The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why is Singapore Not Classified as a First World Nation?”
Singapore was not a First World nation
because it did not explicitly side with the US, NATO, and their allies, against
the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and their allies, the Second World; during the
Cold War. As a member of ASEAN, and the
Non-Aligned Movement, Singapore was Third World. Those terms are outdated since the Cold War is
over. Singapore is, however, a developed
country.
The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Do I need life insurance?”
That really depends on how you understand life insurance and how it works. You cannot ascertain need until you have defined the subject matter. In summary, an insurance policy is an exercise to mitigate risk. In your case, you mitigate against the risk of loss of income for your beneficiaries, your family, in the event of your untimely death. Or, you mitigate against the loss of income and the cost of lifestyle maintenance in the event of critical illness or disability.
What the insurer does is take a premium, payable at a set interval, every month or year, from every person who seeks coverage, for whatever reason. At a macro-level, the premiums of these policies are consolidated to service them. In the event that there is a claim, it would be a percentage of all the premiums collected, which the insurer can afford to pay out. In the perspective of the individual policy holder, it is all or nothing. If there is no claim, at the end of the insured period, the policy lapses, or the insurer returns the premiums with or without some dividend. This is dependent on the nature of the policy contract. If there is a claim, the policy pays out.
Now, if you have no coverage, there is nothing to pay out in the event of loss. There is no risk mitigation. Whereas, if you had coverage, even in the event you never claim, you still had that coverage, and the right policy is a financial instrument in and off itself. In modern insurance, you never lose that premium paid. It either comes back at the end of the policy term, or as a claim, which may be many times the premium paid. The exception is a term plan, where there is no claim at the end, the policy simply lapses.
Unless you are certain to live to age 101,
a life policy has 100% claim for death. In
a developed country, because of the excellent healthcare, you are likely to
live long enough to get some form of critical illness. Claim rates for critical illness plans is over
50%. In light of that, I would say that
it is extremely foolish to not have some form of coverage.
There are
words we need to borrow from other languages.
From Turkish, that word of the day is “aşermek”. “Aşermek” is from the Ottoman Turkish یمك (yemek), meaning “to eat,
consume”, further derived from Proto-Turkic prefix, “jē-”, “to eat”. This word is used colloquially for pregnant
women to refer to the food cravings they experience.
The menstrual cycle is a natural part of being a woman. Most cultures still refuse to name it directly. The International Women’s Health Coalition and the period-tracking application Clue surveyed the world in 2015 and found roughly 5,000 euphemisms for menstruation across just ten languages. Five thousand ways to avoid four syllables.
Psychologists
Ingrid Johnston-Robledo and Joan C. Chrisler explained, in their research on
menstrual stigma, that if there were no shame attached to the word, there would
be no need to call it anything other than its actual name. Every “Aunt Flo,” every “Code Red,” every “time
of the month” exists because the simple word carries a social cost the
euphemism avoids. That cost is not
evenly distributed. It falls on the
person menstruating, asked to manage everyone else’s discomfort with her own
biology.
The Global Sample
Afrikaans
speakers say Granny is stuck in traffic.
Chinese speakers say the old friend has come. Danish speakers say the Russians have
arrived. French speakers say the English
have landed. The imagery runs from the
domestic to the geopolitical, but the function stays identical everywhere:
substitute anything – an ally, an enemy, a household relative – rather than say
the word. Punjabi carries one of the
starkest entries on record, “untouchable,” a euphemism that does not soften the
taboo so much as state it outright.
Ghana’s
Akan people offer the clearest counterexample.
Linguist Kofi Agyekum’s 2002 study of Akan menstrual language found the
official phrase used to inform an Asante queen mother that a girl in her
jurisdiction has had her first period is “ɔ-a-yɛbra,” which translates
literally as “she has been made perfect.”
Menstruation is framed as arrival, not affliction. The same culture also carries euphemisms
describing menstruation as toxic and polluting elsewhere in its vocabulary,
proving stigma and reverence can sit inside the same language at once, but the
Asante court’s own chosen phrase shows a euphemism can just as easily elevate
the thing it names instead of hiding it.
A
euphemism is never neutral. It is a
measurement of exactly how uncomfortable a culture is with a biological
function half the population lives through monthly for decades. Most of the 5,000 recorded terms measure
discomfort. One Asante phrase measures
the opposite, and the gap between the two tells you everything about which
culture made peace with what it was naming.
Afrikaans
“Granny is
stuck in traffic”
“Granny is in the red car.”
“Birthing a blood diamond.”
Arabic
“The monthly habit.”
Brazilian
Portuguese
“I am with
Chico.”
Chilean Spanish
“The rabbit has been stabbed.”
Chinese
“Regular holiday.”
“Little sister
has come.”
“The old friend has come.”
Danish
“Aunt Red is here.”
“Painters are on the stairway.”
“The Communists are in the funhouse.”
“The Russians have arrived.”
“The Red Sea.”
Dutch
“Monthly party.”
“The egg yolk has dropped to the bottom.”
English
“Aunt Flo/Aunt Flow.”
“Bloody Mary.”
“Carrie.”
“Code Red.”
“Having the painters in.”
“Girl flu.”
“Lady business.”
“Lady time.”
“Making wine
tonight; no stomping on the grapes.”
“Monthly visitor.”
“Moon time”
“Mother Nature’s gift.”
“No circus tonight; the monkey has a
nosebleed.”
“On the rag.”
“Red Army/tide.”
“Riding the cotton pony.”
“Shark week.”
“Surfing the
crimson tide/wave.”
“The Blob.”
“The oven is being cleaned.”
“The red badge of courage.”
“The Red
Baron.”
“The
Redcoats are coming.”
“Time of the
month.”
French
“Cooking black pudding.”
“Crime scene in my panty.”
“Ketchup week.”
“Niagara Falls.”
“Strawberry season.”
“Technical control.”
“The British Army has landed in my panty.”
“The little clown with a nosebleed.”
“The English
have landed.”
“VOO (Vaginally Out of Order).”
Finnish
“Japan is attacking.”
“Mad Cow Disease.”
German
“Monthly oil change.”
“Smells like fish.”
“Strawberry Week.”
“The cranberry woman is coming.”
“The Red Army has arrived.”
“The red plague is here.”
“Tomato juice.”
Greek
“The Russians are in town.”
Irish
“The decorators are in.”
“The painters are in the hallway.”
Italian
“Guests/relatives have come (to visit).”
“I have my things.”
“Red Sea.”
“The Flood.”
Portuguese
“Benfica is playing (Portuguese football
club with a red flag)”
“I am with Chico.”
“Raining on the farm.”
“Red traffic light.”
“The basin is broken.”
“The home team is playing (in red jerseys).”
Punjabi
“Untouchable.”
Romanian
“Bitten by a rooster.”
“I have guests.”
Russian
“Business.”
“The Red Army.”
“The red day of the calendar.”
Spanish
“Defrosting the steak.”
“Like a tomato.”
“Red traffic light.”
“The rule.”
“I’m with Andrew, the one who comes once a
month.” Spanish: “Andrés, el que
viene cada mes.”
Turkish
“The motherland is bleeding. “
“My aunt has come.”
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District
80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder,
Awesome Toastmasters
Someone anonymous said, “English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.”
And this is why the language is challenging for non-native speakers.
Language
is the original source of diplomatic incidents. Long before governments issued formal protests
and summoned ambassadors, ordinary people were accidentally threatening each
other across linguistic borders with perfectly innocent intentions.
“Bom
dia” is the Portuguese greeting for “Good morning.” It is warm, cheerful, and entirely benign. A Brazilian walking into a café, a Portuguese
businessman greeting a colleague, a Mozambican answering the phone — all of
them saying, with genuine friendliness, “Good morning.”
