Down Germs

"Down Germs". Can the word 'down' take on the form of a verb? If it were so, how would you explain this slogan to someone learning grammar!? Often, we would say "Down with the ..."- especially during World War II when Singapore's independence was still a few years away. Should the word 'with' then be inserted inside this slogan also?

Going well!

Hi everyone,

Thanks very much to everyone who's been posting on this blog. Although I haven't responded to all your entries, I have been checking in most days to read what you've written, and I've really enjoyed all the observations that you've been making. Do keep it going!

R Tang.

english in china. hmms..

China has quite a lot to do to improve the standard of English there.. I think its referring to washing detergent and soaps..
"kills the insect" water. so, "kills the insect" is describing the water. Supposedly this should be an adjective phrase? not quite.. (what's that actually haha)

Simply.. pesticides and insecticides..

I'm just wondering if "the" as the determiner is used excessively and wrongly over and over again.. THE FURNITURE NURSES THE THING! what thing is there to nurse? the "sick" and peeling leather of the sofa? hahaha, maybe its diagnosed with skin disease!

okay enough of the atrocities. i can't take it anymore!
will post more next time! :)

-Kee Pin.

I got this picture from www.engrish.com and it sounded strange... In mandarin (if i'm not wrong, because my Mother Tongue is very bad), it means "Please beware of falling over the fence", how would the action of me turning over (which I assume means to face another direction) cause me to fall off the fence if I'm not even touching?
There is dark magic going around if you 'turn over'!!!

*Adeline*

"Smile your on camera", look at this phrase, add some imagination too!!!

After looking at this sign, there are two different interpretation that strikes me.

1) smile = verb
your = you're = you (pronoun) are (verb) *perhaps a typo error here??? haha*
on = preposition
camera = noun

do you see the sign as "Smile, your (you are) on the camera"

2) smile = verb
your =possesive determiner
on = verb
camera = noun

now do u see it as smile at your on camera (a camera that is switched on)??

Please correct me if I am wrong:)

ceeteing

Hello all. Hope the week has been a a quick, good break for all of you taking English modules :)
Too short I must say, haha.

Well, nothing much from me but just some funny signs I came across as I was reading my emails. Enjoy :)


Here is one posted at the back door of a pizza shop in Niagara Falls.
I am very sure that the sign had meant to read ' You are under camera surveillance'


Here is another similar grammatical error made.
This was written by residents of North Carolina, asking Hurricane Isabel to stop coming.
What I found weird about this is, hurricanes cannot read!

Sarcasm... on post :)

Definitely an revolutionary way of warning someone about the dangers of drink driving! And by the way, this post is found in the overseas. By looking at this post, we can see that the use of: firstly, language and secondly, symbols and signs can co-create sarcasm that might just well effectively deliver the message of doom to would-be drunk drivers.

Cheers,
Gary CHEW

Quirky Photos

I took this picture in NTU when i happened to pass by.

It should be spelt as 'Service' and not 'Servict' Duct.

The above picture was taken on the MRT. I thought that it was rather quirky. " Investment essentials for these bearish times" Bearish could refer to

1) being bear-like or,

2) declining prices, unfavourable prospects of an economy.

Funny Chinese Signs

Hi all! Happened to find this picture online:


It reads, "please don't litter up" So that means we can litter "down"? I feel that signs in China are really funny because they always translate them into English directly from the way they are being phrased in Chinese. Just some thoughts...

Cheers,

Michelle =)

swimming pool

The whole sentence is grammatically wrong. I think that it is a direction translation of spanish to english. The supposed 'correct' sentence should be 'THIS SWIMMING POOL HAS NO LIFE GUARD THEREFORE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR LIFE.'

Picture courtesy of www.flickr.com

Ambigous UK newspaper headlines!

Hi guys! First of all, I have just taken the liberty to make some changes to the colors of this blog (do let me know if you're better with the previous settings and I'd change it back if you like).

Alright, let me share TWO hilarious newspaper headlines which I have taken from this website:
http://www.justchat.co.uk/boards/viewtopic.php?p=587476

The first ONE that struck me most: Miners Refuse to Work after Death

My explanation: After their death or in other words when they are dead, surely their previous employers cannot expect them to resurrect and work again right?!

Hilarious number TWO: New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group

Alright, fine. Some of you might not have gotten this one- it's alright I'd explain. Look closely at the word 'LARGER' in the above headline and consider the fact that obesity is being mentioned here. Obviously, the word 'LARGER' does refer to the number of people who are sought after to take the test and NOT the physical dimensions of each individual who is doing the test.

