My Preferred Transaction

Like most of us, I have been communicating with banks perfectly successfully for many years. I have rarely had any trouble telling my bank how much money I want to take out, how much money I want to put in, or finding out how much money I have in my account.

But in the last couple of years, something has gone terribly wrong with the way in which I am forced to communicate with my bank. In particular, something has gone wrong with the screen instructions in the ATM machines belonging to my bank, whose name begins with C and ends with B.

It all began when they changed the text that appears on the screen when you use the ATM machine. When I first started using my bank's ATMs, it was relatively simple. I put my card in the slot, punched in my pin number, and selected the service I wanted and the amount of money I wanted to take out, or whatever. Then, the dialogue would close down when the machine asked me if I wanted a receipt. I would select YES, and the machine would tell me to retrieve my card and take my money. Easy.

But for some unknown reason, around two or three years ago, the bank added an extra question to the ATM dialogue. Nowadays, as soon as you have selected the amount of cash you want to withdraw, you are asked "do you wish to save this as your preferred transaction?"

I remember being utterly flabbergasted when I first encountered this utterly cryptic question. I thought I was having a Senior Moment. What on earth does it mean? Is it asking me if I want to do the same transaction again? Or is it asking me to save this transaction so that it automatically comes up when I use the ATM again? And if that's the case, what if I want to transfer money next time, or see how my shares are doing?!

So all I can do when I face this question is to select NO and carry on. Because with a PhD in linguistics, I cannot for the life of me work out what that question means.

And that's not the worst linguistic conundrum my bank has created for us cryptology experts who regularly use its ATMs in Kuching. Recently, they changed the dialogue for transferring money from your account to someone else's - something I do every month when I send money to my son in KL.

Previously, the transfer dialogue went something like this:

ATM: "Select from the following: deposit, withdrawal, check balance, transfer."

YOU: Select "Transfer"

ATM: "Please enter account you are sending from"

YOU: Enter account number

ATM: "Please enter amount"

YOU: Enter amount

ATM: "Please confirm if correct"

YOU: Confirm

Then the name of the account recipient is displayed on the screen, you press YES, and everything is fine and dandy.

But now, this simple procedure has been made more difficult by a level of linguistic mystification not seen this side of an official form. This is what happens now when you try to transfer money using my bank's ATMs. After selecting 'TRANSFER' from the menu, you get this:

ATM: Please select to account: (which is completely ungrammatical by the way!)

:Your account
:Third Party

Well, I guess I can't transfer money to my own account, so I have to select "Third Party", which actually doesn't make sense, but makes more sense than the alternative...

ATM: Please select from account (again, utterly ungrammatical!)

I guess this means that I have to tell it where the money is coming from. Isn't this obvious? Surely it's my account, right? Well, the ATM then shows a string of numbers at the top left of the screen which you then have to select. I guess that's my account number. Weird!!

Then, once I've done that, I am asked to type the amount of money I want to transfer, then I have to verify the transaction by viewing the details of the recipient as before. Then I can retrieve my card and receipt.

Now, why on earth do they have to make a simple procedure more complex and confusing by screwing up the language used in the dialogue? Why can't they use a dialogue that is short and straightforward and b****y grammatical? Why use confusing terms like 'to account' and 'third party'? Do they think we're stupid? Or is this some arcane code created by a hyper-intelligent race from another planet intended to hypnotise us?

I just don't have a clue. After all, I'm just a foreigner, what do I know?!?!

Senior Moment

Let me introduce you to a new English expression that I encountered yesterday. It's "Senior Moment". This new term hasn't reached the Oxford English Dictionary yet as far as I know, but it came to me via my mother during a phone call the other day.

A senior moment seems to refer to one of those times when you forget something, are absent-minded or perhaps acting a bit like a senile old fart. The senior part obviously refers to a Senior Citizen, hence 'senior moment'! It's basically a euphemism for losing your mind, going nuts, being one brick short of a full load, or, as we used to say years ago, "going Ga-Ga".

