I really suck at word games. I love playing them, but I suck at them.

Tonight my housemate Emmy kicked my ass at Boggle. I'm not overly competitive, but Boggle always makes me feel stupid because -- How could I miss seeing that word?!! I was so dissatisfied that we ended up going several rounds, but Emmy still kicked my ass in nearly every round.

And did you know that you can now play Scrabble on Facebook? My goodness, Facebook is getting to be the most addictive site EVER. I'll blame Sivin coz he asked all of the church members to join, as a way for us to keep in touch more effectively :P

Where was I? Oh yeah, I'm playing Scrabble on Facebook and am currently getting my ass kicked by Pei Ling, Lainie, and Tuffy. Arrrggghhh!

I knew it would probably be a mistake to play with Lainie, who writes on her blog about making bingoes (using up all her seven tiles in a single move). I have never gotten a Scrabble bingo in my ENTIRE LIFE. I'm losing to her quite spectacularly -- so spectacularly that now I'm so embarrassed, I'll probably turn into a tomato on the spot the next time I see her.

And Tuffy! What can I say about a guy who claims that Scrabble is "not his game" and then gains a lead of more than 20 points?! This is not fair! I want to complain! He claims he always starts out by winning but ends up losing. I'll believe it when I see it.

I don't play Scrabble competitively, which is to say I don't go around memorising obscure two-letter words that might come in handy, or words beginning with 'z' which might eventually help me out of a tight spot. I just use words I already know, and do the best I can with those. That's not good enough against a player like Lainie!

Finally got The Time Traveller's Wife back from The Snark. It's been with him for, what... two years? Maybe three.

See, some of us bloggers used to turn up at "book swap meets" to borrow books from each other -- and lend out our own. When the meets died a premature death, some of my books were still floating around in other bloggers' hands. The Time Traveller's Wife was one of them.

I wanted it back because I wanted to reread it. The latest Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock movie, The Lake House, reminded me strongly of this book because both stories are built around the concept of people communicating through time.

The movie, at least, is much more straightforward and easy to follow than the book. I was trying to explain the book's storyline to my housemate last night when I realised that the main idea doesn't sound all that difficult to grasp: it's about a guy, Henry, who has a genetic disorder that causes him to suddenly beam out of his own time into the past or future, and then beam back. He can't control it, and he never knows where he's going to end up or in which year he's going to end up each time this happens.

However, it's the love story that makes things complicated; as the back cover of the book states, "This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty." That doesn't even give you a hint of how mind-boggling things are going to get.

As I said to my housemate, imagine that my future self, the 32-year-old self, beams back into time and meets you when you are 16. Then I beam back. In "real life", you meet me when you are 18 and I am 22. But while you already know me -- because you have met my 32-year-old self -- I don't know you. It's my future self who knows you, and I haven't lived till that point yet. Geddit?

Meanwhile, I am still time travelling all over the place. So, when I was 25, I travelled back in time and met you when you were 19. This means that at 19, when you have already met the actual me in "real life" and are hanging out with me, you also meet the future me, which means you see two versions of me simultaneously.

Then I reach the age of 32 (and you are 28), and as per incident #1 above, I beam back in time, meeting your 16-year-old self, then beam back -- and suddenly I have this memory of you which I didn't have before, but which you have always had, since you've lived through it. I tell you, it really messes with your head, okay.

I seriously don't know how the author managed to keep track of the timeline, because trying to keep the ages and dates straight completely boggled my mind. But that's what I like about the book. I like that it keeps me on my toes and makes me pay attention to what's been happening in order to make sense of the story.

Because the whole thing is woven around the tale of the love Clare and Henry have for each other, it becomes more than just a fantastic, difficult-to-believe time-travel story. One could read a story like that and emerge mildly entertained. But this story is all about emotions: fear, doubt, caring, patience, sacrifice, frustration, helplessness, despair, joy, and hope. It will not allow the reader to remain uninvolved. It's poignant and unusual and very rare.

The problem with playing super defensive Scrabble is that you end up with nowhere to put words. Which, compounded by a lousy rack of letters, made for the most tedious game I've ever played. My partner and I couldn't wait for it to be over! We stopped caring who would win or how high our scores were; we just wanted it to end. Resigned, we painfully plodded toward the finishing line.

