Learnin new words…

17 03 2008

… every day. Always.

Today’s “a ha” occurred while reading our Annual Report. And after groaning about Sam P’s $20M salary … I found enjoyment in the words my communication peers had paired…

<snip>”Business: Impelled by this new global arena…”</snip>

“Impelled?” thought I. Pray, tell. I have heard “compelled,” surely. But to ‘im-pel.’ This is new. Upon further investigation, I discovered (thanks to dictionary.com):

“impel means to urge or encourage while compel means to take action as a result of pressure or coercion; impel is very similar in meaning to compel but suggests even more strongly an inner drive to do something and often a greater urgency in the desire to act”

Like it.


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Categories : general knowledge, work scenes

Word play

21 11 2007

Ok, so I see things differently now that I’m living in Asia. For example, there’s a poster in the office advertising an upcoming family day for employees. The very colorful headline reads:

   Funtasia

Only, my brain does not see “Fun .. Asia” it reads “Funt|Asia” … and methinks, what is a “Funt” anyway and why is that a good pun? Well, dictionary.com tells me that “funt” is Polish for “pound” (as in “that weighs 2 lbs” not the verb). … So, it’s an unintentional bad pun I’m sure. Still, it’s what I see now. Sorry Mickey (ref to “Fantasia” which I think they were trying to play off except with “fun” instead of “fan” … just didn’t work for me.)

In other “word” play … a colleague passed me this Web site today. It’s a good way to waste time, I mean exercise your brain: www.freerice.com. The point? Correctly define the word displayed on the screen and 10 grains of rice are donated via the sponsors to the UN’s World Food Programme. Oh, and they score your vocab prowess — just what all of us Type A’s need, a score. So .. enter with caution. And if you must know, Conrad scored higher than I did … but we all know he’s in study-mode right now, so once we get him back to TV his brain should shrink down to a governmentally accepted size. ;-)


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Flavour of S’pore

29 10 2007

Just a short post to give you a flavor of the language here… it’s English, but it’s not the same as the English we speak in the states.

They write “S’pore” for short.

They say “++” to indicate additional things are available for an extra cost

They don’t call it “take-out” or “take-away” … you order the food as a “pack it” (or “packet” — I haven’t been able to get a straight answer on that yet).

Cough drops don’t come in methol or eucalyptus, instead you’ll find things like “citrus lemongrass”

They say “can,” not “ok.” (To add another syllable and add extra emphasis, they’ll often add the phony word “la” at the end … of anything “Can la” “No la” “She did la”)

And it’s not a “cell phone” or a “mobile” … it’s a “handphone!”


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Categories : singapore