Unveiling A ...

Location: Old National Library, Stamford Road

I Believe You Mean Longest

Watching the news (News 5 at 9) on the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Thai king's ascension last night, this blogger heard the newsreader (I can't remember her name) refer to His Majesty Rama IX as "the largest reigning head of state".

I think that honour goes to Tonga or Swaziland...

A New Disability...

Location: St Joseph's Church - 143 Victoria Street

...where victims share a symbiotic relationship with a wheel

We Are Many

Location: Underpass between Lido and Wheelock Place

And he asked him, What is thy name?
And he answered, saying, My name is Women: for we are many.

Shopping!

While shopping some months ago, your intrepid blogger found rather curious products on sale...

Location: Cold Storage, UE Square

Look what the alchemists concocted today!

Guaranteed to spice up any boring date - found beside the apples juice.

Look Familiar?

Location: Singapore Art Museum

We've seen it somewhere before.

The Affliction of Lousy Tenses

Location: Cold Storage, Holland Village

Location: Pepper Lunch, Lido

weekeegeepee.blogspot.com

Location: http://weekeegeepee.blogspot.com/

This is a blog run by some General Paper teacher from Singapore, ostensibly for the benefit of his/her students. It's quite a scream.

First, the teacher is unable to maintain any sort of consistency between proper English spelling, and American misspellings.



Note 'analyse' above. The correct English spelling. Next, note the use of 'well-organized' in the next extract:



Tsk. Either stay with correct spelling, or go American. Be consistent!

Next:



FREE OF GRAMMATICAL AND SPELLING ERROR? Just the one? Sweetie darling, surely you mean 'errorS'! Next, it should be 'free from', not 'free of'. 'understand your scrawl'? Not strictly an error, but I imagine very few students write with essays with a single continuous line in an unbroken cursive hand. For stylistic reasons, it ought to be 'understand your scrawls' or 'understand your scrawling(s)', unless one is being poetic (which this teacher most assuredly is far from).

Next, one may detect an annoying random omission and insertion of hyphens and commas in odd places. Gently turn your studied eye over the following extract:



First, we get 'Post mortem', then 'post-mortem'. Ai yai yai. Then, 'General notes on what GP essay should be' - please, either 'General notes on what A GP essay should be', or 'General notes on what GP essays should be'. Omission of the article, whether definite or indefinite, is a common error with those whose first languages do not have articles, such as Chinese, Malay, most Slavic languages (Bulgarian is a notable exception), and Latin (I highly doubt Latin is this GP teacher's first language).



Contextualize - there's that horrid American misspelling again. This teacher has an irritating habit of using caps to emphasise things. He/she has already put them in a different colour for emphasis (an inelegant thing to do), so to then shout, as capitalising entire words is called, is unnecessary. A far better solution is to rephrase and set paragraph breaks for emphasis.



There's an obvious contradiction between the question asking 'for your opinion, or give arguments from your experience' and the teacher recommending that it is 'NEVER about your personal opinion or experience'. Then again, most Singaporeans haven't an opinion or mind about anything, so perhaps to express that blank would be detrimental to the essay.

Aside from that, there appears to be a superfluous comma between 'your opinion' and 'or give arguments' - it makes no sense to have one there, and actually confuses the sense of the sentence. Next, a double hyphen? Tsk.



'Please note, even if the question does not explicit require it...' - OY VEH! Have you never heard of an adverb? Hint - adverbs often end with '-ly'.

With such crap English coming from A-Level General Paper teachers, is it any wonder that this blog finds frequent justification for its existence?

We'r Here

Location: Carnaval, basement, CHIJmes

Perhaps a confusion between 'We Are Here', 'We're Here' and 'We R Here'?

Perhaps we can blame Toys R Us...

Aromatic Rashes?

Location: BreadTalk, Capitol Cinema.
Date: sometime last week...

Sorry chaps, I'm not biting into rashes, aromatic or otherwise...

Count The Number Of Balloon!

Location: Osram 100th Anniversary Fair, Bukit Panjang Plaza
Date: Sat, 03 June 2006



Apologies for the quality of the picture! There are a number of balloons tied in a large bunch, with a banner hanging from them, saying 'Count the number of Balloon!'.

Just the one?