Prawn, Shrimp or Scampi?

I quote from the website http://www.theepicentre.com/tip/shrimp.html

A shrimp is a shrimp; a prawn is, well, a shrimp.

Well... the definition doesn't really serve any purpose in drawing a clear distinction does it?

But that being said, the truth is that they both refer to the same entity, but that the term is used differently by different parts of the Earth: prawn for local Singaporeans, Shrimps for US citizens.

But one thing to note is that for Singapore, prawns refer to the bigger prawns, such as tiger prawns and those that you see in prawn noodles. Shrimp on the other hand, is used to imply the smaller types of prawn, those that are dried and used in soup stock, or in frying vegetables, or what in Hokkien is called haebi.

So if an American were to come to Singapore, and ask for shrimp... I wonder if he'll be surprised to see that our shrimp in the local hawker centres would be dried shrimp and that would be what is to be served him.

Funny though, how some local fast food restaurants that originate from USA use the terms that are colloquial there, as seen in Long John Silver's value meals as shown below:

There are, coincidentally, some places in Singapore that are from USA that use Singaporean terminology for their food. Fish and Co for example, call their dish "Peri Peri Prawns", and Manhattan Fish Market call their food "Flame prawns" and not "flame shrimp". I guess that the terminology changes with the location of the outlet. =)

A canteen that is green...

I chanced upon this in the YIH canteen the other day... I wonder.. why isn't that particular canteen green in colour, since it says NUS Green Canteen? Then I realised... It's because the canteen is ecologically friendly... then I wonder why is it only YIH that is ecologically friendly? Why is it singular for canteen and not plural? I couldn't find an answer to that!!

Then I found this:


And I started to wonder why we have a banner for the design of a rag (unwanted cloth used for cleaning), though I know full well that it means "Rag and Flag"... haha.. ok, so I'm being naively innocent that as an NUS student, I don't know what Rag stands for.

But it's just interesting to see how our NUS students are so innovative.

Oh goodness... a stall that bites!

Perhaps one reason why the Olio outlet at the Upper Deck of the Arts Canteen doesn't do so well, could be because people think that it bites... =P

Though the meaning of "bites" is a noun here, which means that it is an outlet that sells some but not all of the delicacies that a full Olio place would sell, but still, at first glance, some people (my friends who rarely come to Arts for example) thought that it means that Olio bites (as a verb).

I guess that's why of the three outlets in Upper Deck, Olio has the least customers?

Chocolate...

When I saw this advertisement on the MRT, I had to snap it!!

The advertisement is for Tudor Chocolates, and the slogan aptly reads

"The only thing between us is chocolate..."

I was actually quite amused by it, as it seems that chocolate holds such an important position, that the woman in the picture would rather choose chocolate over boyfriend anyday. And it implies that if the boyfriend doesn't like chocolates, then that's that... How sad, actually, to play second fiddle to chocolate.

I guess this is really an attempt to bring across the "desirability effect" of chocolate, somewhat akin to why bachelor would seem a bit weird to be used on the Pope for example, or why modern ladies choose to call themselves bachelorettes than spinsters.. I guess the colligation of a word does affect the intent that it brings across. =)

I kup you!

I was surfing facebook, when I came across this on my friend's profile:

"Actual conversation I just heard. "u keep kup me. I never kup u, it's u kup me" Deciphering kup, it means to hang up your call on someone."

It was really interesting to me, because I realised that unless we're Singaporean, and we understand a little bit of Hokkien, this entire sentence would be ungrammatical to the daily passerbys we brush across every single day. "Kup" is a Hokkien term, that means to hang up on someone, as said by my friend above.

The word "kup" is probably a verb in this sense, as other verbs can be substituted into the same slot as "kup", for example, "disconnected" or "irritated". However, what is interesting to note about this particular word, is that if it were to reflect the meaning that it encompasses, the sentence should read "you hung up on me", which means that "kup" encompasses not only the phrasal verb "hung up", but also it indicates that "me" is the subject of the preposition. Amazing how a single Chinese word, be it Mandarin or dialect, can encompass more than one word class of English in its inherent meaning. That aside, the conversation is a very Singlish thing, actually. Though we have www.urbandictionary.com, I wonder if we have a Singlish dictionary online.


It led me to think about the use of our own lexis. In Hoey's reading, the notion of lexical priming was introduced. In this sense, when the sentence "you kup me" comes into play, I wonder what happens to a person's processing of this sentence. When I first read the sentence, I was confused, actually. There was nothing that was primed when I read the sentence, until I finished reading her profile nickname. I guess that from this, even native speakers of Singlish have their moments of confusion about their own language. I wonder if there will ever be a fully proficient native speaker in a language. =)

Set Up!!

Following Manchester United's impeccable victory over arch-rivals Arsenal in a thrilling potential title clash at Emirates stadium last Sunday, Soccernet.com released the following online match report with the picture and caption:

Wayne Rooney celebrates with Nani, who set him up.

The use of "set him up" is normally primed to be with a date, or maybe a crime, or fraud. Taking a look at the concordance sample, we have the following from www.straitstimes.com

"trouble of setting him up with her female friends" -Straits Times, Breaking News

"...which would have set him up comfortably with a house in..." -Straits Times, Breaking News

"... told him that Tan had set him up. When Leong's father confronted Tan.." -Straits Times, Breaking News

This rather interested me, because for the longest time, I thought that "set me up" could only be used with negative things, like crime, or for dates. However, it seems from the concordances of StraitsTimes.com, it could mean describing someone, or in this case, Nani being the one who assisted Wayne Rooney in scoring his goal.

Looks like there's still a lot to mull, ponder and think over. =)