Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to…

…complain.

I kid =) Man invented language of course to communicate with his fellow Man.

I was recently lamenting how my standard of spoken english has deteriorated. There used to be a time where I spoke properly, meaning the english I spoke wasn’t dotted with mandarin, wasn’t grammatically translated from mandarin to english (as is popular here), isn’t dotted with err, what, leh, lor, ma or y’noe. No, I really don’t know.

Believe it or not, I can speak mandarin. But I don’t speak it like most people, a colloquial or casual form of mandarin mixed with english, but rather I try to make the entire sentence 100% mandarin.

It helped that my social circle didn’t practise these habits too.

Then my social circle changed, due to changing environments. Then I felt that speaking like this kinda alienated people and people found it odd or pretentious. Worser still, I had the habit of correcting people, which is terribly annoying to the people being corrected =P

These days I’ve lost that “edge”. Afterall we talk to communicate, not to elevate ourselves. But it’s also fair to say my capability (not necessarily the capacity) to communicate has “degenerated” to the pudgin form of communication known as Singlish.

I definitely noticed I’ve been correcting people alot less. Maybe I should give up my Grammar Nazi badge. Guess there’s worse things to be worried about =)