Do you practice good hygiene?
Good hygiene practices and the use of Dettol have proven to reduce illness in children by up to 75%. Instinctively, as a native speaker of English , I know that something is not right. It has never occurred to me once that reduce could collocate with illness. Based on the results obtained from the Cobuild Concordance sampler, what was observed was that there were many of words like “fatal, disability, chronic, terminal, mental, serious” collocating with the word illness. These words fall under the syntactic category of adjectives. There were no instances of a verb collocating with illness based on the cobuild concordance sampler.
The what about the word reduce? Based on the list of sentence fragments provided, we can make a general hypothesis that reduce is often used in sentences where the meaning takes on a negative sense. Hence, the word appears often finds itself collocating with NP with a negative meaning or something undesirable.This is evident in the concordance sampler.
1.) To reduce environmental pollutions
2.) Reduce incidence of alcohol-related crime
3.) Reduce stress
4.) Reduce frequency of racial attacks,
5.) Reduce burgulary in London
6.) Reduce the risk of transmission
Yet , I wish to highlight that this is not representative of all sentences in the English language. Of course, another hypothesis could be that the NP has to be a quantifier if reduce were to collocate with the NP. Therefore, we can generate sentences like
1.) Reduce the number of papers in his workroom
2.) Reduce my burden
3.) Reduce his pocket money
4.) reduce bleeding, period pain and PMT.
5.) reduce the number of hospital beds
6.) Reduce the intake of total dietary fat
Based on the first hypothesis, reduce can collocate with illness . Based on the second hypothesis, reduce can still collocate with illnesses, because we can think of the word illness as a noun possessing having quantity. If so, then reduce illness should be perfectly fine but why does my intuition tell me it is wrong? Ah, but I think I know where the problem lies. The word is in its singular form illness. But supposedly if I were to say illnesses, does not improve things? Not really! Reduce illnesses still pose a problem! Someone please enlighten me to this!
Perhaps my analysis is not very detailed? Perhaps I have to spend more time pondering over this? Perhaps my hypothesis is wrong? Frankly , I feel that prevent should take the place of the word reduce. So the ad should say, GOOD HYGIENE AND THE USE OF DETTOL HELP TO PREVENT ILLNESSES.
Going back to the concordance sampler, we see that the word prevent collocates with illnesses.
Moreover, we observe that there is a great number of instances of the word prevent collocating with words like ‘ infection, bleeding, constipations, cancers, blindness, dehydration” which all fall under the category of illnesses. As for the word reduce , we get collocations like “ reduce inflammations, risks, puffiness, stress, discharge, fertility, discharge”.
So based on this extra set of data, I am going to generate a 3rd hypothesis to explain why is it that reduce does not seem to collocate with illness. Looking at the above data, notice that the lexical items which are grouped under the category of illnesses are collocated with prevent. Whereas, inflammations, puffiness, discharge (vaginal ?) , fertility do not seem to fall under such a category.
Hence this explains why reduce illness does not seem to hold. The constrain here is the domain or category of words which are classified beneath it. What are your thoughts then? Do I seem to make much sense or not?

