Word of the day: etiolated

I remember well what this word means. It describes plants that grow in insufficient light so look blanched and have elongated stems. It was introduced in my high school Agricultural Science class. As soon as I heard it I joked: Like David!

Everybody else in the class understood what I meant and laughed. The unfortunate target of my joke was a classmate who was somewhat pale and spindly. He transferred to another school later, nothing to do with my joke, nor was he bullied. I wonder what became of him and if he remembers this moniker. I'm sure he's bulked out like all the rest of us. 🙁

Etiolated boy

Two words for we in Malay

Malay is a relatively easy language to learn. For example there is no conjugation or indication of number for verbs. However Malay has a feature that English doesn't. Malay has two pronouns for we, kami and kita. Simply put kami does not include the listener, whereas kita does. So where English would use the same pronoun we for these sentences:

Thanks, we had a great bushwalk.

We must take better care of our environment.

Malay would use kami for the first and kita for the second.

I feel that this is a lacuna in English. If there were two forms of we, pollies would have to openly prevaricate in sentences like this:

We will all benefit substantially from this tax cut.

😉

If I may briefly mention a few things…

First Day Covers

Remember these? I was reminded by one in my collection of paper mail that was sent to me 48 years ago. In those days FDCs commemorated special days and were collector's items. Some aficionados went to the trouble of getting them at the post office on the first day of issue to gift to friends.

It was sent to me by a friend who was the younger brother of a boss I worked for after school. He may have been a colleague, I can't remember. Obviously he was keen on FDCs and was kind enough to send me one. I wonder what's become of him. I hope he had a good life.

Sugar people

He liked word jokes

A joke a friend of mine made came back to me today. A couple of university friends, one on a break from studying in NZ, and I, were discussing what to do over the Chinese New Year break. We were considering taking a ferry to Pangkor Island, off the coast of Perak, to stay in a beach chalet. Talking about the holidays, the NZ friend invented the phrase sugar people.

We knew exactly what he was joking about. Chinese sometimes call themselves Tang people, 唐人, because that period of Chinese civilisation was a glorious era. However the character for Tang, with the radical for rice added to the left, becomes the character for sugar, 糖. The characters are homophones and context disambiguates. You'll usually hear the Cantonese phrase tong yan, and it doesn't mean sugar people.

The other incident I remember is on the return trip on the ferry, we observed one of the passengers conspicuously taking great pleasure smoking a cheroot. Annual Chinese New Year cigar, quipped my friend, the implication being that it was a once-per-year treat.

My friend's somewhere around, possibly in Singapore. I miss his quirky sense of humour.

While writing this I discovered that sugar people are in fact a thing. They are figurines made from melted sugar. I never saw them in Malaysia though. Sugar was for tea or coffee, and sugar objects would have attracted ants.

Sugar people dining out

My dad read Japanese

Datsun stand at industrial fair in Penang

Well, actually just katakana, not the full Japanese syllabary, which includes kanji, hiragana and some rōmaji. It came back to me today that my dad was able to translate electronics terms from repair manuals that I had and electronics trade magazines that my brother was subscribed to after returning from studies in Japan. I particularly remember トランジスタ (toranjisuta, transistor) and ラジオ (rajio, radio). Then there were components like コンデンサ (kondensa, condenser, an old synonym for capacitor). However they have contracted television to テレビ (terebi) something they have also done to animation.

Where did he learn katakana? It wasn't for work. In the late 60s Japanese companies had only begun to export their cars to Malaysia, and they had set up some manufacturing in Malaysia, but my dad had no dealings with those enterprises. Rather, it was because as a young man he had lived through the Japanese occupation of Malaya during WWII. Katakana is phonetic and used for foreign and loan words so relatively easy to learn. I suppose it was a survival skill, but he was also good at picking up knowledge. He even showed me the katakana scheme but I have let that knowledge lapse. He didn't tell me any war stories. Our family suffered the privations of wartime occupation, but emerged relatively unscathed, compared to far more unfortunate civilians.

The first telephone exchange

 

You can have my phone but not my cat

At university one of the lectures in final year engineering was on telecommunications, which was not formally covered by a course. It was presented by an engineer from Telecom Malaysia, the national phone company. He explained that the first automatic telephone exchange switch was invented by Strowger, an undertaker, allegedly because he suspected that the town switchboard operator was diverting calls to her husband, his business rival.

One of my classmates was very susceptible to jokes. If you told him a joke, he would start laughing and keep laughing for a minute or two. After that even a reminder of the joke would set him off again.

Anyway when I heard the phrase first telephone exchange, my mischievous mind caused me to say to him: First telephone exchange; you give me your phone, I'll give you mine. That set him off.

We got told off by the lecturer for the disruption.