The effect of arrogance in the media.

When I first came to Singapore, I noticed something very clearly: almost no-one spoke well in broadcast media. At first, I made allowances for it, assuming it to be a local language. Then, as the months and years passed I came to understand something else: the mistakes they made in pronunciation were neither English, nor Singlish, they were just pure ignorance.

At one time, I took to calling up Mediacorp to complain about the pronunciation of Channel News Asia anchors, pointing out, in detail, the errors they had made. I got no more than: "You have a very detailed mind." out of them. They said they would call back, but they didn't. I tried several more times to alert them to the deficiencies of the speech of their public figures - but no-one ever got back to me. In the end, I stopped complaining.

One day, however, I made a special visit to Mediacorp where I met a senior executive to make a proposal. I offered to help them with voiceovers, since there were innumerable errors that went beyond the easily correctable. He virtually laughed at me. He seemed most arrogant: he looked down his short nose at me, as from a great, unbridgeable height. He said they didn't need people to do voiceovers since they already had them. I thought he was an idiot, because he clearly could not perceive what was so abundantly clear to me - yet he was a senior man in the institution.

Yesterday, I was watching Arts Central, when I heard the voiceover (a typical deep voiced but poorly informed man), say "scarce" in which the first four letters were rhymed with CAR. It was most disconcerting. It was the first time in my life that I had heard anyone, anywhere ever say it that way. I knew it wasn't Singlish - and I knew it wasn't English - it was just pure ignorance, again.

I didn't call the station to complain. I gave up doing that long ago. Yet, it set me to wondering again about the effect of such verbal ignorance among broadcasters. TV and radio stations set an example to the nation. If that example is filled with errors of pronunciation or grammar, the quality of language of the entire population of the country will be lowered. That is precisely what is happening in Singapore. The reason this situation persists is that the powers-that-be do not know English well enough themselves - or care to know, it seems, from that senior executives' arrogant, narrow-minded attitude - to notice the deficiencies of their staff. It is true to say that virtually none of the staff employed in Singaporean broadcasting speaks English well enough to work in the UK broadcasting industry - and this is not a matter of accent, but of grammar and pronunciation.

There is no real concern for quality in language usage here. I find that worrisome - if a nation doesn't care about the quality of one thing, they tend not to care about the quality of many things. That attitude leads to poor quality in many areas, across the board.

Singapore would benefit from hearing good examples of language usage in public figures in broadcasting. There is a simple solution: fire them and hire better spoken ones. It would be a great help to the linguistic landscape of Singapore, in time to come.

It would also be pleasant not to hear jarring errors in pronunciation or grammar on national TV virtually every day (for someone who watches little TV...) However, given the way that senior executive responded to my suggestion, by scoffing, I don't think anything will ever change.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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