Being one who cannot sit still for long, I tend to snack while watching a film. This means that I’m not totally mindful of what my hand is doing — it just moves automatically from snack to mouth.
On one such occasion, the snack was pistachio nuts. One of them was not completely opened. I absent-mindedly used my teeth to crack it open. Result? A ￡126 bill from the dentist for a crown for the cracked tooth. Expensive lesson, indeed, for not being a bit more mindful.
(London, UK, 2015?)
The Chinese saying 聰明絕頂 / 聪明绝顶 / cōngmíng jué dǐng / “clever bright extreme top” means “clever to the highest degree”.
絕 jué, however, also means "to cut off", e.g., 絕交 jué jiāo / to stop being friends (sever relations).
The pun-loving Chinese like to put a different spin on 聰明絕頂: that the cleverness cuts off the top (part of the head), therefore to go bald.
A Chinese friend says, “Everything stops growing on the top of the head (头顶 tóu dǐng) if someone knows too much knowledge” (李懿 / Li Yi, 2022).
Being a knowledge nerd, I always need to know the reason behind something, so am forever asking “why?” in real life anyway, but as a teacher, I do it even more, to get the students to talk.
During my one-to-one lessons with banker Alex, he’d check each time, “Do you really not know, or are you just trying to make me say it in Chinese?”
When I told current student Rosie (a retired teacher herself) about this, she came up with the term “professional ignorance”. Haha, brilliant.
Helping out a Singaporean couple with their gardening, I'm trying to re-house the water cress I'd given them last year from a makeshift bed (thick plastic lining bottom and sides) into pots for sitting in a tray of water (for constant supply of water and to stop the snails and slugs from getting to them).
Asked the wife which of the pots I could use. She said, "Better ask the boss, or might get told off if we use the wrong pots."
This is a case of kena, the passive marker for being at the receiving end of something not nice, so "to kena V" = English: to be verbed. So one would say, “You’re going to kena scold. / I kena scold for not checking first.” As it’s used so much, and Singlish coming about because people are lazy speakers, it just gets reduced to kena: “You’re going to get kena.” (Sort of equivalent in English: “You’re going to get it.”)
Asked my RI (Raffles Institution) classmates to confirm that I'd got it right (since I never spoke good Singlish and have been away for so long). Boo Tat came back, saying:
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You must add the verb if you want to be specific eg “you sure kena whack”. You leave open if it is a follow up of a consequence ie “You sure kena!”
Generally, if you gotten into some shit, you can say “kena Sai!" Credit must go to my daughter. I first heard her saying “kena Sai” whenever she got into trouble as a kid!!
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wikipedia says:
Borrowed from Malay kena (“to be struck, hit, affected by”).
kena (indeclinable) (Manglish, Singlish)