 
(Of course, it didn't help that the Scrabulous application on Facebook decided to go bonkers on us and returned last few letters on our racks THREE TIMES before it condescended to recognise the fact that we had blinking finished all our letters already!)

I've overdosed and burnt out on Scrabble in the space of a week. Dermot was right -- all of a sudden so many friends invited me to play -- I found myself playing 11 games simultaneously! Taking a break over the weekend... no more squinting at letters and trying to imagine them in strange combinations. Phew.

I've been thinking about the fact that in Malaysia, the upper middle class or the more highly educated tend to have a better grasp of the English language. When I first came to this conclusion, I felt like a snob: arrogant, conceited, thinking myself better than those of the less privileged socio-economic groups.

But it is a fact. In Word Play, Peter Farb draws the reader's attention to Pygmalion, the play on which the well-known musical My Fair Lady was based. The story goes that Professor Higgins, being somewhat of a snob himself, says of Eliza, a Cockney flower girl, "You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days." He proposes to pass her off successfully as a member of their class merely by teaching her how to speak standard English.

Of course she would need to dress differently, learn etiquette and all that other stuff, but speech was key. Because if she were to speak like a Cockney, she'd immediately be identified as one the minute she opened her mouth, and then she would look like nothing more than an imposter dressed up in fancy clothing.

And so linguistic barriers shore up the social barriers between the classes. This is interesting because over here, university graduates are said to have very poor mastery of standard English -- despite the fact that they are highly educated, have access to information, and have received opportunities others have not. Traditionally, education has been seen as the means of helping us to climb further up on the socio-economic ladder, become "somebody", and gain the ticket to a better life. "If you don't study hard, you'll end up sweeping the streets or becoming a garbage collector!" our parents used to say. Yet formal education seems to be failing us now.

In January this year, it was reported that one-third of those who graduated from local universities last year are not proficient in English. In December last year, Bloomberg reported that an estimated 45,000 college graduates are unemployed, mainly because of poor English (English is the lingua franca in the business and corporate sector). Yet instead of promoting the use of "proper" language, the popular media seem to be perpetuating the colloquial dialect, a state of affairs that has led to Zewt's rant. (Where I posted such long comments I decided I might as well write about this on my own blog!)

The thing is, I'm fortunate to come from a family that speaks English at home. The necessity of speaking English daily definitely honed my proficiency in the language. But if you think about it, the language we speak at home is a more colloquial variety, the casual form used in conversation between family and friends.

So, despite having the opportunity to practice speaking English all the time, I'd say that I most likely picked up standard English through reading and formal instruction provided in school. (Most of us do speak two forms of English, a colloquial form and the standard form, switching between them depending on the appropriateness of the situation.)

Why do others have such difficulty picking up standard English? I wouldn't blame the media. Apart from the failure of the education system, I'd attribute this to 1) not reading enough, and 2) not using the language.

To become proficient in a language, one has to use it often, or one will forget. Also, hearing or reading good English will sort of "condition" a person to recognise the right sort of grammar and sentence structures, to the point that he can subconsciously "sense" whether a sentence is right or wrong. Very few of us are aware of all the grammatical rules, but if we are proficient in the language, we can tell when something is not quite right.

The problem as I see it: birds of a feather tend to flock together. So the Mandarin-speaking friends tend to gather and speak Mandarin to each other, and likewise Malay friends tend to gather and speak Malay to each other. They only use English if they have to, for example if they are speaking to someone outside their circle. Thus they have very little practice in speaking English and are also not in a position to absorb and learn by listening to others speak.

I on the other hand tend to speak English with my friends, and therefore don't get the chance to practice Mandarin and Malay -- so my command of both those languages has gone down the drain. Essentially, I face the same problem, but mine is not as obvious because I rarely end up in situations which call for a good grasp of Mandarin or Malay... whereas English is used everywhere, every day, in the business world, so much so that if you cannot converse well in it, you end up handicapped.

"Irene Kiew" spells out "Eerie Wink". Or "I Wee Inker".