Has it ever dawned upon you that through the course of your education , the word top school papers or top school has been mentioned and repeated countless times by students, parents and teachers?
The reason why I wanted to bring this out was because I was brought up in Australia and I studied in a government school (Rossmoyne Primary school) where I received 7 years of education there. It was only until I turned 12 that my parents felt that it would be better to emigrate to Singapore. I was automatically enrolled in Raffles Girls School primary (top school) as everyone calls it during those days where I spent the next 10 months preparing for the psle exams, something which appeared very foreign to me at that time.
The main point of my discussion is this interesting fact in which in Singapore, where schools are stereotyped in the positive or negative sense through the use of these terms such as top-school and neighbourhood school. Well at least in the humble city where I stayed (Perth), I dare say that such a stereotype is not reflected through the labelling given to schools.Even in other cities in Australia, schools are not labelled based on students' academic performances. Likewise in Britiain l schools are either government-aided or private. Government schools simply means that the government gives a certain money to fund the programmes and the maintenance of the schools. Of course, this is not to deny that there are no stereotypes given to government and private schools. It is generally acknowledged that students who study in private schools come from a relatively wealthy family compared to those who study in a government -aided school.Likewise if you think about boarding schools in Britian, one can imagine the immense amount of school fees one would have to pay just to stay and study there. My parents did consider sending me to a boarding school in Britain but later decided to change their mind because school fees were so expensive. Anyway, I soon learnt about this distinction between a top-school and a neighbourhood school in Singapore where their literal meanings have been extended to denote other aspects such as physical, behavioral, intellectual etc.
In most Western contexts, a neighbourhood school is a school that is not very far from where you stay. So for my case, I would say that I study in a government-aided neighbourhood school since going to school is only a stone's throw away from my house.
Macmillan dictionary gives the definiton of neighbourhood as
1. people living near each other: people who live near each other or in a specific neighborhood
2.vicinity: the general vicinity or surrounding area of a place
In general, the idea of neighbourhood encompasses the idea of proximity. Proximate to something.
However in the Singaporean context, the meaning of the word neighbourhood has been extended beyond the dictionary's definition. When we talk about neighbourhood school's in Singapore, it appears as if the focus is not so much on the proximity of the school's location to a town or a district. Instead we define and label neighbourhood schools as something undesirable, as a school where students are intellecutally challenged , where academic perfomances are alot more inferior to our top-schools. Our definition of a neighbourhood school also leads us to stereotype students such as their behavior (uncouth, unrefined, rowdy), their inability to excel in the future..etc.

On the flip side of the coin, the ideological notion of a top school is a school which has an excellent reputation of producing students who excel in their studies. Status of these schools are more superior.
All in all, it appears as if the word neighbourhood school, appropriated in our context acts as a pejorative term to label negatively students and the reputation of the school itself. This, for me was something very novel when I first arrived in Singapore and it took me quite a while to get used to this term. = )

A vulgar affaire
Apologies to all readers of this post especially to Professor Ooi who may find this a very taboo discussion. Today’s discussion will feature on extremely vulgar words and its usage and meaning in different social communities and society. I was encouraged to write after watching this British TV serial The inbetweeners. Click on this link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYr9Vg9Uj0 You’ll be fasicinated by the number of vulgar words used in this comedy. If I’m not wrong, there were numerous instances of words such as “dickhead”, “twat”, ”wanker”, “fuck”. Speaking of fuck, I wish to highlight that the Brits are very fond of using this word in their everyday conversation amongst their peers . My constant interaction with the Brits while I was in France tells me so.
Here are some of the phrases that caught my attention:
“I fucked with a girl last night”
“Dickhead”
“You wanker “
“You twat”
“Balls “
“you’re Mental”
I remembered that one of my British friend claims that the F word is so beautiful because it can used as a noun , verb, adjective, intensifier, interjection, exclamation, and an adverb.
Definition of Fuck taken from the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary:
Fuck (verb) : To have sex with someone
Fuck (noun) : an act of having sex /or a sexual partner
Fuck (exclamation): Shut the fuck up!/ Fuck off
Fuck(adjective) : This fucking pen doesn’t seem to work.
Fuck(adverb) : She is so fucking mental! (literally means crazy or deranged)
Dickhead (nouns) offensive ..refers to a stupid person.
Wanker (noun) UK : a very stupid person, usually refers to a man
Twat (noun) ;Female sex organ, vagina
Twat (noun) UK: A stupid person . may be referred to a man or a woman
Mental (adj) UK slang: crazy
Balls(noun) UK : utter nonsense
Merriam Webster dictionary:
Twat: vagina
Mental: 2 a (1) : of, relating to, or affected by a psychiatric disorder (2) : mentally disordered : MAD, CRAZY b : intended for the care or treatment of persons affected by psychiatric disorders
3 : of or relating to telepathic or mind-reading powers
Main Entry: wank•er
Pronunciation: \ˈwaŋ-kər\
Function: noun
Date: circa 1961
1 chiefly British usually vulgar : a person who masturbates
2 chiefly British usually vulgar : JERK, DOLT

Main Entry: dick•head
Pronunciation: \ˈdik-ˌhed\
Function: noun
Etymology: dick (penis) + head
Date: 1964
usually vulgar : a stupid or contemptible person

Main Entry: 1fuck
Pronunciation: \ˈfək\
Function: verb
Etymology: akin to Dutch fokken to breed (cattle), Swedish dial. fókka to copulate
Date: circa 1503
intransitive verb 1 usually obscene : COPULATE
2 usually vulgar : MESS 3 —used with with transitive verb 1 usually obscene : to engage in coitus with —sometimes used interjectionally with an object (as a personal or reflexive pronoun) to express anger, contempt, or disgust
2 usually vulgar : to deal with unfairly or harshly : CHEAT, SCREW
The entry for the word Balls cannot be found in the Merriam Webster Dictionary.