Seeing as it was my 43rd birthday only a couple of weeks ago, I have been thinking very hard about whether or not I am going Ga-Ga, or whether I am having a mid-life crisis or something like that. After all, I recently grew a goatee beard to make myself look more cool, which may be a sign of going round the bend, or a Senior Moment, because my goatee is decorated with two lovely snowy-white patches of grey hair on either side of my chin!

But yesterday, I had a serious Senior Moment which worried me, although looking back at it, I suppose it was rather amusing. It all started when I had dropped my wife back home after taking her to breakfast at Chilipeppers. It was my day to teach the Masters class at the university, so I kissed the wife goodbye and set off on my journey to the Fun Factory as usual. I hadn't even reached the next street on our housing estate when the Senior Moment happened.

I checked my left pocket to make sure I had my bunch of keys, but couldn't find them. Oh no!! Forgot my keys! If I went to work without them, I wouldn't be able to get into my office, wouldn't be able to collect my notes and books, and therefore wouldn't be able to teach my class.

So I turned right into the next street so that I could turn the car back round to go home for the keys. But as I was performing my three-point turn, I felt my pocket again and hey presto I could feel the metallic lump that was my bunch of keys. Perhaps my gut had disguised them the first time. So I now had to perform another turn so that I could go back the other way again, towards the road and back to work.

Anyone witnessing this event would have seen a door-wide Mat Salleh driving a Matrix round and round in circles at the entrance to the street, apparently without any reason, and then driving off in a huff, swearing bitterly. Not a very good PR image, I am thinking!

And the humiliation did not end there, because that evening, as we were preparing to go out to dinner, I couldn't find my bunch of keys again! I searched high and low: my pockets, the drawer, my wife's drawer, and in the end I found them in a place I could have sworn I didn't leave them, namely my briefcase. A second Senior Moment in the same day, and focused on the same object!

Some people believe in faeries - those invisible little people with wings who go around causing mischief everywhere like moving your razor blades or putting things where you didn't leave them or whatever.

Maybe my Senior Moments were caused by faeries. I must admit, it sounds a lot better than simply going Ga-Ga!

Oh, the Purity!!

As someone who might pretentiously be called a "language expert", I am constantly amazed at the attitudes some people have to language and language use. The other day, I was teaching my Masters in TESL class at the university and one of my students was commenting about the linguistic phenomenon known as 'code switching'. Code switching is where speakers who have access to more than one language will use different languages in the same situation, sometimes even in the same utterance.

Some examples from the Malaysian context would be something like "Oh, my little Timmy, he is so jahat (bad)", or "her anak angkat suda pergi to school" (her foster child already went to school).

People code-switch for many reasons - to signal a change in topic (perhaps English for formal topics, Malay for kampung topics), to acknowledge a change in the social dynamics of a situation (changing into the dialect when granny enters the room), to show off and appear trendy and modern-lah, or sometimes, just because of a lack of vocabulary.

But whatever the reasons why people code switch, it is a linguistic fact that they do do it, and they do it all the time. You only have to live in Malaysia for more than five minutes to see this. And, as a professor trying to understand how English is used in a multilingual society like this one, I fully acknowledge that code switching is a natural part of the linguistic life of this beautiful nation. Lah.

However, many people do not share this view. Apparently, characters in local television dramas have been officially banned from mixing their Bahasa Malaysia with other languages. Scriptwriters can no longer have their characters code-switching. So much for the media reflecting reality, I thought.

This reminds me of the situation back home, where swear words are not allowed on mainstream TV, resulting in some highly creative solutions to the conundrum of how to make your police drama series realistic and relevant, without upsetting the purists. One example of this was Britain's top police drama The Bill. In one hilarious episode, in which a young black policeman was working undercover in a Jamaican gang in London, one of the villains shouted out, when the police burst in to arrest them: "oh no, he's a blasted policeman"! Now somehow I doubt that a real life equivalent of this gangster would use a word like "blasted". More like an expletive beginning with F, I would say.