Anagrams... I've never quite understood how people can come up with them. I mean, shuffling the letters around sounds great in theory, but in practice... who has the time to sit down and fiddle with all that?

This calls for a computer brain.

All I had to do was google "anagrams", and a bunch of free online anagram generators popped up on the first page of the search results. Pretty cool, although they just put together a jumble of words that fit, and you have to look through the list to find the combinations that have a modicum of meaning.

My Chinese name, Kiew Sieh Ping, turned up "I win hip geeks". I sure hope that's a prophecy, although I don't need hip geeks in the plural; I only need one!

It also yielded I HIS KING WEEP, not to mention I NEIGH WE SKIP, WHEE I SKIN PIG, and, err... I SEEKING WHIP. *gulps*  Read into that what you will...

I think these anagram generators might be my new favourite time-waster for the week!

Interesting that the Internal Security Ministry is now banning books on sex education. For example:

• Rahsia Kenikmatan Rumahtangga (Secrets Of An Enjoyable Marriage)
• Masalah Seksual Lelaki & Rawatan Alternatif (Male Sexual Problems and Alternative Medicine)
• Pendidikan Seks Rumahtangga Kemuncak Rahsia Kebahagiaan (Sex Education, The Greatest Secret To Happiness)
• Teknik Bercumbu dan Berjimak (Kissing and Love-making Techniques)
• Rahsia Di Kamar & Kunci Wanita (Bedroom Secrets & The Key To Women)

Meanwhile, a young newly-married couple who are friends of mine have been facing difficulties in the bedroom. "I don't know where it is," the wife confided.

"Which 'it'? There are so many 'its'," I replied.

"Our it lah."

"What?! What do you mean, you don't know where it is!"

I mean, you'd think a lady would recognise the part of her body through which blood drips every month. Gosh.

See why sex education is important?!?!

I can't understand anyone going to KLCC at five-freakin'-A.M. to queue up for a free anything, even if it is a book. I have this on-going love affair with books, and if they were people I'd be considered a promiscuous slut based on the number of books I own, but seriously? Even I don't think any book can possibly be worth that much sacrifice.

And so we come to the aptly-named "Harry Potter mania".

Obviously, I'm not a fan, which doesn't say much since I still haven't read The Lord of the Rings, which has been dubbed the greatest book of the millennium. Considering this horrific omission, plus the fact that I read way too many romance novels for my own good, you could say I might not exactly have the best taste in reading material. I admit it. You don't raise your eyebrows at my Nora Robertses and Stephanie Laurenses, and I won't raise my eyebrows at your JK Rowlingses. Deal?

What I really don't understand, though, is the rabid fear of spoilers. This isn't a whodunit, which has readers journeying along with the protagonists to the climax, where the mystery is solved and the criminal's identity is finally revealed. Secrecy is vital to that sort of book, because trying to figure out the mystery is 90% of the fun. It's not as fun once you know who did it.

But stories like Harry Potter are written to be read and reread, tens and hundreds of times, over and over again. Stories like these never lose their magic, and despite already knowing the ending -- indeed, despite being able to recite lines of dialogue directly from the text -- there's still something deeply satisfying about rereading these books, picking out details which we hadn't previously noticed, journeying once again with the characters, laughing at all the funny bits. Knowing the ending doesn't detract from the story.

Maybe it's just me. I rarely worry about spoilers; you can tell me the entire plot of a movie and that wouldn't cause me to enjoy it any less. I'd rather be prepared for what is to come, so I can look foward to it. Anyway, even if you were to find out that Harry dies (and I'm not saying that he did!), that wouldn't tell you how he died or why he died. I'd be burning with curiosity to find out the how and why, the circumstances and what had led to them, rather than be upset because I knew he was going to die.

 

 
Shocking, isn't it? The rating, I was informed, was given based on the presence of the following words on this blog:

• ass (3 occurrences),
• suck (2 occurrences), and
• death (1 occurrence).

"Any word is an innocent collection of sounds until a community surrounds it with connotations and then decrees that it cannot be used in certain speech situations," Peter Farb wrote in his 1973 book Word Play. "Prohibiting certain words actually elevates them in a neurotic way by encouraging the strategy of talking dirty; it endows them with titillation, shame, and a vulgarity that the things they stand for do not themselves possess."

