We Apologise for the Delay in Transmission

The Girlfriend was leaving town, and there are things more important than blogging. It's stunning the number of long-distance relationships there are in Singapore sometimes - a function of the fact that so many of us study overseas. Sigh. Will return to random postings now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

50 Cent's crib

This New York Times article on 50 Cent's life in the sleepy suburb of Farmington, Conn. , is quite wry - But a cook at China Palace said Mr. Jackson could save 10 percent on any order over $30... Ah, the privileges of fame... 10% off Chinese takeout! For the party, Mr. Jackson ordered more than $5,000 worth of liquor, including "a lot of Baccardi," according to the owner of a Farmington liquor store who spoke on the condition of anonymity "to protect his privacy." Sipping Bacardi (ooh, caught a Times misspelling) like it's his birthday. How anonymous could a liquor store owner in a suburban town be? It's not like there're hundreds of liquor stores in the town, I'm guessing. I like how they keep referring to him as Mr. Jackson...
Read more

English words that are borrowed from Malay

I really like studying etymology and the origins of words, and I'm interested in the fairly omnivorous nature of English, which has a huge "borrowed" vocabulary. (Random fact: "bugger" is related to "Bulgaria".) So I thought every now and then I'd put up random lists of words English borrows from various languages - well, besides French, German, and Spanish, or I'll exhaust myself from typing. I thought I'd start with Malay, national language of Singapore. Wikipedia already has a partial list , but I thought I'd come up with a list that also included a few other loan words. The obvious ones are words for things that are indigenous to the region - plants (durian, rambutan, bamboo, sago, camphor ), animals (orang-utan, pangolin, cassowary), and cloth ( gingham , sarong). But there's a whole bunch that're less obvious, even to native English speakers from this region: amok . If you asked me to name one English loan word that
Read more