Wednesday May 2, 2007
Is it ‘blind salary’?
FADZILAH AMIN answers your questions on English usage
I WOULD like to know: 1. Does the word “invocation” mean “doa?”
2. What is “gaji buta” in English? Someone wrote it as “blind salary” which I think is a direct translation. – Siti Hafisah Sheikh Long
1. The usual English word for “doa”, in which we ask God for something for ourselves or others, is “prayer” (prayers = solat). “Invocation” has a more formal and broader meaning; it is “the act of asking for help from a god or from a person in authority”. (OALD)
2. There’s no such expression as “blind salary” in English! I don’t know an equivalent English expression to describe what is done (or not done) by the common idler or shirker who draws a salary without doing much work.
The closest word to this concept is a “sinecure”, which is “a job that you are paid for even though it involves little or no work” (OALD). This is usually offered to people of high social standing, though, who can then ‘loaf’ in style!
In public hands, not hand
A FRIEND of mine complained that a recent newspaper heading, ‘Decision in public hand’, is wrong. She said it should be “in public hands”.
I have checked various sources, including the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries and also the book English Similes, Idioms, Metaphors & Proverbs by Milon Nandy, and this is what I discovered:
“In hand” is an expression meaning “in control” or “under the power of”, e.g. “Decision in public hand” (NOT “hands”).
If I am wrong, please advise. – T.L., Petaling Jaya
There is a difference between the expressions “in hand” and “in somebody’s/some people’s hands”.
The latter uses the plural “hands” whether the reference is to one person or many. The relevant meaning of “in hand” here is “under control”, as in this quotation from the online Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary: “The police have the situation in hand.”
“In somebody’s/some people’s hands” or “in the hands of somebody/some people” is defined by the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary as “being taken care of or controlled by somebody”, e.g. “The matter is now in the hands of my lawyer.” (OALD); “Art treasures put in public hands” (BBC website) news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1828763.stm
Your friend is therefore right that the newspaper heading should read ‘Decision in public hands’, because the expression used is “in ___ hands”, where the dash ( ___ ) can stand for one or many people.
The use of ‘the’
I USED to think that I had a good command of English. I easily scored A1 for English in my SPM, but I got a miserable C5 for my 1119 paper.
When I was in the UK, my tutor corrected one grammatical error in my dissertation. And that particular error was repeated over the whole of my work.
It had to do with the use of the word “the”. I suppose it was influenced by how we write things in Malay. Here are some examples:
1) Out in the park, kids are running around.
or 2) Out in the park, the kids are running around.
And consider this example (the sentence refers to a technical design software):
The drafting module provides a good transition between (the) design results and (the) drawings outputs.
Is the word “the” in brackets correctly used? What would happen if either one or both is removed? – Jason Chin
I don’t know the context of your sentence, nor what it means precisely (I’m not a computer person), but since you are presumably referring to a particular “drafting module” (“the drafting module”), I should think you would need to use the word “the” in both brackets. That would mean you are referring to particular “design results” and “drawing outputs.”
If you are talking generally about “drafting modules”, you won’t need to use “the” before any of the terms, and your sentence would then read:
“Drafting modules provide a good transition between design results and drawings outputs.” (Shouldn’t it be “drawing outputs” without the ‘s’ in “drawing”, which acts as an adjective there?)
By the way, Michael Swan’s Practical English Usage (2005) provides a good guide on the use of “the” in particular and articles in general.
Study prospects
1. CAN you suggest some ways to improve my English?
2. Do you encourage us to read the dictionary?
3. I know that you are graduated from the English Department of the University of Malaya (am I right?). I am interested in this programme. Can you tell me what I will learn from it and the career opportunities? – Tee Kian Soon
1. The best way to improve your English is to read a lot of well-written English books and magazines. You could also try writing in English – keeping a journal or a diary can help you practise using the language. If you want to improve your spoken English, try speaking more English with your friends.
2. No, don’t read a dictionary like a book! That’s not the way to increase your vocabulary. But do consult a dictionary when you come across a word whose meaning you don’t know or are unsure of. Too few Malaysians that I come across take the trouble to consult a dictionary, let alone buying a good one!
3. Yes, you are right. I studied in the English Department of the University of Malaya in the early 1960s, and later I taught there till 1996. This department is part of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. It teaches mainly literature courses: British literature from Shakespeare to the present day, American literature, New literatures in English from the rest of the world, as well as some literature in English translation from Europe, South America, etc. There are also a few linguistics courses.
You will be expected to read a lot and will hopefully enrich your command of the English language while acquiring a critical appreciation of a wide range of good literature. You will also gain some knowledge of how the English language works.
Graduates of this department work in a lot of different fields, among them teaching (at school, in colleges or universities), journalism, the civil and foreign services, advertising, corporate communications, etc. There is no problem of unemployed graduates from this department, as far as I know. (Sorry to sound like a prospectus!)
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