Mick Jagger speaks Singlish!

There's a lot of nice stuff to read in today's ST (March 17), and stuff that continues to make me wonder if the checkers are doing their job.

The bouquets first.

If you are a baby boomer -- a child of the pop music from the Sixties to the Eighties -- how can you not want to read the review of the Rolling Stones' concert in Singapore? The Page One blurb made me want to go straight to that story first...

Wah piang, if I were there, I would have gone wild too!...

Ho say, man! Now, we only need to get him used to choping hawker centre/food court tables with tissue paper packs and maybe even try eating durians too. And I hope other celebrities have taken note: Speak Singlish here, hor, and you'll have us eating out of your hands -- even if you draw the line at ingesting the "king of fruits".

This other ST Page One teaser blurb also got -- arbuthen -- my attention:

On this one (on these ones?), I am wearing my Grammar Nazi hat. The grammatically correct phrasing here has to be "DJ flaunts them to get better paid". Reading the story, it is obvious that this is the correct verb-noun agreement:

Actually, pushing the argument further on this teaching point, there may be a way to get school children to improve their English. Kids these days don't like to read the newspapers but -- if you push a newspaper into their hands -- they will check out the sports pages. So an English Language teacher might want to get his or her pupils to do a simple "content analysis" of good sports-page articles with respect (note: spelt correctly here; see my blog entry on Saturday, March 15) to, say, vocabulary and idiom building -- by referring to such articles as these ones here:

Example above: what does loquacious mean? What is its antonym, etc? Find out more about the idioms used here, ie, leg-breaker and no-brainer.

Example above: pockmarked, seismic.

The letters' page often has good stuff too (especially for further research and discussion), such as this one that sheds light on a brutally tragic part of our history:

Update (here's the reply):

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Now for the brickbats...

A lot of effort had previously been made within ST's newsroom to banish the use of the term parking lots as a synonym for parking spaces/parking spots in the Singapore context (ie, with regard to local stories). Now I fear ST has regressed here, as I keep seeing this inappropriate (US-specific) term cropping up again in stories like this one:

And I was surprised that my friend Chris Tan, a veteran journalist of the Old School, seems unaware that Changi Coastal Road is incorrect; the official name is Changi Coast Road. Moreover, the sub-editors did not bother to do a check [people like me used to keep a list of words and terms -- from bunting (not buntings) to Changi Airport (not Changi International Airport) -- that would "flag" an immediate alert]:

Here's proof: