} of short forms

my current work assignment is to come up with a name for a new publication by another division of the company. i have resigned to the fact that i will probably never touch the original job scope i was supposed to do, and that i will probably end up just doing all kinds of odd jobs and assignments unrelated to anyone else in this office until i quit in june/july/when i cant stand it anymore.

anyway, im supposed to think of a name that makes use of common singaporean lingo so that the people here can identify with it, because the same publication in hongkong is correspondingly using a common hk lingo. when my boss told me this i gave him a look not unlike the one i gave him when he told me that he wanted to employ me precisely because i cant speak chinese, and therefore will not be able to communicate in chinese to my chinese colleagues. i may have lived here for 9 years but i dont exactly have singlish slangs at my fingertips.

so i consulted google, and i found this wikipedia article. quite an entertaining read considering how bored i am at work, especially:

"When the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) was established in 1991, the name was chosen instead of the alternative "Nanyang University of Technology" because the latter would have resulted in the unsuitable NUT. Anderson Secondary School is one such unfortunate example, where the name upon being shortened becomes ASS."

and:

"When SAFTI (Singapore Armed Forces Training Institute) was reorganised in 1995, it acquired the name SAFTI Military Institute, further abbreviated as SAFTI MI, which when fully expanded would form a rather awkward title Singapore Armed Forces Training Institute Military Institute."

haha.

ok its not that funny anymore but bear in mind that in this corporate four-walled hellhole i cant have a real conversation with any of my colleagues, cant understand and/or join in their conversations, cant access msn, cant access youtube, and still have to find ways to look busy constantly. sigh. even filing and getting 823472834 papercuts must be better than this.

2008-03-19, 11:25 a.m..
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