Thursday, April 19, 2012

Mind your language!

I've always wondered why MediaCorp's 93.8 presenters blame themselves for traffic snafus, eg, "We have slow-moving traffic along...", "We have an accident...". And I had a good laugh when a presenter, well-known for being a voracious reader of books, in reviewing a book on a venerable British spy agency, called it "M Fifteen"!

Just this afternoon, I heard a news reader, in  describing the successful test-firing of India's latest missile, called it the "Agni Vee" (it should be the Agni-5, or Agni-V).

But the one that was really, really, bad was the station's radio ad for its education seminar: "No four alphabets of the English alphabet cause parents more stress than P, S, L and E..." [the PSLE is the Primary School Leaving Examination, which decides which secondary school a Primary 6 pupil gets to go to].

Thankfully, as of this morning, the ad has since been corrected to: "No four letters of the English alphabet...". It took several days before the correction was made.

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Here's another ungrammatical specimen... a print ad:


This is a common spoken and written error, especially when referring to numbers such as the one above, "aged between 9 to 14 years". The correct form should be "aged between 9 and 14 years". But why not just drop that booby-trap word "between"? Just say "aged 9 to 14 years".

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This is another common error... the wrong use of "double up" or "doubling up". The chair described above apparently serves two functions, a sort of two-in-one. So, it "doubles" as a whatever and a whatever. The Deputy Minister doubles as the Home Affairs Minister. He does not "double up"... (unless he is having a stomach ache).

This is because to "double up" is to bent over in pain, as when someone has a severe tummy ache!

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This one is strictly not a grammatical error. But unless and until we start spelling words the American way, the British spelling of that word above is "favour". I just wonder why no one spotted it.

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Finally, there are ungrammatical or at least funnily-worded song lyrics; someone started a thread on this theme ((below) a while back...

http://glyphs.gardenweb.com/forums/load/paradise/msg010439262798.html60

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