Please be kind to me-my explanation may really be very bad but.. you got it right?
Cheers!
Gary Chew

Scary food!

I ate some really great food in Shanghai. (: HOWEVER...

Daniang Shuijiao serves really good dumplings but as you can see, I think they are aiming for world domination. I don't quite know how to rephrase their slogan.



Cream Mushroom soup ---> Cream of Mushroom soup?

I still don't quite get the next dish (I did NOT order it.)
My interpretations:

1) the 'wild germs' hate soup with crispy skin. (yay! to prevent 'wild germs' from getting us, we shall all drink soup with crisp skin!)
2) the wild 'germ hates soup' (assuming hates is a kind of food?) with crisp skin. (wild soup?!)
3) 'wild germ hates soup' with crispy skin. ( soup with crispy skin? soup has skin?!!)

By the way, is hates a kind of food? Do we eat germs? Soup has skin? Wild germs drink soup? Wild germs exist?
I'm seriously puzzled.

Please correct me if I'm wrong!(:

A glaring spelling error

An obvious case of error in spelling the word 'Opening'. They should have left out a set of the letters N and I, in order to clearly spell their message of "Opening Soon".

Grammar in China

We all know that China is infamous for their English. During a study trip there years ago, I noticed there were many signs with ungrammatical English on the roads and even in hotels. It was a pity I didn't take any of the pictures back then. Anyway I found this particular sign on the Internet that caught my attention.

Lets analyze the sentence. Speaking (v) cellphone (n) is (v) strictly (adv) prohibited (v) when (conj) thunderstorm (n).

What that means is that if there is a thunderstorm, you are strictly not allowed to say the word cellphone.

I assume what the authorities meant was "Talking on the cellphone is strictly prohibited in the event of a thunderstorm.

Explosive dogs?

I found this on a website that was looking for funny signs in the UK. The above example is very similar to the hedgehog question in our tutorial.

1)The first interpretation would be the notion that very volatile search dogs are at work. (My, I think that's kind of macabre)
NP: Search dogs
Premodifier: Explosive

2)The second interpretation would be that the search dogs are working on something explosive.In that case, I think they ought to include an exclamation mark after 'explosive', so that people will not think that it's a premodifier of the NP "search dogs".

NO pls! dun hurt my mom!

Hello everybody! =) Here's something that I would like to share.

So what do you see? "Happy Birthday aunt flash mom" or "Happy Birthday aunt slash mom"? In any case neither of them sounds right. lols.

• "Happy Birthday aunt flash mom"
  The word 'flash' in this context can take a meaning:
  (informal)
  1) As a verb, to expose oneself in an indecent manner
  2) As an adjective, ostentatious or showy; attracting attention by being large or expensive eg. a flash car/he is very flash, isn't he?
  
  
• "Happy Birthday aunt slash mom"
  The word 'slash' in this context can take a meaning:
  1) As a verb, to cut with a violent sweeping stroke or by striking violently and at random, as with a knife or sword.
  (informal)
  2) As a conjunction, as well as; and. Used in combination and often rendered as a virgule in print: an actor-slash-writer; a waiter/dancer.

Anyways, I'll end off with what the original blogger has said regarding this picture:
"Although I suppose if Aunt flashed Mom that would liven up the party, and it's certainly preferable to Aunt slashing Mom."
- Cake Wrecks

I hope I am actually sharing accurate information here. *smiles*

Definitions quoted from:
dictionary.com and Oxford Advanced Learners' dictionary
Picture from: http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/
(a blogger that blogs about cake wrecks - where professional cakes go horribly wrong, hilariously wrong)

1 Funny Avatar

Hello! I'm sure some of you are smiling to your screens right now. I found this pretty funny when I first saw it. Well, it's taken from NoiseBot.com, a website selling funny t-shirts, hoodies and bags. Their designs make good MSN avatars, hence the title of this post.

Anyway, the phrase here has two meanings...

1) One which means literally subscription to a magazine and how the subscriber finds the magazine issues boring,

and the other

2) How person A wants to severe ties with person B because A is sick of the constant problems/ whining person B weighs A down with.

Hence, I think that "subscription" and "issues" are homonyms... (I'm not too sure, can someone enlighten me please?)

Anyway, I'm sure we all know straight away that it's the 2nd option :)

-Bernice

One Word, Many Word Classes

In the comic above, the word "down" is used as an adjective, which is used to describe a specialized machine that is not working.

The adjective "down" has another meaning as well. For example, "She has been feeling down since her husand died." 

