The Noughties

I was startled recently, while reading a Straits Times article about the proposed North-South expressway, to see the following sentence: "Several feasibility studies have been done on it, some dating back to the early noughties."

I remember hearing about "the aughts" as a possible term for the first decade of our present century, a usage apparently modelled on one popular in the early 20th century. But "the aughts" doesn't appear to have caught on. To me it sounds a little too WASP-y—it makes me think of boater hats and spatterdashers and vapid young men wearing Harold Lloyd glasses.   

But is "the noughties" really preferable? The Wikipedia article on the decade—entitled, by the way, "2000s (decade)"—claims that the BBC listed "noughties" as a "potential moniker for the new decade," and that the word has since become "the only term for the decade in common use in the UK." I guess this is why the Straits Times adopted it, out of some naive notion that if the English use it, it must be OK. Not so, I say!

The trouble with "the noughties" is that 1) nobody outside the UK uses "nought" very much, aside from a certain generation, now probably retired, of Convent-school math teacher; 2) the suffix -ties, derived from -ty in numerals like twenty and thirty and so on, can't be stuck on to nought because there is no such word or number as *noughty.

For me, "noughties" sounds too much like the tongue-in-cheek media catchphrase that it is. I don't know whether "in common use in the UK" means it has been adopted into stylesheets as standard usage—if so, that strikes me as remarkably tone-deaf.

I expect the beef against "early 2000s" is that some newspaper or press stylesheets direct their editors to spell out the decades, i.e. nineties and not  90s. The thought of using numerals for the one decade and not others must send a few people into copy-editing conniptions.

But that seems a lot less gauche to me than "noughties."

Minim Confusion and Pig's Organ Soup

I saw this sign at the temporary location of the Hong Lim hawkers' centre last time I was in Singapore. It took me a minute to figure out what had gone wrong. I rather think it had to do with minim confusion.

The minim is the short, vertical stroke that is used for forming the letters i, u, m and n. The word minim is itself formed out of 10 minims! I don't know much about palaeography, so I can't go on at length about this, but a run of juxtaposed minims can be hard to distinguish in manuscripts—is that u or n? An m or in?

The practice of dotting i's solved part of the problem. Replacing minim-formed vowels with others did the trick too. It's thought that our spellings of love, son and woman—all with unhistorical o's—stemmed from a desire to reduce minim confusion in words that were, at various stages of Old and Middle English, spelled luue, sunu and wimman.

So I imagine that the signmaker for this hawker stall had been handed a note specifying that the words Pig's Innard should appear, but as a result of some understandable minim confusion (innard is not among the most frequently encountered of English words), he wrote Lunard instead.

It's somehow rather nice to think that my Hong Lim hawker's signmaker was stymied by the same difficulty that sometimes beset medieval scribes.

Incidentally, to the left of pig's lunard appeared a notice for pig's trottles. Behind that, I think, is another story ...

At the Other End ...

... of the spectrum of linguistic competence, this notice I found taped to a malfunctioning bank machine in Coronation Plaza.

In a way, you have to pay tribute to the work that went into the composition of this notice. You can almost hear the gears turning in the author's mind, as more formulaic options such as "Not Working" or "Out of Order" signally failed to present themselves. So carefully specified are space, time, and the existential salience of the "promblem" that, in the end, there was only enough energy left over for a singular "thank."

It's too bad. I really needed to update my passbook.

Coffee Shop Paronomasia

I saw this sign on a recent trip to Katong (in the eastern part of Singapore) and thought it was a very good example of a bilingual pun.

The Chinese says A li ba ba yi ding hao, which of course approximates the sound of the English rather well, and means "Ali Baba is sure to be good!"

I like the way the Chinese version eschews representing the final consonant of house. They could so easily have rendered it A li ba ba yi ding hao chi (Ali Baba is sure to be good eating), but that would have ruined the syllabic count!