This gives a rough insight of how even swear words take on meaning in different social communities. In the British society, a stupid person may be called a twat and a crazy person might be labelled as mental in a British society and a psycho in the American context.. Also, there seems to be some commonness between certain swear words such as Fuck in both the American and British context.
Then what about in Singapore? I’m am pretty sure everyone has sweared once. Yet,what form of swearwords do most Singaporeans use? Do they take on the same meaning as our native English counterparts? Lets ignore Hokkien swear words here since the comparison is on English swear words. How would a Singaporean use the word fuck? I have decided not to discuss words like dickhead (very common insult in Australia too) simply because I have rarely heard any Singaporean using it.
So how is fuck used in our society then? The only way to do so is to google this word and observe how fuck is being used and which words does it collocate with!
Here is the definition of the word fuck in the Singaporean context thanks to http://www.singlishdictionary.com
fuck n. [Eng.] vulg. 1 In big fuck: a A ‘very important person’ (VIP), esp. a high-ranking guest or official, often regarded with derision. b A person who has a high opinion of himself, a conceited person. 2 In fuck care [< Eng. not to give (or care) a fuck]: not care in the slightest, not give a damn. Compare HECK CARE.
2 [1929 FREDERIC MANNING The Middle Parts of Fortune vol 1, ch 5, 87 ‘They don’t care a fuck ’ow us’ns live,’ said little Martlow bitterly. 1962 JEAN IRIS MURDOCH An Unofficial Rose, ch 6, 63 Not that I care a fuck.]
fuck v.i. [Eng.] vulg. Berate, rebuke, reprimand, scold.
2006 NEIL HUMPHREYS Final Notes from a Great Island 36 “He take any small thing and make it into a big thing. I tell you, any small thing, he want to make it into a big thing. So I fuck him, lah.” They were criticising their supervisor, I believe, but the dialogue could equally have detailed a gay romp they had enjoyed the previous night.
Phrase: fuck upside down v. phr. Reprimand or scold severely.
fuck spider int. [origin uncertain; poss. < Eng. spider (mil. slang) the dirt in a rifle barrel; or f. the practice of boys catching spiders and having them fight each other (Coxford Eng. Dict.)] vulg. 1 An exclamation expr. extreme frustration. 2 In go fuck spider: go away, get lost, leave me alone. Compare GO FLY KITE.
2006 NEIL HUMPHREYS Final Notes from a Great Island 133 .. National Servicemen are all fluent in bizarre Hokkien and Singlish phrases that mean nothing to anyone else. Approach a Singaporean woman and say “fuck spider” and she almost certainly will not clean your rifle. .. Singaporean men possess the ability to converse in an exclusive, members-only language. It is not Malay, it is not Singlish, it is not even Hokkien. It is Army Speak. If you do not know the language, you can go “fuck spider”.
fucked-up a. [< Eng. fuck up v. ruin, spoil, mess up; blunder, make a (serious) error; fail: see quots. 1968, 1971]
[1968 JOHN UPDIKE Couples, ch 4, 294 This fucks up our party, doesn’t it? 1971 EUGENE E LANDY The Underground Dictionary 84 Fuck up, v. 1. Make a gross error..]
vulg. 1 Of a person: incompetent, ineffective, useless. 2 Of things: broken, damaged, faulty, useless. See also COCK-UP a.
fuckshop n. [Eng. fuck + shop, poss. alt. of tuckshop] coarse mil. slang A brothel.
Some interesting observations: In our society, we actually say fuck spider(slang in Singapore English) and fuckshop. This is something very novel, in my opinion. We actually use fuck spider to tell someone to fuck off. Fuck is collocated with spider and shop in our society which has a meaning to it.
Another point to make is how in the Singaporean context, fuck actually takes the meaning of to scold. Eg: He was so annoying so I fucked him.
Also, fuck is primed with care to give fuck care...I don’t give a damn.
Yet another interesting point of observation is that in our society, the verb fuck does not take the form of a transitive verb as in the case of AmE and BrE. Similary, in Singapore, this verb is not associated with the meaning of having sex.
We will rarely hear people saying: I fucked with a girl last night. ( I had sex with a girl)
In addition: the word fuck as a noun seems to be very unique in our society. Someone who is arrogant or an important person is labelled as a fuck. Interesting indeed! Refer to the first definition.

