I don't go to great lengths, I go to great depths..

Interesting paragidmatic substitution for this long coined phrase.


Because the dish is soft-shell crab, so Pizza Hut played with the idiomatic meaning of the phrase "to great lengths" to "great depths" so that it applies.

It is a good commercial outreach to show the effort taken to get the soft-shell crab.

Though seriously... if you have to go to great depths to get the crab, means that the crab lives almost a few thousand feet below water, where the pressure is very high... so... how did you get the crab in the first place when no human being or optic device has ever gone down to that level? =S

Pulled Pork burger..

In Canada, I came across this style of cooking pork called "pulled pork".

Initially, I wondered what it meant... does it mean that the pork is stretched so that it's thin and when cooked, it's crunchy? Wait... that's bacon. Or... is it that pulled pork means cooking only the tendons of the pig? Hmm... It doesn't sound right.

So curious me went to check it out. Recently, I was at "The Hand Burger" at Raffles Place Shopping Centre at City Hall, and I remembered what it meant. For people who don't know what pulled pork is, here it is:

Interesting when you see that "pulled pork" implies something akin to "yakiniku" in Japanese food, or like... shredded pork...

It made me think... why do we only use "pulled" as an adjective for pork. I have never seen "pulled chicken" or "pulled beef", but only "pulled pork." I did a web search, and found this:

"Pulled pork is a form of barbecue originating in Mexico. It is known as Carnitas in Mexico. It is a method of preparation in which pork, usually shoulder cut (sometimes referred to as Boston butt) or mixed cuts, is cooked using a low-heat, long-cook method. With these extended times at low temperatures, the meat becomes tender enough that its weakened connective tissue allows the meat to be "pulled", or easily broken into individual pieces"
-From Wikipedia

Interesting to see this theory. In essence, when I did a dictionary search, "pull" as a verb or an adjective did not include the definition for "pulled pork". It is rather interesting to see that "pulled" here borrowed the meaning of the original meaning of pull, which is

"remove [transitive] to use force to take something from the place where it is fixed or held"
- From Longman Dictionary.

But it is not included inside. Perhaps in time, when this dish has extended to all parts of the world can we see that it will be in the dictionary too.

Muscles needed?

I came across this advertisement in the classifieds one day after reading the comic section (No, I'm not looking for jobs as yet...)

It's interesting to see how synonymy is applied here, with the idea that in this case, "muscle" refers to "physically fit movers". As we've discussed in class, it is very difficult to find complete synonymy, but how about implied synonymy? If the advertisement had not included the clause "physically fit movers" beneath the caption of "muscle needed", I might have been inclined to think about something else.

Perhaps it's interesting to see such an advertisement stunt to grab attention. I think we've definitely seen such synonymy use in advertisements, with "Pink is the new black", and even the more recent "purple is the new pink". Such implied synonymy seems to transcend above and beyond the sense, to the referent, and even applied in society. Interesting how a simple lexical semantic function eventually transcends beyond to the society.

If you really dislike Bush..

I had lunch at this new Indian food place beside Fong Seng a couple of weeks ago, and what I saw on the menu really shocked me.


Yeap! You've got it. Bush and Obama are dishes on the menu. =S

I've been trying to put together why Bush and Obama represent these specific dishes, but up till today, I still have no clue nor idea about it.

One thing to note thought..the dishes are pretty good. =)

Lesson learnt... if you ever run out of names to give your new dishes, then why not try major presidents or celebrities? I wonder if anybody would name their dish Pitt.. =S

Married Couples have been merged...

There is a new function in town. If there is a celebrity couple, their names are merged to form the name of the couple.

For example:

Brangelina

Or even, take this quote about SNSD's YoonA and the male pairings that she's had in her dramas or in commercials:

"Move over Taec-Yoong, Gi-Yoong or any other Yoong’s pairing. Won-Yoong is now the trend as SJ’s Siwon and SNSD’s Yoona feature for TV & Style "
from: http://snsdkorean.wordpress.com/

Comparing previous conventions, whereby we'd have "David and Victoria Beckham" or "Tom and Katie Cruise". Perhaps the function as stated only works if the couple do not take the same last name. If a couple is married, and the female takes the last name of the male, we do not see the merger of names.

The thing for this is that, the generation of new terms are getting increasingly more and more. The function as stated above seems to imply that the male and female names will merge, and thus, a new term comes out. Imagine for the other members of SNSD, whereby in a Korean show "We got married", we have JyungTae to represent Jyung Don and Tae Yeon, so on and so forth. Thus, for the lexicon of SNSD, I think we would generate a whole new list of names that would fade off in the span of a month or two.

Perhaps we should explore the possibility of a temporary lexicon, given these days, there are so many terms that are being created that don't last for a more than a couple of months.

Thank you for taking my eternal life

Yesterday, some of my church friends and I were having a gathering, and many members of our church are doing their daily devotional time through the "Eternal Life Devotional", which is a print done by a Korean church.

As one of my friends did not attend service on Sunday, one of us collected on his behalf and passed it to him yesterday. And this is what he said:

"Thank you for taking my eternal life."

To a layman passerby, he would think that he was dead, because someone had taken his eternal life.

But this prompted me to think of something else, which is how with the "technologically saturated childhood", we are beginning to increasingly ellipsis phrases and words, and even, to take them in the figurative sense literally. I started wondering if in time, the dictionary would even be redundant in daily social life, since everyone seemingly create a new word class with their own terms of sense or referent.

In time, would the mental lexicon be THE dictionary that people trust? If that is the case, then it would be quite sad.

Soshified?

The recent KPop craze has taken the world by storm, and there have been rather new terms that are coming up.

Take SNSD, who are my personal favourites. If you are a fan of SNSD, you are what we call "soshified", as SNSD stands for So Nyuh Shi Dae, or Girls Generation in Korean.

After going through the lectures on terminology and how they are entered into the dictionary, there is one quote that I find that is very interesting from one of the articles that we went through. I quote it below:

"English is very good at absorbing new words. [But] in three or four years a lot of these words may have fallen out of use and might well come out of the dictionary," Times Online quoted Elaine Higgleton, the Editorial Director for Collins, as saying. (ANI)
from: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/twittering-hmm-and-heh-make-it-to-collins-english-dictionary/

Then remember how some time ago, when the era of JPop, Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls came out. If you were a fan of them, you'd be "Backstreet", "Spiced" or some other word that uses the group name to convert it to become a verb to be used to describe a fan of the club. Over time, however, these terms died away with the disbanding of the bands, with the exception of the very popular ones, such as Backstreet Boys, whereby there are some countries that have "Backstreet Day", where stores play nothing by Backstreet Boy music. And who can forget "Beetlemania", with girls hounding John Lennon and Paul McCartney as though there is no tomorrow.

So, in time, when SNSD disband as well, or they eventually become like JPop's Morning Musume, whereby they keep taking in new members and "graduating" the senior ones, "soshified" may not even exist anymore in our lexicon. Interesting. =)

Have you soshified yet? =P