ms Wong [Eu Yan Sang's general manager for brand management -- like I said, this company is very, very modern] said [Mr Ge] was not a TCM physician but a "tuinalogist".

Quote ends. I love her upside down logic. And I hope she pronounced this strange word such that it did not sound like a vulgar swear word in a certain Chinese dialect (not Hokkien).

So, if you want to be a bit stylo-milo about your occupation, just call upon the "science of ology" to burnish it. Taxilogist? Makes good PR mileage for the taxi companies. Cabilogists? Also can. After all, we also call taxi drivers cabbies.

Back when I was a university student, the only "ology" we pursued was "paktorlogy" -- courting (pak tor being the patois Hokkien for "going on a date").

Then there was this politically incorrect joke. What do you call the study of Singhs? Bhai-logy. [Bhai means "brother" in Bengali. I don't hear it used in a jocular way these days but it used to be shorthand for turbaned Sikhs.]

So, what then, is the study of baby Singhs? Micro-bhai-logy.

There's one about Singh-lets too but I must have used up my quota of non-PC jokes so I'll cease and desist. Bye, bye.