Girls have cooties. Every young boy can tell you this. Girls may claim that it is in fact boys who have cooties, but that is preposterous. I spent much of second, third and fourth grade avoiding cooties. I also had a number of hand-made cootie catchers, but for some reason, they did not catch or […]
Author Archives: bingregory
Strange Fruit, pt 2: Mata Kuching
The next fruit I present to you is the mata kuching, literally, cat’s eye. It’s about the size of a quarter, with a thin peel that covers a juicy greyish meat that covers a hard shiny dark brown seed. The fruit is sweet with a musky, almost salty aftertaste. They are inexpensive in season. They’re […]
Malay Contributions to English, pt. 3
Recently, the Congress of the United States of America preserved the pride and culture of our great land by passing a resolution renaming French Fries “Freedom Fries”. Yes, they did. This of course was due to France’s unwillingness to support the war on Iraq. But members of the Coalition of the Unwilling are still at […]
A Kuap by Any Other Name
If Malaysia is the land of odd fruit, then Sarawak must be the capital. I have just as much fun looking at it all as I do eating it. This one is called a Kuap Terap, according to the guy who sold to me. My Malay dictionary doesn’t have it, Google doesn’t have it, SR […]
Path of the Paddle
Ikram Saeed from Canada keeps a blog called Path of the Paddle. If you’ve got the war on your mind, but you can’t take anymore news, check out his peice on war poetry. He’s pulled together a lot of good stuff, including poetic Rumsfeld declamations. He asks, Why isn’t there famous modern English language war […]
Charitable Missions
Metafilter has an interesting thread today about plans by the Southern Baptists to send missionaries to Iraq after the war: “Two leading evangelical Christian missionary organizations said Tuesday that they have teams of workers poised to enter Iraq to address the physical and spiritual needs of a large Muslim population.” I think the interesting question […]
Malay Contributions to English, pt 2
With the war in mind, here is the next installment: Amok, usually seen as “run amok”. It tends to be used in English to mean out of control, but the dictionary meaning is the same in English as it is in Malay: In a frenzy to kill; in a violent rage; bloodlust; berserk Let’s use […]
Clash of Little Plastic Army Men
If I’m going to buy my child war toys, I can’t really get hung up on the real-world parallels. Either it’s make-believe or it isn’t, right? Still, I swallowed hard when I looked at the sticker set for these green and gray soldiers. I wonder when it was exactly that little plastic army men went […]