The Noughties

I was startled recently, while reading a Straits Times article about the proposed North-South expressway, to see the following sentence: "Several feasibility studies have been done on it, some dating back to the early noughties."

I remember hearing about "the aughts" as a possible term for the first decade of our present century, a usage apparently modelled on one popular in the early 20th century. But "the aughts" doesn't appear to have caught on. To me it sounds a little too WASP-y—it makes me think of boater hats and spatterdashers and vapid young men wearing Harold Lloyd glasses.   

But is "the noughties" really preferable? The Wikipedia article on the decade—entitled, by the way, "2000s (decade)"—claims that the BBC listed "noughties" as a "potential moniker for the new decade," and that the word has since become "the only term for the decade in common use in the UK." I guess this is why the Straits Times adopted it, out of some naive notion that if the English use it, it must be OK. Not so, I say!

The trouble with "the noughties" is that 1) nobody outside the UK uses "nought" very much, aside from a certain generation, now probably retired, of Convent-school math teacher; 2) the suffix -ties, derived from -ty in numerals like twenty and thirty and so on, can't be stuck on to nought because there is no such word or number as *noughty.

For me, "noughties" sounds too much like the tongue-in-cheek media catchphrase that it is. I don't know whether "in common use in the UK" means it has been adopted into stylesheets as standard usage—if so, that strikes me as remarkably tone-deaf.

I expect the beef against "early 2000s" is that some newspaper or press stylesheets direct their editors to spell out the decades, i.e. nineties and not  90s. The thought of using numerals for the one decade and not others must send a few people into copy-editing conniptions.

But that seems a lot less gauche to me than "noughties."

Minim Confusion and Pig's Organ Soup

I saw this sign at the temporary location of the Hong Lim hawkers' centre last time I was in Singapore. It took me a minute to figure out what had gone wrong. I rather think it had to do with minim confusion.

The minim is the short, vertical stroke that is used for forming the letters i, u, m and n. The word minim is itself formed out of 10 minims! I don't know much about palaeography, so I can't go on at length about this, but a run of juxtaposed minims can be hard to distinguish in manuscripts—is that u or n? An m or in?

The practice of dotting i's solved part of the problem. Replacing minim-formed vowels with others did the trick too. It's thought that our spellings of love, son and woman—all with unhistorical o's—stemmed from a desire to reduce minim confusion in words that were, at various stages of Old and Middle English, spelled luue, sunu and wimman.

So I imagine that the signmaker for this hawker stall had been handed a note specifying that the words Pig's Innard should appear, but as a result of some understandable minim confusion (innard is not among the most frequently encountered of English words), he wrote Lunard instead.

It's somehow rather nice to think that my Hong Lim hawker's signmaker was stymied by the same difficulty that sometimes beset medieval scribes.

Incidentally, to the left of pig's lunard appeared a notice for pig's trottles. Behind that, I think, is another story ...

At the Other End ...

... of the spectrum of linguistic competence, this notice I found taped to a malfunctioning bank machine in Coronation Plaza.

In a way, you have to pay tribute to the work that went into the composition of this notice. You can almost hear the gears turning in the author's mind, as more formulaic options such as "Not Working" or "Out of Order" signally failed to present themselves. So carefully specified are space, time, and the existential salience of the "promblem" that, in the end, there was only enough energy left over for a singular "thank."

It's too bad. I really needed to update my passbook.

Coffee Shop Paronomasia

I saw this sign on a recent trip to Katong (in the eastern part of Singapore) and thought it was a very good example of a bilingual pun.

The Chinese says A li ba ba yi ding hao, which of course approximates the sound of the English rather well, and means "Ali Baba is sure to be good!"

I like the way the Chinese version eschews representing the final consonant of house. They could so easily have rendered it A li ba ba yi ding hao chi (Ali Baba is sure to be good eating), but that would have ruined the syllabic count!

A Whopping Big Number

When did whopping become obligatory before large numbers?

I first noticed it in my students' essays ("Shakespeare wrote a whopping 38 plays" and the like). But since then I don't think I have ever failed to see whopping inserted where attention to a large number was intended to be drawn. Why, just this morning I read that "a whopping 23,000 applications" had been submitted to the Ontario Power Authority for a green retrofit program. And while surfing the web earlier I saw this fearsome headline: "Worst Milkshake Packs A Whopping 2010 Calories"!

Sometimes, the adjective is used in irony (I see someone entitled their blog post "A Whopping TWO New Jerseyans Sign Up for Obamacare Benefits"), but as often as not whopping is inserted with all apparent sincerity, even in serious journalism and scholarly writing. This despite the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary labels its use colloquial or vulgar.