But I digress. Coming back to code switching, one of my students last week asked me whether I thought that code switching "pollutes" the language. I replied firmly in the negative. For one thing, how can you pollute a language? To argue that we can pollute a language assumes that a language is in some sense "pure" in the first place, and that mixing it up with words or phrases from another language makes it somehow "impure".

Well, by that definition, then, there are not many languages in the world that can be said to be truly "pure". Let's just start with English. The other day, I purchased the latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (revised 11th edition, 2006). Just a quick flick through its august pages will show you just how many words have entered English usage from other languages. Here are a few examples: Bearnaise, Beaujolais, beaux arts, bechamel, beau. And that's just from pages 118 and 119, and all the examples are taken from French.

And what about Malay? Even with my poor knowledge of the language, I know that Malay contains many words from Arabic (most of the Islamic vocabulary), Chinese, Portuguese and of course English. How pure is that?!?!? Yet the language continues to be used effectively in official and non-official circles by all its speakers.

So the point is, that if we use Malay, or English, or any other of Malaysia's plethora of tongues, in a multicultural setting like this one, there is bound to be a certain amount of mixing. And most language experts agree that this is a natural and normal phenomenon.

Code switching is perfectly natural and perfectly safe. It does no harm to the languages involved, in fact it will enrich them by providing lots of interesting new ways that meanings can be expressed. Also, code switching in a multicultural nation like this one brings people together linguistically in a way that no amount of official campaigns and slogans can do. Malaysians happily sharing one another's languages will lead to them happily sharing their country too.

And as for the purists who think that their languages will suffer corruption from all this mixing, I say this: languages are always evolving and changing to meet new needs and situations. It is not a sign of linguistic poisoning for a language's users to mix their codes when the situation demands it, or for the language to admit new words and phrases into its lexicon. Instead, it is a sign that a language is healthy and vibrant, and adaptable.

Obviously, I am not advocating the totally free use of code switching in all situations. There will be some situations, such as official settings, news broadcasts, etc, where such switching between linguistic lanes is not appropriate and may lead to confusion.

However, we have to accept that language is a social communication system which is used by many different kinds of people, for an ever-increasing range of diverse purposes. Language is not a fixed, monolithic thing that never changes. If English, or Malay for that matter were absolutely pure and unchanging, they would have died out long ago because they wouldn't have been able to meet their speakers' needs.

Shopper's Paradise?

Well, I decided to check out the two newest shopping sensations in town, namely the Boulevard and the Spring. Both of these monsters of retailing opened very recently, to take advantage of the holiday period, but I must say that I am slightly underwhelmed by the whole experience.

I mean, come on. What are we supposed to think when the two shopping centres – billed as the first true mega stores in Sarawak – open their doors before they are completed. I was under the obviously mistaken impression that a building was supposed to be completely built before it opened for use by the paying public. But alas no. This is Kuching.

Things looked fishy when the Boulevard opened first, and our neighbour warned us not to go to there because they had not finished the car park yet. So apparently, there were millions and millions of eager, and doubtless frustrated potential shoppers all trying to get in to this new palace of commerce, only to find it almost impossible because there was nowhere to park the car. And of course no one wants to park down the road and walk, cos this is the Tropics and people don’t do that!

So, Annie and I decided to give the Spring a chance first, mainly because it’s closer to our house and I heard the Spring has a branch of MPH, one of Malaysia’s few decent bookshops. So the opening day came, January 10^th and –

CARQUAKE!! PEOPLEQUAKE!!!

You couldn’t get within half a kilometre of the place for the oceans and oceans of cars whose drivers were obviously trying the Spring because they couldn’t park in the Boulevard. I mean, the sheer number of cars was quite shocking – they were all double parking on the side of the main road from Simpang Tiga to Kuching, jammed solid all the way to the first set of traffic lights, and of course, the actual Spring car park itself was completely iced up with cars, and people were risking their lives crossing the busy road to get to the shops. You would think the Pope had come to town, or Elvis, or Billy Graham.

