Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 25 January 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
Don’t get me wrong, I love dinosaurs, but do they have to roar all the time?
T-Rex

I was flicking through the TV channels (I’m old so I still watch TV) when I came across an American movie where two bikini-clad women were chatting with each other in a jacuzzi. I stopped to watch this movie because I thought they might be discussing something important about, you know, existentialism and stuff. But then they were suddenly attacked and eaten by a dinosaur. I was as surprised by this turn of events as they were. After all, dinosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years.

What is the endless fascination with dinosaurs? But the big question is, why is it that in movies and documentaries they are roaring all the time? They’d give away their location if they were roaring all the time. T-Rex would have been a useless predator if it stopped to roar when tracking its prey.

There is a plausible theory that the Ancient Greeks came up with their stories of fantastical monsters because Greece has many dinosaur fossils lying around. When the Greeks found the fossils, they didn’t know what they were and put them together in strange configurations. And so the Cyclops, gorgons and griffins were formed. China is one of the richest repositories of dinosaur fossils in the world and it is also the home of dragons.

The largest dinosaur yet to be discovered has recently been dug up in Argentina — a gigantic Titanosaur, 37m long and weighing 70 tonnes (equivalent to 15 African elephants). How can you not be fascinated by something as gigantic as that? And yet this Titanosaur probably led a very dull life as a herbivore. When I was growing up, dinosaurs were portrayed as uniformly grey and silent but since then, Hollywood and TV and have made them more sexy with coloured skin and all the constant roaring, and now they’re eating bikini-clad human women. Dinosaurs still inspire stories. Jurassic World is a modern myth where our assumption that technology and science can resurrect and control beasts from the past is challenged. It would have been a box office hit in Ancient Greece.

Dear Kam,
The other day somebody said to me, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. I said, “Yeah, that’s right.” My question is, what the hell was he talking about?
What’s Cooking

Recently I wrote about how Malaysians have a tendency to write English as it sounds in the head, which can lead to mistakes. It may sound right, but it can be completely wrong. A surprising problem for Malaysians is that we are very familiar with idiomatic English and not just with English as a basic language for communication. Idioms are phrases like “hot potato” or “the drop of a hat” and they often don’t really make any sense, especially if you don’t eat potatoes or wear hats, but even if you did wear a hat and dropped it, so what? I was editing somebody’s writing and he wrote that a something was “dull as dishwater”. This sounds right but the actual phrase is “dull as ditchwater”. What is ditchwater and why would it be dull? When I first moved to England at the age of five, I was asked by a kindly woman if I wanted to “spend a penny” before going out. She was asking me if I wanted to have a pee, but I was completely confused and told her I didn’t have any money and promptly started to cry. If that scene had been filmed and put on YouTube it would have had a trillion hits because it must have been very cute, but at the time I was very confused. Damn that idiomatic English. Somebody learning English in China would not be expected to know idiomatic English because they have absolutely no history with the English language, but we do.

When I wrote about Malaysians making written mistakes, I was feeling very smug because, obviously, I never make those mistakes. But just now I was writing about how China is a rich “suppository” of dinosaur fossils. That sounded right, but it also didn’t sound right. So I looked it up and it turns out that China is a rich repository of dinosaur fossils. A dinosaur suppository would not be a good thing. Making the mistake of writing what sounds right instead of what is right can get you into trouble. Recently in England a 10-year-old schoolboy got a visit from the police because he wrote that he lives in a “terrorists” house. The schoolboy happened to be Muslim. It transpired that he was trying to say that he lives in a “terraced” house (a “link-house”, in Malaysia). No doubt everybody involved had a jolly good laugh when they discovered the simple error, but the child has probably been put on a no-fly list and has a drone stationed over his house anyway.

The moral of the story is, be careful when you write those idioms. It might be the last thing you do.

Reprinted with the kind permission of