砂漠のJeffire

Jeffirean Stories

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

This seems an interesting topic today to discuss, rather than the usual bantering of the whats-going-on-in-my-life oriented entries. Nonetheless, the topic still arose from my recent experiences and therefore you still can taste a tinge of my life. After all, I intended the blog to be something for me to reflect on in the future...

First, let me ask you, my dear friends, will you be offended if someone calls you 'uncle', or 'auntie', when you are obviously not married, not old, and still young and lively?

Both Pika and me, in our library jobs, were referred by parents of children as 'uncles'. Again, here I quote a conversation between me and my dear SMU buddy Leslie:

Me: and the uncle called me uncle la
Me: in e library got the parents alwiz tell their children 'wait the uncle scold u'
Me: 'go and ask the uncle'
Me: do i look uncleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Me: anyway i m gonna blog abt it sometime soon
L: haa
L: guess we're all loOkng old
Me: NAAA
Me: it's cos they got a lack of vocab
L: like kor kor?
Me: they dun wan to teach their kids dialect
L: then use brudder
Me: sounds army
Me: haha, our conv shall be quoted on my next blog entry
L: i am getting famous... yeah right
L: haa

So you see, we then tried to discuss some terms to use when addressing people of our age but without using local colloquials. Like you see above, I thought "brother", "bro", "sister" and "sis" seems quite NS-ed, or Christian-ed. Then an idea struck me. Thinking along the lines of the Chinese way of addressing one another ("comrade" or "tong zhi"), I have some suggestions here which I mentioned to Leslie:

a. Sings
b. Poreans

But "Sing" will be confused with the "Singhs" and "Poreans" seem quite weird, maybe sounds like "Koreans" and also could have an denotation -> are we full of holes? Haha.

So that returns the thinking process to zero again. How should we deal with this? How should we educate our parents that there are different people of different age groups, so that you do not call every adult man you see 'uncle' (not related in anyway too). It will be easier perhaps to use the occupational names like 'waiter', 'service assistant', 'helper' but kids and parents today do not want to hassle themselves with so many different words to remember. Somemore these service occupations are usually looked down upon, not like professionals. In the clinic the parent may tell their children, "say thank you to the doctor" but at the supermarket at the cashier, they would tell their children "quick pay money to the uncle (or auntie, usually)" when the cashier could be a 15 year old part-timer. And to the many non-Chinese (or some act-angmoh Chinese), using "korkor" and "jehjeh" seems unfitting.

Here I put forward my humble suggestions, especially to ALL THE STUPID SINGAPOREAN PARENTS (or other stupid people)which should help make the addressing simpler, with the female equivalents in brackets:

general - gentleman (lady)
"say thank you to this gentleman"

situational - use occupational terms
"say thank you to the waiter (waitress)"

flattering - handsome (belle)
"say thank you to this handsome" [seems abit colloquial though, can also substitute with dialect]

friendly - ask for a name, duh!(or look at the name tag)
"sorry, may I have your name?" "*****" "say thank you to ******" [is that so difficult?]

Hope this helps you people with limited vocabulary.

The other thing to complain about is my residential area. We all know recently it's the rainy season, and it has not stopped for days. Here, as one of the newest , hip, upcoming residential areas in Singapore, I see:

a. FLOODING of pavement, is there something wrong with your gradient marker, dear Mr Contractor? Can't you slant your pavement slightly so that the water can go to the drain?

b. Unsheltered walkways, this is the designer or urban planner's fault. Whoever he/she is, I guess must be some brainless guy who must be living in a fancy place. Thank you HDB for building a linkway from the carpark 3rd level to the 3rd level of my flat, and THANK YOU VERY MUCH for not building a shelter for that walkway, be it rain or shine, I still get to see the sky.

c. Earthworms, on the concrete, tiled void deck of my block, every day I am training myself to dodge earthworms... While I do not necessary find them nauseating (better than cockroaches right?), it is so funny to see earthworms in my modern, urbanised seaside town boasting of the name PUNGGOL 21. I say we call the area PUNGGOL -21, retro right? (My block looks like a factory anyway)

d. Exploitation by SBS, due to the lack of huge trees and sights, people here rarely walk the 5-10min to or from the MRT station, so they take the LRT, or the bus, which means more money spent taking that bus/LRT which takes aeons to arrive. I think maybe that's how they earn so much profit... THANK YOU. Maybe I should start buying SBS shares (ComfortDelgro Group).

Oh well, there's more to talk about but I'm happy living here for the wind, the serenity, and Punggol Plaza's quite comprehensive too. And being the starting point of NEL means I get a seat usually on the way out. Still not too bad for a town I call Punggol -21.

Finally, just let me update some stuff in life..

a. been reading history and histories of arts and mathematics... i should had done that when i was younger, then i would have appreciated what I have been learning so far... i guess perhaps we need to tell our kids how do those stuff learnt in school originated from...

b. yesterday's badminton was not too bad, less my oversight to not book 2 courts simultaneously rather than to had book a single court for 2hrs. To ask for some sympathy, please let me mention that until now nobody offered to pay a single cent for the booking. Oh, and there was a big hoo-ha caused by my insensitivity to Grace by insisting on having a competitive game rather than a relaxation game.. ah well, am really sorry about it, as it eventually snowballed to a counselling session by many of the people who turned up for the badminton session. And next week there should be another session coming up, hope it will be better... And probably I have to collect a gathering fund soon as I always have to pre-pay stuff for the group...

c. been fighting wars with karkars (cockroaches) at home...i supposed it's my family's habit of 1. not having a covered rubbish bin 2. a moistureful, dark and warm cabinet 3. misfortune - once one egg is layed, you have a lot more to battle against.. sigh. anyone got any good idea on this: no need to kill the cockroaches, and yet deter them from my home?

Wow, this is a long post...hope you have enjoyed reading it so far. Merry Christmas to all of you~!

Seasons Greetings
Jeffire

Acknowledged my existence at
1:21 AM