National Disgrace

The other day I went to the Selangor Registration Department to collect my sister's IC. It was a painless process - take a number, grab the card, leave. Ten minutes at the most.

But it was during those ten minutes that I saw something that drove me up the wall. A sign.

It wasn't actually a sign, just a piece of paper people would usually print a short message on so as to avoid spending a few hundred ringgit on a proper signboard. That's fine. But what really raised my blood level was not the message it conveyed, the gaudy-coloured paper or even the cheap-looking speech bubble shape of the sign. It was how the message was written. I don't remember what it was about, but it started off - bearing in mind we are talking about a message on a sign of a government building in a major city - with this:

"Sekejap aje................."

And then I saw another one at the photo booth reading something like this:

"Semasa ambil gambar boleh duduk diam tak??? Bolehhhh.......hhhhhhhhhh........."

Now, before a Malay starts pointing fingers at me for being racist, I would like to make it clear that I'm fine with people talking like that in everyday life. I even have friends that text to me that way. I may not like that kind of lingo, but if people want to speak the way they want to speak, God has not yet created a creature or force that can stop them.

But this is ridiculous. Putting signs like that in a Malaysian government building is akin to stepping into the Pentagon to find hip-hop language in their signs.

Is this the image we want to portray? That Malay is our national language and even government officials can't use it properly?

We may be way past the age of ties, jackets, tweed hats and meticulously perfect Queen's English, but that doesn't mean we should speak like men in caves in 1325 B.C. At least their language wasn't broken.