We have the OCS briefing on Friday morning. After some discussions, one of the managers presented their action plans. They suggested having bimonthly departmental meeting instead of monthly meeting. The manager explained that having more meetings would enable communications to flow faster. What she meant was to have two meetings a month instead of once a month.

According to the dictionary, the word “bimonthly” means every two months, such as bimonthly magazines. What those managers suggested was to have a meeting every two weeks. In this case, she could have said, “We proposed to have two meetings a month.” She could also use “fortnightly” or “biweekly”.

In Singapore, we do come across people using words differently from the standard usage. Here I have gathered some words that are commonly used locally.

We do hear people say, “He horned at me on the highway”. This is incorrect as “horn” is a noun and it cannot be used as a verb. We should say, ”He sounded his horn at me”.

Many times we heard people saying, “I am so blur”. “Blur” is either a noun meaning something that is not clear or is indistinct, or a verb that means to become indistinct. It is not an adjective. The correct word to use is “confused”.

There are times we heard people say, “I will ask my boss for an off day because I came back to work last Saturday”. In Standard English, an off day is a day when we feel ill or when everything goes wrong. A day off is a day when we do not have to work. So, we should say, “I will ask my boss for an day off”.

Someone came over to the workstation and asked, “Where is she?” Another person answered, “She is on MC”. MC stands for “Medical Certificate”. What we mean is that she is sick and unable to come to work. We should say, “She is ill or she is on medical leave.”

One day I saw a piece of paper pasted on the photocopy machine. It was written, “The photocopy is not working”. Photocopy as a noun is a copy of a document made using a photocopier. We heard people say, “This is a photocopy it is not an original copy”. As a verb, photocopy refers to the process of making copy of a document using the photocopier. If the machine is not working, we could say, “This machine is not working” or “The photocopy machine is not working” or “The photocopier is not working”.

Source: from the book “Grammar Matters”