Word: singlish
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...grammar. Despite its apparently naughty title, Talking Cock: The Movie is actually an innocuous comedy comprising four skits about the lives of ordinary Singaporeans. The censors also banned a 15-second TV spot promoting the flick. All this because of what the authorities deemed "excessive use of Singlish...
...Given the tough crackdown, you would expect Singlish to be a harmful substance that might corrupt our youth, like heroin or pornography. But it's one of Singapore's best-loved quirks, used daily by everyone from cabbies to CEOs. Singlish is simply Singaporean slang, whereby English follows Chinese grammar and is liberally sprinkled with words from the local Chinese, Malay and Indian dialects. Take jiat gentang, which combines the Hokkien word for "eat" (jiat), with the Malay word for "potato" (gentang). Jiat gentang describes someone who speaks with a pretentious Western accent (since potatoes are considered a European food...
...like to talk cock, and I like to speak Singlish. It's inventive, witty and colorful. If a Singaporean gets frustrated at your stupidity, he can scold you for being blur as sotong (clueless as a squid). At work, I've often been reprimanded for having an "itchy backside," meaning I enjoy disrupting things when I'm bored. When I don't understand what's going on, I say, "Sorry, but I catch no ball, man," which stems from the Hokkien liah boh kiew. There's an exhaustive lexicon of such Singlish gems at talkingcock.com, a hugely popular, satirical website...
...year-old Neo credits his success to his willingness to put on the screen what his audience actually thinks, feels and even how they talk. He broke artistic ground by writing dialogue in Singlish, the island's distinctive twisting of Shakespeare's tongue, widely spoken by Singaporeans but absent from local broadcasting. "As a director, I like real," he says. "Everything in my movies is real." Singaporean director Eric Khoo, whose gritty cinematic style puts him on the opposite end of the artistic spectrum, agrees that Neo is a master at getting at what lies beneath Singapore's stolid sterility...
English is now the most creolized tongue of all time, spoken in some form by people on every continent. Well-known English dialects include Patwa (in Jamaica), Scots and Spanglish. But newer hybrid languages continue to evolve. In Singapore English, or Singlish, a tired worker might say, "I was blur at work." Blur means "to not know what is going on." The government is promoting "standard English" over the more popular Singlish, but it's an uphill fight...