It's like the expression piping hot. People just like to put that word piping in before hot, especially at the end of recipes, where the aspiring cook is enjoined to serve the dish p— h—. The phrase has the reassurance of ubiquity; it may be assumed to be safely idiomatic.

The word whop (first attested in the 16th century) means "to strike with heavy blows; beat soundly, flog, thrash, belabour (a person or animal; rarely, an inanimate object." The OED also deems whop in its various senses colloquial or vulgar.

Whopping, as a participial adjective meaning "abnormally large or great; 'whacking,' 'thumping,'" is first attested in 1625. In 1818, Walter Scott wrote with sartorial enthusiasm in Rob Roy, "What a wapping weaver he was, and wrought my first pair o' hose." Curiously, none of the citations listed in OED place whopping with a number.

I wonder if, in the minds of some (no, a great many) writers, whopping has come to corner the intensifying-adjective-before-big-number lexical market. Perhaps I could suggest a few competitors of a higher register: impressive (as in "Ad Spend on Social Networks Gains Impressive Half-Point in Share") perhaps; or colossal ("Bill Adds Colossal $2 Billion to Deficit"); or, if you're hyperbolically inclined, astronomical ("Fourth Quarter Profit Soars an Astronomical 244%").

Come to think of it, the possibilities are endless. "Profits Shrink by a Crushing 40%"; or "House Sells for Mouth-Gaping $14 Million"; or "Cat Weighs in at Shriek-Inducing 40 Pounds".

But now I've come to a realization. Sometimes, in writing, a vulgar colloquialism is exactly what's called for. Time for a whopping 2010-calorie milkshake.

Good News

I learned this week that the Boldprint Graphic Novel series has won the 2011 Learning Magazine Teacher's Choice for Children's Book Award. I am the author of four titles in the series — Castaway Island, Kingdom of the Snow Cat, Operation Fly South, and Turtle Rescue.
     The series is published jointly by Rubicon Publishing and Oxford University Press. It had previously won the 2010 Texty Award for Textbook Excellence from the Text and Academic Authors Association.
     It seemed like the kind of news that might merit a blog post!

The Etymology of Perkedel

I was browsing yesterday in Tap Phong (a wonderful shop on Spadina Avenue) and saw a kind of thermos flask called a Qingcheng Coffee Fot [sic]. This reminded me of a theory I have concerning the etymology of perkedel.

A perkedel is defined in my 1963 Malay-English dictionary as "minced meat." But most Singaporeans would think of a perkedel as a fried patty made not just of minced meat but also potato and onions. I've heard it referred to as a "cutlet" (somewhat quaintly, to my ear). If you order a "Royal Flush" from the very popular nasi lemak stall at Adam Road hawker centre, you'll get a perkedel along with your otak-otak and your deep-fried chicken wing. When I was a schoolgirl I used always to get a perkedel along with my mee siam in the school canteen. It was what I dreamed of through the morning, and it got me through Chinese and math. Bagus or what!

But I digress. Last week we were visiting friends in Copenhagen, and the conversation turned to food (naturally). I asked my hosts what they thought the national dish of Denmark was. They made various suggestions, among these liver paste with fried mushrooms and bacon (and, you know, it's quite nice!), but everyone agreed that frikadeller was the thing. Frikadeller are (according to Wikipedia), "flat, pan-fried dumplings of minced meat." I've never eaten any, but they look in pictures very like perkedel.

Of course, it's most likely that the word would have entered Malay through Dutch, and indeed the Dutch do have something called a frikandel, defined unappetizingly by Wikipedia as a "long, skinless, dark-coloured sausage that is eaten warm." 

I don't know anything about the phonemic structure of Malay, but it seems to me that originally at least it must have lacked an /f/ phoneme. The F section in my dictionary is only a page and a half long, and about ninety percent of those words are listed as being of Arabic or Persian origin. Many other loanwords that began in the original languages with /f/ or /v/ would have been pronounced with an initial /p/ (though the only example I can find at the moment is panili for vanilla).

Add to this the commonplace metathesis of /r/ and the vowel, and frikadel becomes perkedel. It's a little strange to me that our perkedel resemble Danish frikadeller more closely than the Dutch frikandellen (though, given the description of the latter quoted above, perhaps this is something we can be thankful for); and the monumental Singlish Dictionary by Jack Lee doesn't mention an etymology for perkedel (which he spells begedel), but I am quite sure it is the same word!

I'm probably not the first to think of this (indeed, my hubby is standing on the stairs claiming that he was), but no matter, it was a good excuse to think about eating.