We decided on the spot to divert to the Saberkas building, which ought to be quieter, but were held up by the fact that the traffic lights were out, which made the traffic jam even more interesting and adventuresome. Eventually, we got to Saberkas, safe and sound.

Well, that’s life. In any case, we thought it best to avoid the Spring for a week or so until the dust settled, but eventually we couldn’t resist the temptation and made our first attempt to enter the place on Monday night. It wasn’t as hard as it appeared, and when we drove through the car park entrance, we descended into a bright, very well lit and absolutely cavernous underground car park which was thoughtfully signposted with little colour and number coded signs to stop you getting separated from your car forever.

Once we parked the car, we entered the bowels of the shopping concourse upon a sci-fi travelator which took us up towards the shops on bumpy rubber walkways.

Now, you know when a building is impressive by its effect on your emotions the moment you walk through the door. I have felt this transcendent sense of awe many times in my life – when I first entered King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, I was instantly touched by the sheer soaring glory of that most magnificent of ecclesiastical buildings. Also, when I first stepped up to the Statue of Liberty in New York, I was amazed by how human hands could create such a stupendous facsimile of the human form, in such detail. And more recently, when I first stood at the feet of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, I was humbled by their sheer size and precariousness.

Did the Spring make me feel anything like this? Frankly no. But it came close. The interior is huge, spacious, bright, and decorated with colourful paper lanterns hanging from the ceilings, and fake cherry blossom trees poking out just about everywhere. It has shades of the Suria KLCC or the Mid-Valley Megamall in KL, but on a smaller and simpler scale.

There are many, many shops, a sizable proportion obviously catering for the very well heeled, such as Habib the jewellers, which was complete with security guards toting serious-looking pieces of armoury.

Many of the shops were not opened yet, including my MPH, and many shop fronts were just walls or closed shutters. Nicely decorated and painted, but still walls and shutters. But despite the gaps, the place was friendly, airy and gave the impression that here was an upmarket shopping mall which wasn’t going to look down its nose at you. The food bazaar was a case in point – an eclectic collection of food stalls surrounded by tables with comfortable and swanky plush varicoloured seats. The place was colourfully and tastefully lit like a trendy bistro.

The food on offer covered a wide variety of cultures and geography – Indian, Indonesian, Western, pasta, Chinese, Japanese and even Arab. Oh and there was a branch of Sushi King right next door for us serious sushi junkies. I decided on pasta, though, and had a very healthy plate of fettuccine bolognaise which was so good I didn’t leave anything behind, which is very rare these days given my teeth...

Downstairs, there is a Starbucks, Kenny Rogers, and a Secret Recipe, for those who can’t resist a popular brand name. And, once all the shops are open, I predict that the Spring will be a hit. But for the time being, it remains just a candidate for greatness, rather than greatness itself.

Now, I hear you all scream, what about the Boulevard? Well, precisely. Seeing as yesterday was my wife’s birthday, she wanted to see what the Boulevard was like. So, off we went. Arriving on the scene, we found that the car park was now thankfully ready, but we were led on an amazingly circuitous route round the building before descending into the underground car park. This had no signposts unlike its Spring counterpart, yet was just as huge and absolutely crammed with cars, even at 6.30 in the evening. Eventually, after much searching, we found a space, and made our way to the entrance, making our way up into the shopping centre on an escalator.

I must say, my first impression was that the Boulevard is a shopping centre, whereas the Spring is a Mall. Apart from the fact that many of the shops are not yet open, the shops that are open are for the most part not much different from what you might find in Sarawak Plaza. Little brightly coloured boutiques selling Body Glove stuff and accessories for girls. A department store called, creatively “Boulevard”, which looks like a slightly downmarket Parkson clone. And, a decidedly under-stocked branch of Popular Bookstore. Few really eye catching or unexpected shops or really big international brands. Not even a computer shop or CD shop that I could see. The only highlight for us was the Kenny Rogers, where we had an excellent birthday meal.

After a brief diversion to the supermarket to buy fruit (really high-class that!), we trundled off to the car park, my only prize being a new dictionary from Popular that I could have got almost anywhere else.

