Mind your language

"Mind Your Language" was an old British comedy series first launched in 1970s which I remembered fondly. Even though I was so little at the time, I could appreciate and enjoyed the comedy so much, because they dealt with English blunders and bloopers. It was hilarious and funny.

The show was about an international language school, where Indians, Malays, Chinese, Japanese, French and Deutsch come together to learn English. The class consisted of foreigners with varying degrees of English proficiency. The humour of the show was derived from the students misunderstanding English words or terms, and played up to the cultural stereotype of their individual nation of origin. They were an excellent cast, and interesting to see a make-up of many nationalities and their accent and their use of the English language. I love the English teacher Mr Brown with his shocked expressions, the stoic typical matronly-looking headmistress Miss Courtney, and the Punjabi student, Mr Singh, with his signature expression: "A thousands apologies!" as well as Ali, the Pakistani with "Oh Blimey!"

It was also at that time, I was deeply in love with books. I was reading fervently many English books throughout my primary school although I hardly finished a Chinese storybook. Perhaps that explained why my English results were always good throughout from primary school till A levels. Hence the English language played an important part in my young life.

I notice there are some words that we tend to use errorneously, and had brought with us to adulthood, either by habit or oversight.

Loose vs Lose
Simple carelessness leads people to write "loose" when they mean "lose". The words 'loose' and 'lose' are mixed up in writing;

Loose means the opposite of tight or contained. For example,
My shoes are loose
I have a loose tooth
I have some loose change

Lose means to suffer the loss of, to miss. For example,
I win! You lose!
Don't lose your keys
I never lose bets

I also notice many people spelling the word "anyways" instead of "anyway". Drop the "s" !!!! There is no such word as "anyways", my dears. It would be nice we use and spell some words correctly, especially if we know there will be a lot of people reading what we write. While it is nice to use words correctly, I do not mean we have to be too extreme and fastidious. I know of someone who insists on writing the perfect english in all medium, for example, on paper, on MSN, on email, on sms. Well I think that may be carrying it a little too far, being too "principled". What do you get out of life, being so fussy?

Sometimes, we can relax and go singlish and be generous with our "lahs" and "lors" and "aiyohs" but ensure we do use the proper words and spellings in proper medium. If I have ruffled some feathers here ...well, blimey, thousands apologies hor!