YTuesday, August 22, 2006
understand not?
i was at the supermart with my mum. while we were at the meat section, a rather well dressed lady was on the phone, "elma? can you ask Ah Ma if she wants smoked salmon or the raw one?"
salmon... common word that many singaporeans mispronounce. they call it... 'sow-men'. how uniquely singaporean. there was once i ordered a salmon sandwich from the coffee club express at NUS. the lady at the counter raised an eyebrow as if i was speaking greek. strangely, her idiotic look made me feel idiotic. so i idiotically spoke slowly when i repeated my order, only to be rewarded... with another blank look. i had to point to the menu and then she exclaimed, "oh, a sow-men sandwich!"
i was in no mood to correct her. anyways, i guess we will never be a country that speaks proper english because if we do, we cant understand each other... we are just too used to our sub-standard english.
our english foundation just isnt there. looking back at kindergarden, do you remember how our teachers recited the line of natural numbers? 'one... two... TREE!' and when they read fairytale stories to us, they pronounced 'sword' as.... sWord (proper pronounciation is sord).
my sis and i went to the magic shop at coronation to look for stage props - one of which was a fake sword. we were looking around and the assistant, or maybe the shop owner, came over and asked if he could help. so my sis said we were looking swords and asked if he had any to recommend. we were already at the sword section. but that guy said he never heard of such a trick before.
apparently, he thought 'sords' was the name of a magic trick. i echoed my sister's statement, this time with mispronounciation and wow, we were understood right away....
sigh. here we are, in a country that has a 'speak good english' movement. but what's the point? this is a place where good english cant be understood. either we continue our bad english, or launch a 'Understand good english' campaign. i doubt we'll ever have that campaign. i mean, didnt we boast that we are a world class educational hub? having such a campaign will be a mockery to our education system.
so anyways, i'm gonna go back to making english as bad as it can be - the singaporean way. pronounce their as 'thiar', three as 'tree'... and well, be happily understood.
cai was here with you at