THE MOST SHIOK HAIR WASHES IN TOWN- extracted from the front cover of the magazine HER WORLD , February 2010 edition. It is astonishing to see how Singlish terms as the aforementioned creeping into local magazines occassionlly. I'm not an avid reader of fashion magazines so to simply make an assumption that singlish terms are finding its way into print media is of course debatable. Magazines, a form of print, is expected to conform to certain rules such as choice of words used and expressions used. It is a norm for us to associate written media with the standard variety of a language. In addition, sentence structures are expected to be grammatically correct and choice of lexical items employed conform to the notion of a "standard" language. In the case of magazines classified under the genre of entertainement and fashion, if the targeted audience of these magazines are the general public of different socio economic background and educational status, it becomes obvious that language employed here should be simple to render easy comprehension of what is being written. In addition, the use of SHIOK in this context adds a very unique Singaporean flavour to this locally based magazine. Yet, the phrase MOST SHIOK appears semantically awkward. As the coxford dictionary briefly states :
SHIOK-Originally a Malay exclamation, but now a universal Singaporean expression denoting extreme pleasure or the highest quality.1. “This char kway teow is damn shiok, man!”2. “I ate the char kway teow until damn shiok.If shiok is defined as something of the "highest quality" how on earth is it possible to intensify this further through the addition of an adverbe most? Syntactically, the structure is fine, yet semantically, it appears strange. It is equivalent to saying that within a set of even numbers that X can hold, there are no constraints to this. To illustrate this: VALUE OF X= 12. X contains At most 6 elements in the set of even numbers namely (2,4,6,8,10,12) . 7 elements would obviously be illogical. Likewise in the above example, if something is of the highest quality (reached the extreme end) , the use of 'most' either erases this extreme quality thus rendering 1.) the definition of shiok as fallacious or 2.) the sentence as being semantically illogical.Another observation made here is that, notice how in the 2 examples, shiok is collocated with damn (damn appears on the left of shiok acting as an adverb). Interestingly, I do not seem to know the actual definition of damn albeit using this word on many occassions as a means of swearing. Definition of damn based on the Merriam Webster dictionnaire:DefinitiMain Entry: 3damnFunction: adjective or adverbDate: 1775: damned — damn well : beyond doubt or question : certainly on ofStrangely, there seems to be no definition of what damn means. Other than the mere fact that it acts as an adverbe or an adjective. Secondly, the only meaning which they gave was damn +well which does not aid much in my understanding of the word damn. Unfoutunately, I had difficulties accessing to the OED site in public, so I am going to make a guess and say that the word damn serves neither to intensify nor describe this "extreme pleasure "and "highest quality." It could act like an interjection or perhaps as a phrase to arouse our emotions . Think of "f..." and "bloody" . It would be interesting, on the contrary to have a unique Singlish dictionary with an indepth analysis of the way words are used and the way they appear in phrases.