After all, an ass is an ass, whether or not you use the word ass to refer to it. You can call it bottom, buttocks, rear end, backside, behind, butt, posterior, derriere, fanny, rump, tush, or whatever, but it'll still be what it is.

The funny thing is that new words are introduced into the language to take the place of so-called "taboo" words, but then these new words become similarly tainted and are then replaced by other words. For example, at one point privy was deemed less polite than toilet, but these days the terms restroom or washroom are considered more acceptable -- toilet has become too direct, too raw and vulgar. In the end we move further and further away from calling a spade a spade. We end up with euphemisms of euphemisms.

Farb traced the habit of creating euphemisms back to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The ruling Normans considered themselves superior to the native Anglo-Saxons and thus, it came to be that their Norman-derived words were considered more "high-class" and polite, whereas Anglo-Saxon words were deemed uncouth, vulgar, and suitable only for use among the lower classes -- mainly the natives themselves.

The farmer today still looks after his Anglo-Saxon cows, calves, swine, and sheep -- but once they are served up appetizingly in a restaurant or supermarket, they become French beef, veal, pork, and mutton. Whenever the speech community must discuss anything it deems unpleasant, the discussion is acceptable on the condition that it is carried on in the elegant vocabulary bestowed on English by the Normans.

The problem with having taboo words is that some ass (sorry, couldn't resist!) will purposely break the rules and use the words just to show that he can, or to shock those around him, or even to provoke somebody by knowingly being rude. If we would just use the words to mean what they mean, they would lose their power to offend.

So powerful is the taboo on the word cock that Louisa May Alcott's father changed his family name from Alcox to Alcott to avoid any chance of being associated with -- and tainted by -- that word. Absurd, isn't it? I find it a bit sad that a person would feel the need to change his name just because it sounds similar to a certain word, a word that would have been perfectly innocuous if not for the unfortunate meaning imposed upon it. A word that, in fact, was perfectly innocuous -- it refers, so the Oxford English Dictionary tells me, to "a male bird, especially of a domestic fowl". Unfortunately, it has also come to refer to the penis.

Oh, I forgot I can't say the word penis. I meant, of course, the male sexual organ. *cough*

I've been trying to write about this book for at least two weeks, but I still don't know what to say. It's a fascinating read -- the only problem is, I don't know how to explain exactly why it's fascinating.

Part of the fascination stems from the glimpses of a man's world through the eyes of a woman. It kinda brings home the fact that men and women are so different -- we see things differently, we react to situations differently, we relate to each other differently. For instance, Vincent says women don't understand male friendships because we're so used to talking about how we feel and demonstrating our emotions, and we assume that because guys don't do this, the same depth of feeling or connecting isn't there. But she discovered that it is there, "and when you're inside it, it's as if you're suddenly hearing sounds that only dogs can hear."

Another source of fascination came from Vincent's disguise. You see, in order to write this book, she lived as a man for 1½ years. It's interesting to note what goes into making up a man, and how she managed to pull it off. It's even more interesting to discover that after a time, even when she left off the disguise and didn't bind her chest to flatten her breasts, nobody questioned her male identity. How could people be that unobservant?

They saw what I wanted them to see, at least at first, while I still had control over the image. Then later they saw what they expected to see and what I had become without knowing it: the mind-set of Ned.

However, immersing herself in the mind-set of Ned, truly becoming Ned, took its toll. Trying to make herself think, react, and see herself as a man severely injured her sense of self, to the point where she suffered a nervous breakdown. Being very much a woman and yet taking on the mindset of a man was like "holding two mutually exclusive ideas in my mind while trying to juggle and ride a bicycle at the same time," she writes.

And this is, I think, the most fascinating thing of all: discovering how gender is "wired" in us. It's part of us, something we don't even think about, something that comes as naturally as breathing. Even though Vincent managed to take on the mentality of a man and adopt the behavior & mannerisms of a man, it didn't change the fact that she was a woman, wired to behave, think, and react as a woman. Trying to make herself otherwise damaged her. That is truly something to think about.