If you don't know much about grammar and you are given the task of telling Singaporeans what common grammatical errors they make and how they should correct them, what would you do? The obvious thing to is to pick a sentence that is so obviously wrong that no Singaporean would construct in the first place and tear it apart and publicise that all over Singapore. That's precisely what the Speak Good English Movement folks have done in this advertisement that has almost become an icon of the Movement and appears even in wikipedia.
I find such an advertisement which appeared in some food centre in Singapore incredibly insulting to Singaporeans. I do not know a single Singaporean who says "Borrow me $5 can?" I've spoken to many Singaporeans and none of them knows of anyone who speaks that way. Such an ad ridicules Singaporeans most unfairly because that is not how the average English-speaking Singaporean speaks. Absolutely nobody speaks this way. If a Singaporean is totally uneducated (and there aren't many of them here), he probably speaks his own language, ie one of the Chinese dialects, Malay or Tamil. Posting such an ad in a public place would only give non-Singaporeans the false impression that Singaporeans really make such shocking mistakes in their normal speech.
In a previous blog post, I mentioned how the then chairman of the Speak Good English Movement Committee made the ludicrous suggestion that Singaporeans could not pronounce the word "cement". I showed in that post that the problem lay solely with him and those of his ilk - people who are pretentious and who try so hard to sound un-Singaporean that they mispronounce words that even uneducated Singaporeans have no trouble with.
What good is the Speak Good English Movement to Singaporeans? What purpose does it serve? I will argue here that apart from insulting Singaporeans and giving foreigners the false notion that we in Singapore are unable to communicate in English (which may very well ruin investment opportunities here), those in the Movement who profess to teach us good English are not equipped to handle even the rudiments of English grammar. In that earlier post of mine, I demonstrated how they got everything they said about grammar wrong. If you have not read that post, I urge you to click here.
Although I laughingly concluded in that earlier post of mine that the Speak Good English Movement had a statistical 100% failure in English grammar, I felt that wasn't entirely fair even though they made two points on grammar and they got both of them wrong. As any statistician knows, you need a larger sample size for an accurate statistical reading and being a decent and fair-minded chap, I decided to look for something more that the Movement has written. I went to their website and this was what I got.
The website has been under maintenance for a long time. But I just discovered today that the National Library has archived all the past articles of the Speak Good English Movement. Each article usually consists of only a few sentences and follows a simple format. It begins with a question on grammar which is followed immediately by an answer. I have looked at random at three of their articles and I will deal with all three here.
Let's begin with
ARTICLE NO. 1
For the link to the original article in the National Library's archives, click here.
"People use these utterances when they are not sure of the truth of their statements." As I have said many times before, I don't care what word a person uses as long as his meaning is clear. But when someone from the Speak Good English Movement superciliously arrogates to himself the authority to tell the rest of us what grammar is all about, I do care a lot if he uses a wrong word. "Utterance" has different shades of meaning and can be used in different senses. It can mean the action of uttering something. It can also mean a person's power of speech or his manner of speaking. It also means that which is uttered, a spoken or (occasionally) written statement or an articulated sound. In Linguistics, it has the special meaning of an uninterrupted chain of words spoken by someone eg "the utterances of children". But an "utterance" cannot be used to signify what the writer intended.
Now, I'll go into the psychology behind the error. For the sentence "John was here, wasn't he?" why on earth did the writer refer to "wasn't he?" as an "utterance"? Again, I can only hazard a guess but I'm positive I'm right. In grammar, "wasn't he?" in such a sentence is called a question tag. As I have shown in this post and my earlier blog post about the Speak Good English Movement, I think I can't be faulted if I say that a working knowledge of grammatical terms is, in my view, not one of their strong points. Now put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know it's called a question tag. How do you refer to it then? That's the infuriating thing about grammar. If you don't know its many terms, it's very hard for you to tell others they are wrong and telling others they are wrong is just what these people love to do. So, what should our grammarian wannabe do? What other words can he use that mean a question tag? The next best term which isn't as precise as a question tag is of course a phrase. Now, our poor grammarian wannabe is confused. Is it a phrase or a clause? In grammar, they have different meanings. After puzzling over this for a couple of minutes, our grammarian wannabe probably decided to chuck it all and just settle for "utterance" which is of course not just incorrect but amusingly so.
It was only after I had examined these three short articles by the Speak Good English Movement that I realized that they have compiled all these appalling articles into not just one but two books aptly called English as it is Broken and English as it is Broken Part 2.
I asked myself if my readers might think I was a little unfair to the Movement if I didn't make at least a reference to one of the books and so I did a search in google for one of these books to see if perhaps they might have taken greater care with their book than they did with their website. Everyone knows how slovenly we all are on the internet but a book is different. You have to proofread it countless times before it is finally sent for publication. So I searched on google and sure enough, I found a few pages of the book in google. I screen-saved the first little paragraph and I told myself that this would be the final bit of write-up I would bother to read. If there was nothing wrong with that bit, I would post it here and tell the world that the Speak Good English Movement isn't always wrong on grammar.
Here is what I screen captured from the book as displayed on google books.
