Here’s a few of my own bugbears which are pretty contentious. I don’t know if some English language expert is better placed to comment on them than I am. Suffice to say that, I HATE them. And here’s why.
Slapped…
People seem to be getting slapped pretty often. So, he was slapped with a fine, a jail term, a penalty. Unless he was slapped with a fine piece of paper, a book containing the penalties or just plained slapped…shouldn’t it be that he had a fine slapped ON him?
See/saw
We seem to be attributing the gift of sight to anything, even inanimate stuff. So… Yesterday saw a crowd of 10,000 …; The company saw its profits for last year soar/sink; Singapore saw its birth-rate tanking….I don’t know about you but I don’t think yesterday saw anything…
But even the venerable Economist has been giving everthing the all-seeing eye…so who am I to say that see or saw cannot to be applied more widely? But really, something HAPPENED yesterday, to the company, to the country etc is really what we should be seeing no?
Speculation is rife.
It always is, isn’t it? I think I am on surer ground here. This phrase is over-used. And a newspaper really shouldn’t be in the business of speculating or rumour-mongering unless it is reporting someone doing the speculation…
So… XX claimed that the PAP would lose Hougang by 1 percentage point. “I am not speculating,” he said. “I am just reporting a rumour. You sure you want to report this? ”
That’s right. You sure?
Scheme
Everything is a scheme these days, not a project or a plan. Even if it isn’t formally titled a scheme, the media just tends to stick the word on any sort of proposal/plan etc. When you scheme, it usually means you are planning something nefarious. Nobody wants to be known as a schemer either don’t you think? But Singapore is full of schemes….Such scheming people we are!
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