The Blukar-Covered Hills

I was recently researching the 1956 kidnapping of a distant relative and was interested to see in the newspaper account (Straits Times, 24 March 1956) that a police shootout left two of his kidnappers dead, "deep in the blukar-covered Mandai hills".

Belukar is a Malay word meaning "brushwood, bushes, underwood, thicket". It seems to have been so current in the English of colonial Singapore that its use did not require a gloss.

Shinozaki Mamoru, the "Japanese Schindler" who was in Singapore from 1938 to just after the war, knew the word. He writes of the wartime settlement of Endau, "When the big trees had been cut we waited a few days for the timber to dry, then we set fire to them. There were clouds of smoke everywhere; the smouldering belukar chased out the wild pigs and monkeys."  (Syonan—My Story [Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2011; first published 1975], p.119)

The word has certainly now fallen into disuse. It is not in the Singlish Dictionary, and I had never heard it in my life until reading it in the abovementioned article. I wonder if, partly, the demise of the word in Singapore English has to do with the fact that the British tended to borrow more Malay words than Chinese, for the simple reason that they were easier to pronounce. Then, when they departed, they took these words away with them. The word may have been well known to colonial types, but not much used by local Chinese. I know that is a very simplistic way to describe what was likely a fairly complex linguistic process, but I hope readers will sort of know what I mean.

Of course, the real reason behind the obsolescence of the word in Singapore English is that those hills which were once covered in belukar are now paved over with heartlands malls.

The Secret Cows of My Furtive Imagination

There are garden-variety solecisms—such as the confusion between reluctant and reticent—that annoy in a particularly dull and unedifying way. They bring out the worst elitist and prescriptivist tendencies in people (I mean me), and whenever I start writing about them on this blog I inevitably delete the posts because I just don't want to sound so peevish in public.

But luckily for this blog, there are errors of another kind—folk misconceptions of language that are so startling that all you can do is laugh and be happy. My brother-in-law collects these as a way of tholing through his life of harmless drudgery—yesterday, he says, he heard someone on the radio say "secret cow" for "sacred cow."

I'm sure it's out there, but the only real example I could find on the Internet was in a speech given by the chair of the South Sudan Anti-Corruption Commission: "... our daily focus will be on junior government officers handling financial matters. There shall be no 'secret cows' this time, big or small we shall endorse the panel laws against any corrupt individual or organisation."

A sacred cow, much like a certain kind of civil servant, is something you can't question or criticize. If you thought such a person was hiding in plain sight, and you were a little rusty on your comparative religion, I can see how you might think a sacred cow was in fact a secret cow.   

I once heard a TV journalist say "follow the suits" in an approximation of "follow suit," and found through a Google search that a small (but no doubt growing) group of people seem to believe that "follow the suits" is the idiom. I guess it was inevitable. Suit is a somewhat derogatory term for an establishment figure or professional; the Internet abounds with (legitimate) sentences like "follow the suits to the best after-hours bars."

But if the card-playing metaphor in "follow suit" was opaque to you, and you thought the point was to follow in the footsteps of a figure of authority, then of course sentences like the following make perfect sense:

I have come to narrate the saga of those brave men and women and urge fellow countries to follow the suits 

if you look at all the scriptures from the Koran to the Bible and the Torah theres a lot of things that are quite similar and they all follow the suits of what scientist said

One last thing: given the number of adjectives that begin with f plus some sort of schwa-like vowel, it's no wonder at all that they become all jumbled up in people's minds. Thus, in place of the "fervid imagination" or even the "fertile imagination," we also have the "fetid imagination" and the "furtive imagination." While I can see that some people's imaginations are undeniably fetid, I have some trouble understanding how one's imagination could be furtive. Have you ever had a fantasy that refused to show itself? Perhaps I should bone up on my Freud. Perhaps, in the alpine reaches of his mind, he kept a secret cow or two.