If the Spring was not quite finished, then the Boulevard was even less finished than the Spring. We came away feeling somewhat deflated, expecting an enormous and elaborate ice-cream sundae and only getting a Popsicle on a stick. I think I will take my friend’s advice and wait till the end of the month for the MPH in the Spring to open. Then I will truly be in my own private version of Shopper’s Paradise!

New Years Come in Threes

Malaysia is blessed with a wide range of festivals linked to the different ethnic and religious groups in the country. And, like other countries, Malaysia can even be said to have its very own Festive Season. But whereas in other countries, like the UK, the Festive Season basically means Christmas and the New Year, here in Malaysia the term takes on a whole new meaning altogether.

That’s because, for the last couple of years or so, three different New Year festivals have been falling within a month or two of one another. Confused? Don’t be! You see, the movable nature of the Islamic and Lunar calendars means that all Islamic celebrations such as Hari Raya Puasa, as well as the Chinese New Year, never fall on the same day every year.

The Hari Raya, or Eid il-Fitri, is in fact gradually moving backwards through the calendar each year. And the Chinese New Year, even though it is generally around January/February, is never on exactly the same date every year. So, whenever the Chinese and Islamic New Year festivals fall close to the Christian New Year, you have a triple eclipse of New Years.

This is great for a number of reasons. Firstly, we hard-working wage slaves get plenty of holidays within a few weeks of one another. Secondly, having all these colourful, exciting festivals is very good for tourism, and business in general. And thirdly, having three different New Years at the same time is just so damn cool, and so Malaysian!

This year is no exception. Back in January 1^st, we had of course the usual firecrackerfest and global street party that augured in the year 2008. Auld Lang Syne and all that... Last week, on January 10^th, it was the turn of the Islamic world to have their New Year – the Awal Muharram, which is the first day of the Arab New Year which is followed by Muslims the world over. The Muharram was a much quieter and more sober affair than the 2008 New Year – we had a day off work but it was spent in the Wisma Saberkas hunting for printers. Just an ordinary day off for me. And as for firecrackers and street parties, there wasn’t much – I heard just one or two desultory bangs over the river in the Malay area.

And in early February, of course, there will be arguably the most spectacular New Year of all, the Chinese Lunar New Year, complete with the colourful lion dances, deafening fusillades of firecrackers and a tempting array of invitations to our Chinese friends’ houses. Chinese New Year is secretly my favourite out of the three, simply because of the noise, the colour and passion of the whole thing. And on the eve of the New Year, our street, which is 99% Chinese, is going to be the scene of such a pandemonium of smoke and explosions that you will think you are in a war zone! Just like last year!!

Watch this space for a special report from the front line come February...

Happy New Year! Three times!!!

Watching Without Language

There is only one advantage of having a poor command of the Malay language while living in Malaysia. And that is that I can gain a unique appreciation of local TV programmes.

This is especially so with the rash of Indonesian TV dramas shown on the ASTRO Aruna satellite channel here in Malaysia. My wife is addicted to them, making me something of a TV widower in our household. These shows are highly distinctive in a number of ways, and even though I don’t understand much of the dialogue, I can discern their characteristics very clearly.

Firstly, the Indon TV dramas seem to be populated with incredibly good-looking, beautifully-dressed and coiffed people who live in vast palatial mansions and have servants who call them ‘bos’ all the time. The working classes are inevitably represented as living in dark, crime-ridden shanty towns full of rapists and bandits who hijack cars and drag the poor female occupants into the nearest bush.

The poor in these dramas tend to ride around on motorbikes whereas the well-heeled drive around in luxury sedans the size of a 747. The poor wear shabby, simple clothes and seem to have darker skin than their rich counterparts. In fact, it seems that the wealthy characters in these programmes have skin the colour of fine porcelain, despite their Asian-ness. How do they do it? Is it clever use of lighting? Or is it the clever application of skin-lightening creams?

