What have I learnt today? Blogging about books, media, words, Singapore and the world today. The blog that was Blowin' in the Wind.
The pen is mightier than the sword. Look at what happened to the word, “magazine”.
There was a time when it meant an arsenal, an armoury, a storehouse for arms and ammunition. Maybe that is how the cartridge-holder for rifles and machine-guns came to be called a “magazine”.
Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak can’t be happy with The Economist calling his a “tawdry victory” in the recent general election. But how did a saint lend her name to something so cheap as “tawdry”?
Imagine a world without vowels. We wouldn’t be able to speak or sing. We would be able to make various sounds — mmff! grr! hmm! — but not actually speak.
You only have to move your lips to pronounce letters like b,m,p,v and press your tongue against your teeth or some part inside your mouth to pronounce other consonants such as c,d,g,j,k,l,n,r,s,t,x,z.
To pronounce a vowel, you have to open your mouth and allow air to flow through it, as the Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary points out. Continue Reading
A list of clichés has gone viral, which is not surprising, considering such words are contagious. They pop up left, right and centre every time we speak or write. What makes this list notable is that now journalists are fighting journalese. These are clichés flogged by American journalists past the endurance of their editors.
Carlos Lozada, who put up the list on the Washington Post, says he is not alone in deriding clichés. But there is no stopping them. They are as inevitable as rain when journalists hit their keyboards or go on air.
Here is the list of clichés clogging the air waves and column inches of American media. Many of them are global, in fact. Now let’s see how many we have come across in India or Singapore.Continue Reading
Google doesn’t like the word, “ungoogleable”. Naturally. You can’t google the world’s total nuclear arsenal, the precise age of the universe, the bottom line of unlisted companies, the actual – not estimated – wealth of billionaires, what the Queen of England had for breakfast yesterday, or locate heaven on Google Map. Even the world’s greatest search engine has its limitations which, of course, Google doesn’t want to be bandied about through expressions like “ungoogleable”.
“Google”, as another word for “search”, entered the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, in 2006. But I am not surprised that Google set its foot down on “ogooglebar”, the Swedish word for “ungoogleable”, and prevented it from being officially accepted by the Swedish Language Academy.
English, thank goodness, has no official watchdog minding the language, deciding what is acceptable and what isn’t. Google’s crackdown on “ungoogleable” has given the word new momentum, I think. It is being bandied about freely, far and wide, by every media outlet with newspapers, websites or air time to fill.
The dean of the law school of the National University of Singapore recently wrote an article in the Straits Times for students who want to go to university. But there was a problem with the headline: Students considering university education should ask themselves whom, not what they want to be.
The punctuation is wrong. There should be a comma after “what”. The two words, “not what”, are in parenthesis. Drop those two words and it will still be a complete sentence: “Students considering university education should ask themselves whom they want to be.”
But the sentence will still have to be corrected. The pronoun here should be “who”, not “whom”.
Beyonce got a peck on the cheek from President Obama after she sang The Star-Spangled Banner at his inauguration ceremony in Washington on January 21. Now we are told she may have lip-synced her performance over a recording she had made earlier.
The US Marine Band, which provided the musical accompaniment for Beyonce, is neither confirming nor denying that she lip-synced to a prerecorded track, although earlier a spokeswoman said the pop star “did not actually sing”, reports CNN. The Marine Band did explain that Beyonce, like all singers at the inauguration, made a recording of the song she was scheduled to sing which would be played “in case of freezing temperatures, equipment failure or extenuating circumstances”.
If Beyonce lip-synced, it was unbeknownst to her fans. They have reacted with predictable outrage.Continue Reading
Gordon Bennett
Not one but two newspaper publishers had their names yesterday in the Guardian Quick Crossword. It included both the quick and the dead – the deceased all but forgotten but enjoying a second life as a phrase. Not as part of a phrase like “Jack Robinson” but a complete phrase: “Gordon Bennett”. There was also an Australian general named Gordon Bennett who escaped from Singapore when it fell to the Japanese during the Second World War, but “Gordon Bennett” the phrase predates Gordon Bennett the general, we are told, and was inspired by a colourful American newspaper publisher.
The most famous media mogul in the world today, of course, is Rupert Murdoch, whose name filled up the top of the Guardian Quick Crossword yesterday. The clue was right there in 1 Across: Media mogul (6,7). I did not expect the Guardian crossword to start with the name of a rival newspaper’s owner, so I toyed with words like “press baron”, but they did not have the requisite number of letters, so the answer had to be “Rupert Murdoch”.Continue Reading
Peter Mark Roget
Peter Mark Roget was born on this day, January 18, in 1779. For a man of his time, he lived to a remarkable old age. He was 90 years old when he died on September 12, 1869. His name lives to this day, in Roget’s Thesaurus. Dr Samuel Johnson is remembered for, among other things, compiling the first popular English dictionary. Roget created something almost equally valuable – the thesaurus, “a book that contains lists of words that have similar meanings”, to quote the online Macmillan Dictionary.
If Johnson’s Dictionary – first published in 1755 – was a product of the Age of Enlightenment, defining words and giving their meanings, Roget’s Thesaurus – originally published in 1852 – was a creation of the Victorian age, the age of empire and a great many inventions. While there had been dictionaries before Johnson’s, Roget’s thesaurus was something new.Continue Reading
Is the People’s Action Party (PAP) the only non-communist party to call members “comrades”? Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in his speech at the party conference yesterday said:
After GE (general election), six senior CEC (central executive committee) members retired to make way for younger leaders:
Comrades Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Chok Tong, Lim Boon Heng, Wong Kan Seng, George Yeo, Lim Hwee Hua
Actually, the word is also used by South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC), which had links with the South African Communist Party during the apartheid era, and by the Zimbabwe African National Union — Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) led by President Robert Mugabe.Continue Reading
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