"Down" can be used as a preposition (Who put my Fendi Baguette down there?) (We drove down Haji Lane), verb (He downed two jugs of bourbon coke by himself) or even an adverb (Have you written it down?) (My father has paid the down payment for the new Mercedes C-Class).

'Phrase Teaser'

Hi all!

I just want to share with you a quote that many companies use to market their products.

Have you realized that most advertisements say that the new product is "new and improved"? Has it occurred to you that if something is new, then there has never been anything before it. If it is an improvement, then there must be something before it and therefore, it cannot be new.

What do you guys think?

Love,

Edwin C

An advertisment that "caught my eye"...

I don't see anything grammatically wrong with this ... Its just interesting to see how many meanings it can take. I personally like to believe this poster is claiming that

I descend from a family of heroes...haha, always look at the bright side of things huh.

Alot of ads are using figurative language in promoting their product nowdays (sometimes they don't even realise it!)

Railway signs

Some of you may have already seen this, as I've also posted this somewhere else. But in case you haven't ...

When I lived in the UK, I used to love taking the train everywhere, and this grew into an interest in railway memorabilia. Here are some great Railway Notices from Britain’s past. (Present-day notices are, unfortunately, far less interesting.)

(1) Railway notices contain surprisingly good examples of non-finite clauses used as postmodifiers in Noun Phrases:

NOUN PHRASE = “Any person committing a nuisance”
Determiner = “Any”
Head = “person”
Postmodifier = “committing a nuisance” (non-finite clause of the V-ing variety)

NOUN PHRASE = “Men employed by farmers”
Head = “Men”
Postmodifier = “employed by farmers” (non-finite clause of the V-ed/ V-en participle variety)

(2) And I’ve always liked the following sign. There’s nothing grammatically wrong in any of these signs, but the one below would be great for teaching about how to identify the different meaning units in a sentence, and how to decide which words belong together as a noun phrase.

Noun Phrases in the portion with the instructions:

your feet
the seats
stoves
the compartment
the calls of nature
the window

Note that “your feet upon the seats”, “stoves inside the compartment”, and “the calls of nature from the window” are NOT Noun Phrases. In each of these cases, separate meaning units are involved. ==> Do not put SOMETHING (your feet) SOMEWHERE (upon the seat). Do not light SOMETHING (stoves) WHERE (inside the compartment). Do not relieve WHAT (the calls of nature) HOW / WHERE (from the window).

There are many other interesting railway signs, but I think I won’t hog the space here.

R Tang

Good start

Many thanks to Gary for setting this up for all of us. And thanks too for those who have already started with your entries.

I am looking forward to seeing what all of you post here. Do try if you can to comment a little on what you find interesting about the photos or language snippets that you post, in addition to just posting them. It doesn’t have to be a very profound comment, but it’s good if we can learn something about language in addition to having fun. And do make this interactive and comment on each other’s posts.

I hope you all enjoy yourselves. We don't have to take ourselves too seriously here, but do maintain some level of professionalism. We are all in the education field after all, and some day, who knows, you may want to show this blog to your students or your colleagues as an example of how the English language can be fun.

Ramona Tang.

Weird Warning Signs

Yes! And I'm the second one... Muahahaha... I created an account just for this e-learning... So this better be GOOD! I'll just use net language arh... Dun care anyway since it's a blog, must use the IT/Net jargons... Dun *dotz* me arh... I'm just trying to lighten up the atmosphere. *grins sheepishly*

Anyway, I dun haf an entertaining pic, but wat I do haf is a warning sign or 2 that I remember sniggering or lol or rofl at or even horrible impressions of.

1st one...

DOGS! BEWARE PEOPLE!

*Dude! R u warning us to beware of the dogs or warning the dogs to beware of us?! *
I was riding my bike while passing by my neighbour's house... Nearly fell off the bike...

another one... *this is not a semantic or grammatical ambiguity but it's definately a bad spelling error!*

Pubic Property

Do not vandalise!

I saw that on the net a few years back... can't rmb which site. I was utterly petrified when I saw that... My young mind was tarnished indefinately... T.T It doesn't make sense though... I mean u shouldn't be vandalising on stuff be it PUBLIC or PRIVATE! Unless it's urs than I got nothing to say!!!!

There's more weird signs from over the world that I can rmb... But I think I would just stop there. If not other pple got nothing to say... hehe... Take care peeps!

LOVE,

~MILDRED~

Hello all! Hidayah Amaliah here.

Looks like im the first one to post.

Anyways, here's something i would like to share with you people. Enjoy!

Photo courtesy of Gabriel Camelin.
Found in Bangkok, Thailand.