The Whateverlah Blog

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Stupidest. Portmanteau. Ever.

me: hey, i ask you a question
the expression “go fly kite”
i used to think it was a malaysian thing
but this one time.. i saw it on tv here
how ah?

bro: i dunno
i mean i know ppl here use it also lah

me: o really kah?
doesnt sound like an american kind of expression

bro: maybe its english
as in england english

me: i have to do some resarch. i was just surprised to hear it

bro: oic……brb….toilet

me:http://www.englishdaily626.com/idioms.php?010#Go%20fly%20a%20kite
it says, according to that source, that it’s a “chiefly north american idiom”
now i’m REALLY confused

….

Upon further googling, I found inconclusive evidence from the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms that “go fly a kite” is an american expression.

I think the “go fly kite” expression used by Malaysians, without the indefinite article, is more emphatic and thus more satisfying to use.

Today in The Star got dis artickel that started out with:

The Klang Valley emptied yesterday as Malaysians travelling in more than a million vehicles left the conurbation to return to their hometowns for the Chinese New Year.

Okay. Let’s sit and reflect on that for a minute… because I don’t have a fucking clue what in the hell conurbation means. (I mean, I will after I post this and I look up the word. But really… do you use words like that in a news article? chyoh!)

Found it while I was searching for something interesting to feature for our 50th independence day.

Search yielded an newsreel type video about Tunku’s work… sort of. And it’s not something you can find on youtube. Not yet anyways.

But what you *can* find on youtube is the obligatory Petronas ad:

Oh, I also stumbled onto a really neat newsreel – Malayan Patrol – about the Worchestershire Regiment during the communists period.

And lastly:

*sniffles*

G wrote about the 100 words the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries would have us all know, in order to pronounce us worthy of the label of “probably (having) a good command of the English Language”.

I say a big loud PllllllBBBBBbbbbttttTTTT.

AAG writes a wonderful post about grammar and spelling in courtship communications.

If we can’t teach our high school graduates spelling and grammar (as evidenced by the painfully-widespread confusion of “your” with “you’re”), forget any “enervating, vehement, supercilious and fatuous lugubriousness” about the vocabulary of the general population. The real issue lies elsewhere.

Face it. If you display a persistent tendency of being unable to spell and punctuate, the IQ of your Internet persona as perceived by your readers is going to tank.

So the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries have put up a list of 100 words every high school graduate should know. They say if you know these words then you probably have a good command of the language. That’s debatable because knowing the words don’t mean you can put them together nicely. But I digress.

I took it as a challenge to see which ones I knew and you can see my attempt below. Took me about 1 hour and 20 minutes to come up with the answers (minus 10 minutes for a phone call) and I haven’t checked it for accuracy. You should try it and see how many you can get before reading my answers.

If my attempt is any indication, good luck trying to get high school grads to know all the meaning of these words. Some of them I didn’t know till after I was an undergrad. And in the end, isnt that what dictionaries are for – so i don’t have to remember what they mean?

But read on for the words and how I defined them.

(more…)

Was happily(?) reading the star and saw that we got another person heading to the North Pole besides the Mat Rempits. The article also provided a link to her blog. Naturally curious, I click click over to the site and to my horror(?) there in the front page for all the world to see, is a misappropriation(?) of the word ‘expeditor’:

Lord.

Perhaps she may be expediting something for Pos Malaysia. I dunno.

It ties in real nice with Patrick Teoh’s rant about some politico dumbo’s idea of sending local undergrads who are graduating with a low level of english competency on a 1-month language course.

Says he: What is 1 month going to do for those English language challenged flers? So they can say, “Can I hep shoe?” instead of “Apa? Tak tahu la.”

Soooooo…… um, so many places to take this but I’m just going to say I’m glad I don’t go to school there.

Congratulations on winning the NIT Championships, West VIRGINA!!

See the AOL FanHouse entry for the closeup of the t-shirts logo. I guess even with the misspelled shirts, this won’t be an annus horribilis for the Virginas. (god, that is bad)
p.s. – where can I get one of them shirts?

UPDATE:

I answer my own question cause I’m such a dork. You can get a West Virgina championship t-shirt here. They only have sizes S and XXL and they cost $25 incl. shipping. The website claims these t shirts are “going fast”. But it is very likely that these ones have the corrected versions of the design.

Has a member of the Bad Spellers, UNTIE group infiltrated Google Corp?

Or was the poor bastard so lovesick and had other things on his mind?

How embarrassing – in an email to my future school I wrote to admissions to tell them to “expidiate” something instead of “expidite”. I think I may have just told them to do some online travel booking.

Graduate student, GREs and all.. geez…

Dad sent along some photos he got in the email and I don’t know if these are widely available or not so I will just share them here. These are photos of restaurant menus in where else but mainland China. If you can read chinese, double the funny.

My favourite is the first item in the following menu.

Just one more.

I guess it’s true that the Chinese will eat anything. Including sand!

So if you don’t read/speak the native language and you go into this restaurant with the promise of an english menu then you are thoroughly fucked. Along with the river of cow.

Spotted in a bakery at Berjaya Time Square:

There are about 30 pieces of pineapple tarts in that container which will net me 15 free buns. Nifty.

The bakery employees just about had heifers when I whipped out the camera. In this day and age when bloggers are prone to photograph just about anything, you’d think these people would be a little less paranoid. Meh.

Plucked this one off Raw Story website. It’s a good place to pick up news that aren’t on the main stream media’s frontpages.

Make what you want of it. I just think it’s funny.

Midway through freaking out about the test this Thursday I decided to look through the potential schools’ websites to see if there was a chance in hell I wouldn’t have to take the GRE. The answer is yes, if I only wanted the Canadian schools.

I also checked out the Malaysian Student Associations of these fine institutions – got to know what I’m getting into – and the one at Indiana U had this startling remark in their ‘About Us’ page (emphases are mine):

MISSION: MSA is a non-political, non-secular student association officially founded in 1995 to facilitate cultural exchange between all students at Indiana University, and to provide support and friendship to Malaysian students.

*blink*

If you’re attending IU, could you inform the webmaster of the typo (I’m assuming that’s what it is). If there’re any strings someone could pull to get me in the school would also be great.

Though there was ice rain falling down yesterday, the haze still came back, due to the blowing of the wind.

This above from a blogger living in Subang Jaya. (I chanced upon the blog while aimlessly surfing away my insomnia). Judging from her photo– yes, ok, it’s a she– I immediately, unabashedly, passed judgment on her being an Ah Lian type.

Yes, her English skills were perfunctory at best but that’s not my point. Before I go on — could someone tell me if “ice rain” is the translation from Chinese for “hail”? Because I don’t know, I’ll admit.

The reason this haiku-like sentence struck me was because I came off in two minds about it (just right after stamping her as an Ah Lian). On one hand I can appreciate that growing up in our region, we have no real exposure to the elements that would require us to learn precipitation terms like “sleet”, “flurries” and “hail”. On the other, I’m wondering how on earth could she be a journalism student with such a limited vocabulary.

That may, however, explain the trash masquerading as articles found in ‘lifestyle’ magazines littering the hangout spots all over KL.

I have GOT to get rid of this snarkiness.