In
Malay, the same two words mean something considerably less convivial. “Bom” is bomb. “Dia” is him. “Bom dia” — bomb him. A perfectly ordinary morning greeting in
Lisbon is a direct incitement to violence in Kuala Lumpur.
This
is not an isolated linguistic curiosity. Language is riddled with these collisions. The English word “gift” means poison in
German. “Bless you” in English is an
entirely different proposition in several Slavic languages. “Preservativo” in Spanish means condom,
not preservative, which has caused a specific category of culinary confusion in
Spanish-speaking countries when English food labels are translated without
sufficient care.
The
phenomenon has a name in linguistics: false cognates, or more entertainingly, “false
friends” — words that look or sound alike across languages but carry entirely
different meanings. They are the
linguistic equivalent of a firm handshake delivered to someone whose cultural
norm is a bow. The intent is goodwill. The execution is a misunderstanding.
Bom dia, then. Good morning. Or maybe not, depending on your
audience.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club
Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
Is there a word in English, that uses all the vowels, including “y”?
Unquestionably.
Approximately 40% of current members leave Toastmasters every year,
implying a baseline club retention rate hovering around 60%. Against that benchmark, AIA Toastmasters has
sustained member retention above 80% across recent terms. That is not a marginal improvement. It is a club retaining members at nearly
twice the rate attrition claims elsewhere in the same global organisation, and
the reason sits entirely in how recruitment and onboarding are structured, not
in luck.
A corporate Toastmasters club is not selling to strangers. It is selling to colleagues who already trust
the AIA name, already sit inside the same professional network, and already
have direct visibility into whether the people pitching them the programme are
credible. This changes the entire
psychology of the pitch. A public club
must build credibility from zero with every new prospect. A corporate club inherits it, and the closing
conversation becomes considerably shorter as a result.
The pitch itself follows the same discipline that governs any genuine
sales conversation. Appeal to
self-interest, never to altruism. Nobody
joins a corporate Toastmasters club out of civic duty toward the club’s
membership numbers. They join because a
credible colleague has convinced them the programme solves a problem they
already have: nerves before a client presentation, difficulty commanding a
room, or a promotion that suddenly demands executive-level communication they
were never trained for. Borrow
credibility by having recognisable, respected AIA staff and consultants visibly
involved in delivering the recruitment session, rather than relying on
Toastmasters’ own institutional reputation to do the selling unaided – that is
ineffective, because Toastmasters does not have brand recognition in the wider
corporate community in Singapore. The
key is to close early. A recruitment
seminar that ends without a concrete next step, and a signed membership form,
has generated interest without generating commitment, and interest alone has a
shelf life measured in days. Follow-up
teams must act within days of a session, since the window of interest runs from
a few days to two weeks depending on the impression left. This is not a Toastmasters-specific insight.
Mentorship Assignment is the Closing Step of the Sale,
Not an Afterthought
Once membership is confirmed, mentor assignment must follow within three
days, matched deliberately against the new member’s stature and life experience
rather than handed out at random.
Research on employee onboarding found up to 22% of turnover occurs
within the first 45 days of a new relationship, and structured mentoring
programmes improve retention by as much as 82%, while nearly 90% of people
decide whether to stay in an organisation within their first six months. A club that delays mentor contact past the
first week is gambling with exactly the window the data says matters most, and
a corporate club, sitting inside an organisation that already runs its own
formal onboarding processes for new hires, has no excuse for treating
Toastmasters onboarding as an informal afterthought by comparison.
The Speech Marathon
I personally do not believe in speechcraft and never bother to run
it. We have a speech marathon because
member recruitment depends on two milestones: paying the membership fee and
giving the first speech. This speech marathon
session runs two weeks after the recruitment session, giving follow-up and
mentorship teams time to settle administration.
New members then get a week to prepare their icebreaker with their
mentor before presenting at a speech marathon, where every participant delivers
a genuine first project simultaneously, reducing individual pressure while
producing a shared sense of graduation, the moment a prospect converts fully
from interested colleague into committed member.
