This article could save you millions! As the title suggests it’s about those little words that say so much; there are massive legal implications for the specific non-use of one such tiny word in Malaysia especially, and for the use of another in its place. Not only are the nuts and bolts of language coming undone, it’s all going to blow open in some cases.
My phone’s predictive texting doesn’t like ‘if’, even, or ‘is’. It’s been too predictable or even predictive for too long now, in how it comes up with “OSS” or “OS” for is and “of” or “off” for if. Can we truly call them smart phones? I’ll call mine that when it doesn’t need charging daily, or even more often.
I keep hearing “One of it” when people mean one of them. They’re referring to one out of a number of items. Saying one of it gets us as far into instant redundancy as going forward or at this point in time.
While we’re talking about it though — I mean it — it’s designed to save a lot of repetition. But as Manchester (UK) rock band The Fall said, you dig repetition. I hear a lot of needless repetition in English here and I think, why didn’t they just say it after the first one, for the last million or so repetitions?
To be fair, in writing I do see acronyms introduced in brackets on the first usage too, and then exclusively at subsequent mentions. There goes my secret fantasy of hearing a poem that mentions Mechanical digger idler and roller bolts, or something equally sub-lime (beneath the limestone or chalk), four or five times in as few lines or maybe six, rather than using ‘it’ or ‘that mechanical part’, something like that. It could be the poetry equivalent of heavy metal, one to headbang to in the mosh-pit at Maharajalela or Bukit Jalil stadium poetry gigs.
Even though my final point here has far bigger consequences, the star of the shorties surely has to be So. Until COVID arrived, starting a sentence with that word was a reliable definer of US usage. Just like I guess, any Brit using the phrase in that way so unfeasibly long ago would be ridiculed for having locked themselves into a TV and swallowed the key. For the rest of the Anglophone world it was and still is either an intensifier (see above: so unfeasibly long ago) or a conjunction: She used that phrase endlessly so I asked her to stop; he started every sentence with so so I shushed the so-and-so.
For Irish people such as my relatives, the word so can appear almost randomly anywhere, or so I still reckon; anywhere but at the start of a sentence, though that’s probably so outdated now, so it is.
OK, here’s the kicker: At the LRT, MRT and KMT (city train) stations, for example, we are reminded constantly not to eat or drink, not only on the train but anywhere on the premises. Rather, we are told not to eat and drink — dan minum — what a difference such a small word can make, potentially.
Anyone who’s ravenously hungry on the transport system or — I repeat, or — extremely thirsty, I presume can rightfully say that by only eating or only drinking they are not doing both. If I heard the announcements correctly you can only qualify as an offender by both eating and drinking.
This might seem quite trivial, but think about all the big legal contracts and other documents, those with millions and even billions of Ringgit hanging from such “and” phrases that really should be “or”. Are you really going to try to sue someone who is offending your terms in one single way when you have made their liability conditional on them ticking all the naughty boxes — kicking down the stage, thinking for themselves, getting the cake and even eating it? What if they’ve only kicked the stage down or one of the other things in that list?
You may not want to get into the details of anything that ‘or’ might bring up, the seemingly endless options that stall action through endless talk. With the sweeping use of ‘and’ you can brush all that detail aside by including everything globally. That I can imagine — so action lah, no need talk so much.
But who is it that’s claiming the near opposites and and or have the same meaning? To think, a high percentage of those legal notices have been past the eyes of a proofreader before they reached the public.
Redrafting the document or official notification you could say, “Any of the below listed actions or any combination of them”, something like that. That first clause should be enough on its own though as far as I can see. While I’m no legal expert, you should only need critical thinking.
If you’ve saved a billion Ringgit by reading this, you might be relieved to know my next post will be about a far more important topic such as skies or cats; not both, I promise.
So (yes, so!), I hope you manage to keep on meaning what you say by saying what you mean.
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Thanks for reading! I’d like to feature a few of Lawrence Pettener’s author pages here:
Poetry reviews at Asian Review of Books:
The Star newspaper, Malaysia:
Mohani Niza’s excellent The Culture Review features around 16 of my interviews and reviews here: https://theculturereviewmag.home.blog/2021/08/23/lawrence-pettener-interviews-malaysian-poet-shirley-geok-lin-lim/
Kwailo Lumpur’s author page at Medium.com: https://medium.com/@lawrencepettener_87864
This post was produced on Temuan land.
Qing xia mien ping lun: Please comment below dan sila komen di bawah. In Tamil Go Ogle tells me that’s கீழே கருத்து தெரிவிக்கவும்: Kīḻē karuttu terivikkavum.
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