The original (Singapore's) Mr Bean! And are all women all-woman?

Following up from yesterday, I spotted one more creative ad and one more dumb ad. The bouquet first...

Singapore-based coffee brand Boncafe has been around for 50 years, and it came up with (I suppose the credit goes to its ad agency) this classy way -- in today's ST (Sept 13) -- of announcing the milestone it has reached!

We learnt more of its history too...

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The brickbat? This bank credit card ad...

There are always pitfalls in the English language and the person who wrote this copy fell into one. The top tagline is okay: "We are the card that knows what women want".

But the bottom tagline used "woman's" when it should have used "women's", ie, it should correctly have come across as "The all-new DBS women's MasterCard card".

This is because while there are rules in English grammar -- in this case, a noun made to serve as an adjective in front of another (plural, but there are exceptions) noun typically is cast in the singular sense -- the meaning-sense conveyed by the combined word-form is more important.

Typically then, we talk about "toy soldiers", "all-girl music bands/all-boy choirs", etc. No confusion about their meanings. But you can't stick with this rule for "man/men" and "woman/women". In their case, the adjectival form is "men"/"women" when the noun form is plural (but note that it's usually "male", not "men", if the gender prefix is needed, ie, "male doctors" rather than "men doctors". But we can say either "female doctors" or "women doctors".

To illustrate, what is the intended meaning of "This is an all-woman team of muscle-rippling wrestlers"? It should mean a team of wrestlers comprising all women. But "all-woman" as an idiomatic expression refers to a woman who is very feminine and sexy. So this sentence gets mired in confusion. Likewise, he is "all-man" refers to a man who is manly and presumably macho. Here's a newspaper report that not only is confusing, it is also badly subbed:

The report above did get the phrase "women passengers" right (ie, not "woman passengers). It also got "International Women's Day" right. To call that "International Woman's Day" would sound absurd even though "Day" is singular. Ditto for the credit card ad above. It should have been "The all-new DBS women's MasterCard card".

I'll close with this Lisa Stansfield song, "All Woman":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPk85rwcZ74