Conclusion:
Lexical words , be it our normal English words or vulgar words differ in various social communities and societies. Each word reflects a different degree of rudeness. Some vulgar words may seem to bear some commonness across the globe ( such as fuck amongst the English speakers.) , yet from our data above, there are indeed subtle difference in the way this word is used. In our society, we have seen that the f word collocates with spider and shop to give a meaning to the form while such is not the case in the BrE and AmE context. In addition, how we define and perceive the F word to be varies slightly from our native English counterparts.
I really hope that this blog has been interesting even though it should be censored because of its inappropriate content. So the next time you go to Britain, you wouldn’t feel like an idiot should someone call you a dickhead, twat or a wanker. =).

Something that really caught my attention was the way most students use the word "got". Very often, we hear students, even university students saying" got" in this manner: I got lots of homework to do. I got lots of project to complete.Numerous times when I receive messages from my project mates, I realize that the word "got" nu I would expect alot more from university students simply because in order to secure a place in a prestigious university like NUS, they must have a certain level of competency in the English Language. Is this an example of Singlish then?
I decided to do a check on the meaning of "get"
MW says:
transitive verb
1 a : to gain possession of b : to receive as a return : earn
2 a : to obtain by concession or entreaty b : to become affected by (a disease or bodily condition) : catch
3 a : to seek out and obtain b : to obtain and bring where wanted or needed
4 : beget
5 a : to cause to come or go b : to cause to move c : to cause to be in a certain position or condition d : to make ready : prepare
6 a : to be subjected to b : to receive by way of punishment c : to suffer a specified injury to
7 a : to achieve as a result of military activity b : to obtain or receive by way of benefit or advantage
8 a : seize b : overcome c : to have an emotional effect on d : irritate e : puzzle f : to take vengeance on; specifically : kill g : hit
9 : to prevail on : cause
10 a : have —used in the present perfect tense form with present meaning b : to have as an obligation or necessity —used in the present perfect tense form with present meaning
11 a : to find out by calculation b : memorize c : hear d : understand
12 : to establish communication with
13 : to put out in baseball
14 : deliver 6b
intransitive verb
1 a : to succeed in coming or going : to bring or move oneself b : to reach or enter into a certain condition c : to make progress
2 : to acquire wealth
3 a : to be able b : to come to be —often used with following present participle
4 a : to succeed in becoming : become b : to become involved
5 : to leave immediately
OED says:
trans. To obtain, procure.

1. a. To obtain possession of (property, etc.) as the result of effort or contrivance.
2. a. To obtain as the proceeds of one's business or employment; to earn.
3. a. To obtain (much, little, nothing, etc.) by way of profit; to be benefited or advantaged to the extent of; to gain.
4. To capture, gain possession of (a fortress, etc.). Obs
5. a. To earn, win, acquire (fame, credit, glory, renown, love, favour, etc.).
Doing a quick check on the concordance sampler, I noticed that there were instances where the word got is primed to colocate with the auxillary verb have.
So for instances we have examples like :
1.) they've got a network of people that they do know
2.)you've got a fine er upper torso of hair
3.) you've got a neck a chin and a mouth and a nose
4.)I've got no driving faults,
Now, contrast this with examples where the word got does not have to collocate with auxillary have.
1.) I got a cake for my mother on her birthday.
2.) The boys got 2 pencils from their teacher.
3.) I got 3 presents from my classmates .
Now, relating the comparison above, what can we say about the use of "got" in I got 3 projects to do. Intuitively, I know that this sentence is not only grammatically wrong but semantically odd as well. Rather, we should say: I 've got lots of projects to do. Wwould you also consider this as Singlish ? For me , I would.

