Welcome to the LoA

When you stay in Singapore for quite some time, you get to know something very interesting. To put it nicely, it’s called abbreviation. To put it crudely, it’s lazy shortcuts.

Let me just run thru some of them from the top of my head. PIE, AYE, MRT, TPE, CTE, ERP, SBS, UOB, DBS, POSB, KPE, ST, PUB, EDB, LTA, PSA, PSLE, PSC….. If you stay here, you’d definitely know what they mean.

This doesn’t just stop at road signs and government sector names. At my workplace, I’m addressed as MH. There’s CPZ, MNG, JCN, MLE, MLU, MCH, MCA…. who are my colleagues. You know that Singaporeans are obsessed with abbreviations when some of them even pronounced MRT as ‘mert’. It irks me quite a bit.

Maybe because it’s part of the culture. I mean, in mandarin, there’s a grammatically perfect way of doing this. Let me elucidate:

马来亚大学 = 马大

新加坡和柔佛 = 新柔

瓜拉雪兰莪 = 瓜雪

新加坡国立大学 = 国大

i’m illustrating them with mainly Malaysian place name because it happens in Malaysia too. you get your JLN, KPG, LRG, SG… my point is, it gets quite irritating sometimes when deciphering a certain message made up of these stuff.

Now that i’m working and i have to read comms typed in this kinda stuff: you get M for Monday or Mathematics depending on the context, T for Tuesday or Teacher depending on the context, S for Saturday or Science once again, depending on the context.

But these are just little things in life that if you don’t take notice of them, they just slip by you without you knowing it. I wonder if it happens to the rest of the world.