More better next time

It happened. No matter how much I want to deny, bury, erase or repress, it happened. A few days ago, my wife and I were choosing between shades of yellow paint, when I casually blurted, “I prefer the more darker one.”

Even as the defiling words were leaving my lips, there was a crazed shriek from whatever part of my brain holds grammar dear. The ground shifted under me, the room began to spin, and my left eyelid started to batter my cheek with maniacal convulsions. I, me, moi, had said, “more darker.”

With the possible exception of the Bee Gees, there are few things as noxious to my ear as that particular grammatical pollutant that makes an unholy alliance of “more” and a comparative adjective ending in “er.” You know, things like more longer, more easier, and -- that crowning heresy -- more better. As a result, I’ve got used to being the one that corrects this abomination, not the one who inflicts it.

One of the great pleasures of my career has been to interact with students from all over the world. However, this pleasure comes with an evil twin: having to bear with English spoken to varying degrees of proficiency. Over the years, my unfortunate students and I have suffered together as I have corrected their oral and written presentations. They all learned that there is one error that makes me writhe in pain: let’s call it the “er-gregious” fault.

While at McGill University in Montreal, I confronted the er-gregious affliction often enough to recognize its potential to sneak up behind and insinuate itself into my speech. But I kept vigil over my linguistic landscape and had been successful in beating back its onslaughts.

Alas, with my move to Singapore, I have lost my equilibrium. The er-gregious fiend has assaulted me so relentlessly, my grammatical immune system has been permanently compromised. Yes, I have Acquired Grammar Deficiency Syndrome. Hence, choosing the colour of my daughter’s bedroom became the occasion for the full manifestation of the depths my English has sunk to. I mean, to which my English has sunk.

Do I have a right to be so viscerally repelled by the er-gregious miscreant? Absolutely not. My English has never been perfect. I regularly muddle who versus whom, and have only recently learned how to pronounce “concomitant” correctly. Perhaps more relevant to the Singaporean situation, although I’ve been studying French for 50 of my 52 years, I still make hopelessly basic mistakes. But I just can’t help it; the er-gregious fault makes me wince. That little twinge caused by the confusion of “loan” and “borrow” is but a distant second.

Other turns of phrase common in Singapore are innocuous, pleasant or entertaining by degrees. The ubiquitous “lah” doesn’t even register anymore. I don’t think I’ve used “lah” myself, but felt a weird sense of belonging when a friend caught me replying in the affirmative with, “Can.” A Singaporean’s use of “fanciful,” where I would say “fancy,” is charming. And hearing a crowded bus described as “squeezy” is great fun. I can live with “last time” as a term for “in the past,” but I would rather not go to the cinema to see a “flim.”

Now, before I am inundated with hate mail telling me that I should go back to Canada -- the more sooner, the more better -- let me affirm my great admiration for the many citizens of this country who speak three, four or five languages: Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, English and others. To take a small example, on a flight to the States, I once sat beside a Singaporean who was a native Tamil speaker, and who addressed me in perfect English while correcting and expanding the list of Chinese characters I was studying.

With that in mind, I, with my one-and-a-half measly languages, have no business complaining about people not speaking perfectly what may be their third, fourth or fifth language. In future, I’ll be more circumspecter.

Mark Featherstone is a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, and has lived in Singapore for two and a half years. He does not want to know how many grammatical errors you found in his column.