After years of travelling on Singapore's MRT, I finally realised today what irritates me about the announcement that I like millions of other people have been hearing twice a day, everyday. Here's one of the recorded voice's announcements:
Passengers who are continuing their journey on the North-East line, please alight at the next station.
What could be wrong with that helpful suggestion! you might think. It's irked, irritated and generally gnawed at me for years and I've never been able to put my finger on it. I haven't heard the announcement for the past few months as I've been going to work on my motorcycle but I took the train to work today and it hit me.
Finally.
The first half of that sentence is in the third-person plural while the second half inexplicably shifts to the second-person singular/plural! I think perhaps I missed this simple explanation until now because the second clause is implicitly second-person: there's no mention of a "you". The sentence correctly framed would be in the second-person all the way through, of course.
As a wag once put it:
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
And here comes the blanket statement that I can't do full justice to without banging out an hour's worth of text: this is pretty typical of Singapore. Try to be, um, "world-class" by copying other world-class systems' helpful announcements (good), do it with a slick-sounding recording (er, okay), but then look foolish by making amateur mistakes (yeck).
Daddy's gonna love this post! :-)
Posted by: Rathi | May 06, 2010 at 11:35 AM