e pur si muove

Reuters reports: Viagra-fueled Italian stallions seized by police.

Studs getting pumped on sildenafil citrate. Talk about being too literal.

(I am probably going to get flamed for this, but whatever.)

It has come to my attention that some people have been lambasting bloggers who use the term “Singapore blogosphere”. These are the people who also take umbrage at “Singapore Idol”, for its egregrious violation of English grammar. (These are also in all probability the people who become apoplectic at “defence” v. “defense”, in spite of the ease of their mis-typing, an insidious spelling mistake that makes it pass cursory spell checkers. Or are those spelling checkers? Little plastic pieces that recite L-I-T-T-O-R-A-L?)

On technical grounds, the concerns of the grammar police are not unfounded. “Singapore blogosphere” is a construct of back-to-back nouns, as opposed to the technically more concordian adjective-noun construction.

But let’s face it: the word “Singapore” makes for extremely un-euphonymous conjugations. Sure, “Singaporean” is grammatically more correct, but is it truly an egregrious violation of English grammar? It certainly isn’t quite as catchy. And let’s face it, there is no clear-cut a priori reason for choosing to adjectivize “Singapore” as “Singaporean”. Why not “Singaporese” or “Singaporish”, to name just two? Or why not even borrow from the more outlandish geographical adjectives to use: “Singapork”, “Singaporesque”, “Singaporino” or “Singaporic”?

Let’s face it, the fact that the adjective form of “Singapore” is “Singaporean” is pretty much boils down an arbitrary choice of convention, as far as I can tell. Why didn’t we just pick “Singapore” to be country, citizen and adjective? Any etymological references would be greatly appreciated. And how about the fact that word “Singaporean” itself is both a noun (referring to citizens) and an adjective to begin with? Consider Newfoundland and Newfoundlander. (and - dare I conjugate - Newfoundandish?)

And seriously, what’s wrong with compounding nouns to make a new noun? Perfectly rational and sensible scientists have been violating the ‘precious’ adjective-noun grammatical doctrine for centuries now. And yet it seems that peer review never did get around to agreeing otherwise. Quantum mechanics is an archetype that comes to mind. For a while, purists came up with “quantal mechanics”, in contrast with “classical mechanics”, but to the best of my knowledge, this never did gain currency.

And compound nouns arising from the fusion of a scientist’s name and a concept are legion in technical fields: Bohr radii, Einstein diffusion, Green functions, Navier-Stokes régime, Rayleigh scattering, Smoluchowski equation. Not that there aren’t exceptions, such as Brownian motion or grammatical constructs such as Schrödinger’s equation, but sentences such as “The electron is on average 1.385 units of Bohr’s radius away” or “Now construct the time-dependent Greenish functions” simply do not roll off the tip of the tongue. Poor Green, to be the butt of so many tasteless jokes at colloquia.

The majority is not necessarily always correct, but I believe that an exception should be made for languages. Language is about communication, not the unthinking application of arcane grammatical rules. If it makes perfect sense and is unambiguous, why should it be “wrong”? I, for one, am going to continue using “Singapore blogosphere” until someone comes up with a better reason not to.

You-know-who threatened to sue you-know-who about you-know-what. And now, it seems, the whole world knows about it.

(If you haven’t been keeping up with the latest gossip, huichieh’s compilations should bring you up to speed. (thanks for the plug.)

To be continued…
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