Proper Grandma

Bet you thought this post was gonna be about my grandmother. Well, it's not. But the title serves to show the importance of speaking properly. The title was meant to be "Proper Grammar". (sometimes heard in the speech process with reference to grannies, eg "My grammar is sleeping in the room").

It never fails to baffle me how certain words in the English vocabulary can be so wrongly used. Grammatically or in terms of pronunciation. And commonly used wrongly, correctly by so many. And I don't mean Singlish. Singlish is a separate thing altogether. Know what I mean?

Ok, ok. Let's try this: "NOWSADAYS".
How come got so many 's' one ah?

Another common grammatical error is "Wow, did you saw that?" or "Did you went there?"
Don't these sentences sound 'sala' the minute they leave the tongue?

Yet another one: "This is an important document. Dont lost it, ok?"
????????????

Or: "Can you borrow me your pen?"
So are we borrowing or lending ah?????

Another one: "Although she was tired, but she still wanted to run."
Although.....but????? Like "Despite of" and "In spite of"????

An extremely common one when one is injured: "So pain, so pain!"
Does it take a lot of effort to add another syllable 'ful' to complete the word?

And as YJ once highlighted: "You eat already or not?"
Already or not????????

Not implying that I have impeccable English, but you know what I mean right? Aren't these very basic?

And yes, to those of you thinking: "You think your Mandarin very good ah?", I'm not saying that I don't make mistakes in my mother tongue. I do, but I make the effort to correct it. Like how I try to remember when ordering 'cai fan' that "zha dan" is bomb, and not fried egg. And that bird's egg is called 'niao dan' and not 'niao ji dan'. And how the steamed bao with chicken is "ji ROU bao' and not "ji bao". Or that 5 cents is 'wu fen' and not 'ban mao'. But then how come 55 cents if 'wu mao BAN'???