Prices are subjected to service charge and tax
The menu at Tim Ho Wan, a nice restaurant for dim sum, says: All the prices shown above are subjected to 10% service charge & 7% GST. It should say ‘subject to’ and not...
Category: oops
Up/down, left/right… lock/open?
This is the lid to a tower of blank CDs. I did a double take when I first opened the package because I would have thought ‘unlock’ would be the opposite of ‘lock’ and...
Dengue warrior
It would be hard to overstate the extent to which I hate mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are deadly serious. But this banner is still funny. For one thing, that warrior, with his Roman helmet, looks really...
Queue for taxi
The sign says “QUEUE FOR TAXI”. I wonder whether it means “[This is the] queue for [getting a] taxi” or “[Please ] queue [here] for [a] taxi”. In one case, ‘queue’ is a noun,...
No MSG?
Let this banner teach you to quit while you’re ahead. “No MSG added” is fine, but “in all our food” doesn’t make sense. In fact it almost makes it sounds like there is MSG…...
Salt Water Giant Arachnoid
The front of the box says: Children may be awesome and scary to this direct but simple eight-feet reptile animal. After the fuel battery is activated by the salted water, the metal magnesium plate...
Mind your b’s and d’s
This sign should say ‘Pork Rib Rice’. The fact that it doesn’t proves that it’s not just children learning to read who confuse the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’.
Pesky conjunctions
The same taxi had two signs prohibiting eating and drinking. One said “no food and drinks” and the other said “no food or drink”. “No food and drinks” is wrong. It assumes that the...
EKIT
Oops. It’s not like English needs the letter X anyway. Anything with an X in it could be spelled with some other letter or letters, usually ‘ks’ or ‘z’. Of course, it’s possible to...
“Have you left your valuables behind?”
This warning from the Singapore Police, spotted in a toilet stall in Cineleisure at Orchard is semantically equivalent to “Have you left all of your valuables behind?” Although it is a somewhat plausible question,...