We serve you grill!
Any thoughts about this? The problem lies in the word grill. But before going deeper into the discussion, we must understand where this sentence came from. Context is crucial in faciltating our understanding of a phrase because it directs our thought processes along a certain line. Ok, this was a Burger King advertisement that I came across while I was on my way to university.
Firstly, when we look at the word grill, our mental lexicon, comprised of a complex network systems immediately sends signal to words that are in one way or another connceted to the word grill. Together with context, the first thing which comes to mind is food. Hence, the advertisement here is implying to observers that it is at Burger King where grilled food will be served. But the phrasing here is not natural.
When we dine at restaurants ,have you ever heard waitors saying:
1.) We serve you baked. (Baked what? )
2.) We serve you deep-fried. (deep-fried what? )
I tried googling this phrase 'serve you grill' but it does not seem to appear in most search engines regardless of the region. The concordance sampler does not seem to be useful here because the concordance sampler gives a corpus where the context in which the word is used is too general. If we limit the context to food, the phrase "serve you grill..."must be accompanined with a NP. In addition, I wish to highligh that even grill should be in the past form "grilled" because food has already this process of grilling before it can be served. Thus it would sound abnormal to say grill food.
If we change this grill to grilled such that we get" we serve you grilled..." we further propose that a NP must proceed the word grilled. So we should say things like "we served you grilled chicken, grilled hamburgers etc.
Doing a google search , we observe that grilled is always accompanied with a NP (food item) if the context is limited to food.

THIS LUNAR NEW YEAR, LET OUR CHERRY BLOSSOM PIZZA FILL YOU UP WITH THE JOYS OF SPRING. TOPPED WITH A MOUTHWATERING SPREAD OF DICED BBQ CHICKEN, CHICKEN FLOSS AND PINEAPPLES ON COOL LIME MAYONNAISE, IT OFFERS A DELIGHTFUL EXPLOSION OF FLAVOURS YOU'LL WELCOME HOME THIS SPRING.

