"He then looked away, but looked back again when I told him I was at Mr Loh's wake. Many of your mutual friends were there, I told him."
-- The New Paper, page 3, April 22, 2010.
What's wrong with the sentence in italics?
It's an elementary school mistake in grammar, with the missing past perfect tense. The reporter who wrote this and his/her editor who was supposed to vet it likely do not know what past perfect tenses are or how to use them.
I'll tell you what's wrong. The reporter basically wrote that he "was" at Mr Loh's wake, i.e. at that very moment he was speaking to the guy, he was also at the wake.
This threw me off for 8 seconds, which I had to take to figure out where the reporter was -- in Singapore at the dead boy's wake? So was he speaking on the phone to this other boy? I had to re-read the sentence to double check that he was indeed interviewing the boy in Phuket. Of course reading the New Paper is like drinking coffee ground from Robusta beans, pretty tasteless but you get what you need on the go. But we have to aim a lot higher, this is print media circulated islandwide. School kids read this.
Yesterday Minister Ng Eng Hen announced that the MOE would be reviewing the weightage of Mother Tongue in Singapore's school exams. This has been welcomed by the portion of the population who suck at Mandarin.
It's anybody's guess what the outcome of this will be. One thing's for sure, if we are heading towards a nation of monolingualism like Britain or the United States, I weep for tomorrow's generation, because it will be a nation of dysfunctional monolinguists who cannot string a simple English sentence together.
What's more horrifying? A nation of half-fuck bilinguals who cannot speak proper Mandarin & English or a nation of half fuck monolinguists who cannot speak proper English?
1 comment:
Only a pedantic would have spotted that! Anyway, not everyone who writes for a newspaper has high standards of English. You can leaf through the Chinese papers and spot mistakes aplenty. :)
Post a Comment