Hey EL4216-ers!
Quite a few things caught my eye this week! Here they are =)
This was found in a washroom, as the title of the card suggests, and although this may not be so related to collocation per se, I thought I'll just share it here. In case you find nothing wrong with it... look at the sentence below 'Washroom hygiene inspection card'. It says: For your convenience, hygiene checks are made in this washroom. Is it me, or does this sentence strike you as funny? Does it even make sense? Who is it speaking to? How does a hygiene check convenience who? The cleaner? As opposed to what? The cleaner bringing the washroom to where ever the inspector is and getting him/her to check it?! The idea is pretty ludicruous.. haha. Or was the message meant for people waiting in the toilet and who got bored enough to read the card (like me)? In which case.. How am I convenienced? I don't get it... If someone has a better idea, you might enlighten me. =)
This is a simple example of lexical priming, where the words 'The Singapore Lion' seems to be primed as a symbol of pride, since it is the national animal, and also appears in the national crest. The lion is something important to Singaporeans, and to put those words under the name S. Rajaratnam, is to liken him to the lion, someone who has brought Singapore pride. Hence, if a Singaporean did not know who he was, he/she would still know that S. Rajaratnam was someone to be proud of, simply because of the lexical priming of 'Lion' in the singaporean context. However, this would be a case of cultural (or national?) priming, as I would bet anything, no one outside of singapore would understand the implication of the words below his name. They might even find it comical, if say their image of lions was that of The Lion King.
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Ok. Top-up?! A diploma to a degree? I don't know about you guys.. But 'Top-up' for me, is permanently linked with my ezlink card, or cashcard. So to use 'Top-up' in referring to an academic degree, seems to completely trivialize the prestige of that UK degree they talked about in the ad. Or maybe that was the whole point? To make the degree seem easily attainable?
I found this definition of HIGH tea online,
high tea n. Chiefly British
A fairly substantial meal that includes tea and is served in the late afternoon or early evening.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth EditionCopyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
But it struck me as odd that High tea has been abbreviated to Hi-Tea. Judging from the amount of chinese words on the advertisement, I might guess that the person who created the ad was more fluent in Chinese, and may have used 'Hi' simply based on it's phonological similarity to 'high'. However, it is interesting to note that no one in Singapore would be stumped looking at this advert, despite the misnomer. Why would this be so? Might is be that High tea buffets are very common in Singapore, and this fact, together with the words like 'nonya', as well as the other chinese words, clue the viewers in on what the whole advert is about? Would a foreigner reading this be able to decipher 'Hi-tea'? I google-d 'Hi tea', and the only results that came out were from singapore, with the exception of San Francisco, in which the same usage of the word also came up in Google. Funnily enough, these came out too:
Acronym Definition
HI-TEA High-Level Test Strategy and Economics Advisor
HI-TEA Hidden Intervention into The Established Arts
HI-TEA Hawaiian Islands Tea (Hawaii Coffee Company; Honolulu, HI)
Cool huh?
The irony of such names advertising the ideal-ness of these hostels or hotels for backpackers, is that we are already primed by the word 'backpackers' to completely disregard whatever adjectives they choose to insert in the name, and assume that the place is dirty and cheap old and did i mention dirty? Of course, they may not all be like that.. But, I would make such an assumption as soon as I see the sign. And for backpackers with limited budget, this priming may not necessarily be bad, since they would know immediately that it's cheap accomodation!
Right. First of all, we know that most people who put up such adverts are agents, who would earn commission from the sale/rental of a house. So we would understand that the words 'no commission' here means that we would be paying a flat rate with no additional commission charges. Secondly, 'Studio Like Masterbedroom' (which is cut off in the picture) obviously does not mean the studio likes the masterbedroom, but one ill-versed in the housing vocab might be confused as to what the ad is talking about. Thirdly, 'Agents are welcome'... to do what? Rent the house? Help Lily and Joy to rent them out? And lastly, 'Rent asking' seems an awkward way of saying that the house is going to be rented out for a rate of $1100-$1600. However, because of our familiarity with similar ads, we can get the gist of it, despite its incoherence and awkward language.
This is funny. I imagined two buses merging into one. HAHA.