There are numberous things to talk about regarding this extremely hilarious PIZZA HUT ad. All it takes is just a quick glance of the sentence to make a mockery out of this ad in its quest to be novel and creative. An effective way to go about marketing its pizzas and to stand out from its adversaries? Perhaps! Given that chinese new year is approaching, Pizza Hut advertisers must be obssessed with this whole notion of a joyous occassion for celebration, a time where family memebers gather together for a hearty meal, engaging themselves in endless conversations amidst the occassional outbursts of laughter, young children greeting and wishing their elders a happy new year accompanied by a string of chinese idioms to signify prosperity , luck , health, etc. In light of this fetive occassion, it is no surprise that advertisers put in a great amount of effort in ensuring that the theme of their ads encapsulates the festive dynamics of a celebration t oplay up to this festive mood. Hence the incorporation of terms like cherry blossom, delightful, joys, welcome home. Firstly, let me try to interpret this advertisement:
1.) Since chinese new year is a festive occasion and a joyous one, OUR PIZZAS CAN BRING JOY TO YOU BECAUSE IT IS A CHERRY BLOSSOM PIZZA (NOT AN ORDINARY ONE) a hawaiin pizza cannot bring as much joy to you during chinese new year.
2.) Our cherry blossom pizza DOES NOT SIMPLY BRING YOU JOY BUT IT FILLS YOU UP (TO THE BRIM) WITH JOYS OF SPRING after consuming them. This is analagous to that of an empty container being filled to its brim by another medium that possesses a certain quantity of liquid which will be transferred to the empty container when the action of pouring is conducted. In this case, the pizza becomes an object that possess a certain quantity of an object X which will can fill up another medium only through the process of transference. That explains why I am dubious about the way this choice of lexical items used by the advertiser sounds strange since no process of transference is involved. I would have replaced the word fill with bring such that we generate a sentence as such:OUR CHERRY BLOSSOM PIZZA BRINGS YOU THE JOYS OF SPRING. Again, I am being critical here. What on earth is joys of spring? Can we say "joys of winter, summer, autumn? " I know very well that the word 'spring' is indexical to the lunar new year but supposedly I am not a chinese but somebody of another race and culture, I would not be able to see this connection between spring and the lunar new year and such a message will appear very "alien" to me and if I should want to order the pizza by virtue of the fact that the image of the pizza appears very interesting and novel, I might consider not doing so simply because the description of the pizza does not seem to make sense.
The ad could have done better by saying OUR CHERRY BLOSSOM PIZZA BRINGS YOU THE JOYS OF THIS FESTIVE SEASON ! TOPPED WITH A MOUTHWATERING SPREAD OF OF DICED BBQ CHICKEN, CHICKEN FLOSS,AND PINEAPPLES ON COOL LIME MAYONNAISE! Ok, another problem here, COOL LIME MAYONNAIS! I can see that the advertisers are trying their very best to play around with words in the hope of capturing the attention of its customers and also to promote the uniqueness of their pizza as a commodity that will eventually be purchased and consumed.
I went to the collins cobuild concordance sampler typed the word mayonnaise and from a corpus of 100 phrases, I saw some phrases like "lemon mayonnaise".Thus, lime mayonnaise would be perfectly fine. But what about the adj cool modifying the NP lime mayonnaise? Based on the concordance sampler, I found NO phrases similar to cool lime mayonnaise. ADJ ADJ NP does nto seem to be reflected in the sample.
Doing a google search: If you look at the first page of google.co.uk, there are alot of sentences with the NP lime mayonnaise. Going over to google.com (US), the same results are obtained as well. However, if you were to search under google.sg, interestingly there are 2 instances where cool lime mayonnaise appeared. However, these were taken from Pizza Hut's website. Thus on the whole, we could generalize that while lime can be prime with mayonnaise, cool being primed to collocate with lime mayonnaise poses a problem.
I realize I am being very long winded here since blogs are supposed to be succint but yet I feel there is a necessity to explain everything in detail by penning all my thought processes down on this blog.
Another problem that this advert has is the VP offers a delightful explosion of flavours. It has dawned on me that analysis of a short phrase is tedious, needless to say an entire sentence. So what are the problems here? 1.) The priming of the word explosion and PP of flavours. 2.) the VP offer an explosion (omit the adj first since the adj merely modifies the explosion) .
My findings based on the concordance sampler: ...your choice of flavours
.....amazing range of flavours
.......with layers of flavours
...........A really good balance of flavours
So there were no instances of explosion of flavours.
My findings for explosion: explosion of diverse styles ....
explosion of micro and phantom midge.
explosion of anger
explosion of expressionist writing
Ok, based on what I have here, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way the words are primed to collocate with to one another. The next thing to do is to consider the semantic meaning and to see if such a phrase has been used by people today and if so, are there any constraints to this? Example, is this phrase used only by a certain community of people or is it uniquely in a particular country?
So again, googling the phrase seems to be a useful tool to answer my doubt on this. Again, we see that the phrase explosion of flavours are used by the americans, brits and australians themselves.
What are your thoughts about delightful explosion? Again, googling the phrase delightful explosion, it was observed that there was no such instances in the US and British context. Yet in the Singaporean context, we do get instances as such: delightful explosion of contrasting taste and textures /with its delightful explosion of colours.
What could account for this?Is this part of our Singapore Standard English ? Is it right to say this? Apparently there is nothing wrong with the grammatical structure! Yet why is it that the Native speakers of English do not use a pharse like this?
To conclude, I am going to say that this phrase is part of standard singapore english. As we all, English was exported to the rest of the world mainly as a consequence of colonization. The English brought to each colonized country was the Queen's English which as a result of many factors, such as geographical, social factors can bring about a change in the language. Also, it is crucial to highlight that even though English is a first language in many countries across the globe, the english that we all speak are very different , be it syntactically or lexically. Of course this is not to deny that these varieties are unintelligible. Another thing I would wish to highlight to myself is that,every language used in a community or a large social groups serves a crucial purpose which is none other than communication. Thus, the choice of words that we use may differ from another variety of English to suit our communicative needs. We create and invent certain phrases, appropriate it into our own community which can best express what we would like to say. It is fallacious to say that there exist, in today's society a STANDARD English ! English has attained its status as a World Language and today we see it manifesting in different forms. Today, we have what we call American Standard , Singapore Standard, Malaysian standard English , Indian Standard English all with its own unique linguistic features.

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.