Miss "As Such" is Not My Woman

Living in this country corrupts one’s proficiency in English. There is a certain standard to be preserved in any language. And here, many people are really carefree about the correct English usage. One obvious reason is the fact that for the vast majority of people, English is not their first language. They insert words of Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkien, Malay, etc. into English sentences as they see it fit. The result is often colourful and effective to get the point across, at least to my ear. By “corrupt,” I don’t mean those words or the ubiquitous particles like “ah,” “lah,” or “ma.” These particles only make sentences sound peculiarly rich.

One trouble I still can’t overcome after years is phrases like, “just now” or “last time.” By “just now,” they mean (or seem to mean) “a short while ago.” And the verb they use with this phrase is of its past-tense form as if they avoid present-perfect sentences. “Just now, you said…” instead of “You have just said…” (There seem people whose sentences are all in the present tense. Forget about “-s” and “-es” for the present-tense third-person singular verbs.) And “Last time, you said…” Last time? When? Not specifying the time, what they try to mean is “sometime ago/before.”

Another example is the usage of “how.” Sentences like “How is your girlfriend (look) like?” I wonder how many of them say “What does your girlfriend look like? Cat or pig?” Apparently not many.

Yet another example can be found in writing, especially the kind of writing intended to be formal. This is most irritating to me as it disrupts the flow of reading. That’s “as such.” I hardly see “as such” at the beginning of a sentence in so-called standard English. It should be perfectly ok to use “as such” as in, “He is the king. They treated him as such.” What this means is “in a manner appropriate for the king.” However, when “as such” is placed at the head of a sentence, they mean “consequently” or “therefore.” I’m not a linguist, but I believe this sort of usage is very close to being wrong. When I encountered the first instance of this “as such” in “Shared Responsibility, Unshared Power,” I became certain the author is Singaporean. Every time the phrase shows up, it feels like whenever I turned a corner, I find the same “as such” woman standing and she says to me, “Hi, it’s me again”… Hey Miss As Such, you are completely unsolicited. As such, keep away from me!

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Yesterday morning, the late Yonehara Mari (米原万里) appeared in a dream. It was a rather commodious classroom and she was an instructor of Russian (of course) while I a novice English one. She was exuding powerful confidence and at the same time witty, just as she was in the real life… I read five books by her and each one of them are a source of good laugh and deep contemplation for language, culture, literature, society, history, politics. In the Gorbachev era, her name was on the TV screen day after day, often several times a day. For me, as the ablest Japanese interpreter of Russian, she was Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Shevardnadze.