07:54 by FoxTwo Ever wondered where that phrase came from? I do.
Last night I was hanging out with the guys at the regular pub we always go to on Fridays (technically they weren't all guys. The guys that have wives need to tell the wives something heheheh!). So anyway, the topic kinda turned into local language, customs and social norms.
One of the girls at the table had brought along an ang mo guy friend who hails from Australia. We were just giving him a hard time and teaching him "local words" like CB and all that. It was damn hilarious! So anyway, the phrase "Half Past 6" came out (in reference to the ang mo's pronounciation of Hokkien words) and he had a blank look. He didn't understand what it meant.
So, we ended up giving him a crash course in Singapore slangs . Now, if you have read my previous blog entries, a slang is not how we pronounce words and the way we sound, which is actually called accent. A slang is "local language", meaning that our local brand of English, affectionately referred to as Singlish, is a slang.
But, I digress.
So we ended up giving him a crash course in Singlish, and he in turn gave us a quick tour of Australian (eg a pawpaw is a papaya, that kinda stuff).
Then he asked the conversation-stopping question - "How did this phrase 'half past 6' come about?".
You know, we never actually thought about that. It just kinda latched on to our memories when we hear it in school, at work, in the army and all that. We had to honestly tell him we do not know. Our best guess is that 6.30am in the morning is way too friggin' early to wake up, and our brains aren't fully working yet, so we will definitely suck at doing things. So maybe, just maybe, that is where the phrase came from.
Then again, you guys with families and kids, nowadays you wake up much earlier than 6.30am don't you? After all you gotta shove your kids to school, send the wife to her office, then you have to get to your own office so your ass doesn't get chewed out by the boss (or for families where the woman drives, send the husband to his office).
So yeah, the ang mo got me thinking - what are the origins of this phrase?