Many Indonesian dramas, like their Malaysian counterparts, are set in or around schools. And the pupils seem to look around twenty-five. My wife tells me that many of the Indonesian actors and actresses are very good at making themselves look much younger than they really are, especially when they put on a school uniform. I can believe it.

These school-based stories are full of bitchy bullying among these improbably-young porcelain-skinned girls, boys having crushes on girls, girls framing other girls for crimes they didn’t commit, girls being raped after drinking spiked cola, girls screaming at boys, boys screaming at and beating up other boys, and so on ad nauseam. And there are hardly any teachers in sight. And when they do come into the classroom the teachers are usually barely older than their pupils, and frequently shout a lot.

As a matter of fact, all of the Indonesian TV dramas seem to include an awful lot of shouting and screaming. I always know my wife is watching one of these shows because I can hear the TV from the bottom of our street. The characters rarely seem to be speaking at a normal volume – and there always seems to be some white-heated argument going on involving a (usually mustachioed) man screaming at a woman who either screams back at him or – quite frequently – find herself either slapped across the face, dragged to the front door by her long black hair, or pushed to the ground. Sometimes, she might find herself locked in a bedroom.

Quite often, the poor person being screamed at or otherwise verbally brutalised will be a young girl or a child, often a step-daughter. It seems that children and young girls in Indonesian TV dramas are constant fodder for physical or verbal abuse. And the abuser is typically their father (often with a moustache), a perpetually angry stepfather, a jealous husband or a dragon-faced evil stepmother whose garish make-up and rock-hard perm would scare the living crap out of Darth Vader.

And talking of make-up, I have noticed that the Indonesian male actors often wear lipstick as well as their female counterparts. I guess this is because of the studio lights or something, I don’t know. But as a result of this glaring anomaly, I sometimes find it hard not to laugh during those scream scenes where some male character is verbally roasting someone. I mean, come on, how can you expect to convince the audience you are really pissed off and angry when you’re wearing bright pink dayglo lipstick? It’s rather like beating someone up with a banana and expecting to draw blood.

And one final thing that I can never forget about the Indon actors is that they use their whole faces to act, especially when delivering an angry tirade at someone. Their eyes bulge, their eyebrows rise and fall dramatically with each rise and fall of emotion, and their mouths perform twisting contortions of hate, jealousy or lust. Heads roll around and nod, to punctuate their emotions. So even if I can’t make out the words, the meaning of what they say is crystal clear.

To be honest, I am not really a fan of TV dramas, or soaps as we call them in the UK. But in our household, I don’t get a great deal of choice. You might be asking me why I don’t buy a second TV? Well, my mum and dad did just that years ago – my dad watching his Italian satellite TV shows on his TV in the kitchen and my mum watching Coronation Street on hers in the living room. And they hardly spoke to one another for years.

So you see, having one TV does promote communication. And with TV programmes like these to choose from, who needs language to understand them?!

The First Post of 2008

According to Chinese numerology, the year 2008 is going to be exceptionally lucky and prosperous because the number 8 is a very auspicious number indeed. So, this means that the coming year should work out much better for everyone than 2007 did. Let's pray that this will be so.

The New Year started somewhat ominously. Here in Kuching, 2008 was born in a heavy rain storm which started earlier on in the evening. The almost deafening roar of raindrops outside was competing well with a muffled and rather sad chorus of firecrackers which broke out like a rash around midnight.

My wife and I were in bed, enjoying the cool breeze brought about by this New Year rainstorm. I was lying there thinking how the firecrackers that went off at midnight were an apt expression of desperate human optimism in the face of impossible odds. Just think, you spend all that money on things that are supposed to go BANG! and light up the sky with lots of lovely colour and spectacle, and all you get is a series of spluttering POOFs and wet farts.

Nature is obviously telling you that you should have spent your money on something else! But you still buy the firecrackers and let them off despite the rain, because you're human, and you have hope in your heart!

So that was how 2008 started, not with a bang, as the poet says, but with a whimper. Hopefully, it will end the other way around.