I took an English friend from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) days, Simon, to the Indian YMCA canteen for lunch one year.
Simon had travelled around India for a while after he graduated from SOAS in 1980.
The moment he walked in, he sniffed the air, and said, "OH! This smells just like India!"
Then, when he started to tuck into his chicken curry dish, he said, "No, it's not authentic enough — there's too much meat on the chicken…!"
(London, 1982? / 1983?)
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!!
Unquote
wikipedia says:
Borrowed from Malay kena (“to be struck, hit, affected by”).
kena (indeclinable) (Manglish, Singlish)
Grow watercress (Nasturtium officinale) in plastic bottles -- placed horizontally, with the top fifth/quarter cut off to form a mini bed. Maybe no need to make holes as they like to be waterlogged, or small holes for some drainage. Once they establish themselves, you just keep cutting off the tops to eat. The ones with roots sticking out of the nodes, you can snip off and start new ones.
Two ex-students (one British-born Chinese, now living in Singapore; one Malaysian-born Chinese, now living in New Zealand) discovered recently on FaceBook that they’d both been on my evening class programme, thus sharing the same teacher.
This reminds me of two other students back in the 80s and 90s.
One was in a park in Taipei, started a conversation with another Westerner, and discovered that they’d both studied under me.
Ditto another one in a Beijing park.
What are the odds of that, I ask you?
(Singapore / New Zealand / Taipei / Beijing, 1980s–2023)