The Full Cycle, and Why Run It Like a Campaign
From execution to speech marathon runs roughly six weeks, with four
weeks of planning beforehand, including dry runs for the recruitment session
and every workshop. This must be
executed with the same discipline as a sales campaign, because in terms of
member survival, it functions as one, closing colleagues on a value
proposition, following up before interest cools, and onboarding fast enough
that the new member never has the chance to quietly disengage. Clubs without the institutional depth to run
this on the first attempt should treat capability-building as a gradual
process, combining with sister clubs or bringing in experienced external
Toastmasters rather than attempting the full programme prematurely. AIA Toastmasters’ own retention figures,
sustained above 80% against an organisation-wide baseline closer to 60%, are
the evidence that running it properly is worth the discipline it demands.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club
Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
The claim surfaces constantly, usually deployed to make a rhetorical
point about gender that the facts do not actually support. Someone asserts that “female” is derived from
“male”, that women are linguistically defined as a subordinate category of men,
or, in the reverse and equally wrong version, that the word proves some ancient
priority of the feminine. Both claims
collapse the moment anyone opens an etymological dictionary.
The Actual Lineage, because Accuracy Still Matters
“Male” descends from the Latin “masculus”. Old French shortened it to “masle”,
and by the fourteenth century, after a period running alongside the newer form,
Old French had dropped the “s” to produce “male”. The Norman Conquest of 1066 carried the word into
English, where it has denoted the male of a species ever since.
“Female” has an entirely separate Latin root. It comes from “femella”, itself a
diminutive of “femina”, meaning “woman”.
“Femella” passed into Old French as “femelle”, and from
there into English as “female”. There
was never a shared root, never a shared derivation, and never a “fe-”
prefix attached to “male” to produce it.
The two words arrived in English by separate roads that happened to end
up next to each other on the same page of the dictionary.
English speakers did something mischievous to these two unrelated
words. Middle English writers,
encountering “femelle” sitting beside “male” in everyday use, quietly
respelled it to “female”, nudging the ending into visual agreement with a word
it has no etymological connection to.
This is a documented case of folk etymology reshaping spelling by
analogy, the same mechanism that turned the Spanish “cucaracha” into the
English “cockroach” by dragging in “cock” and “roach” from words already in the
language. The resemblance between “male”
and “female” is a four-hundred-year-old typographical accident, not a
linguistic fact about hierarchy.
This matters because bad etymology gets recruited into arguments it
cannot support. Gender-essentialist
commentary has, at various points, leaned on the false claim that “female” is
grammatically or historically derivative of “male” to argue that womanhood is
defined in relation to and subordinate to manhood. The reverse ideological move exists too,
insisting the resemblance encodes some suppressed feminine primacy. Both readings require the words to share a
root. They do not. Robert Graves built entire mythological
arguments in “The White Goddess” on etymologies modern historical linguists
have since dismantled, and this case belongs in the same bin: a
plausible-sounding word history invented after the fact to prop up a conclusion
someone had already decided to reach.
Language does enough interesting work on its own without anyone needing
to invent false cognates to make a rhetorical point land harder. “Male” and “female” are simply two Latin
words for two different things, dressed to look like relatives by scribes with
an eye for symmetry rather than accuracy.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club
Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
The word “woman” is actually unrelated to “man”; they have different origins. The term “man” is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root “man”, and there is a story to it. In Hindu mythology, as found in the Matsya Purana, from the latter part of the 1st millennium BC, Manu is the name of the progenitor of humankind, who survived a great flood, in a boat, pulled by a horned fish to safety. He lands on a mountain, restarts civilisation, and gives mankind laws. The Sumerian flood myth dates from 1,800 BC. This is the likely origin of the story of Noah (a.s.), which shares many of the same elements.
The term “man”, and words derived from it, can designate any, or even all of the human race regardless of their gender or age. In traditional usage, “man”, without an article, itself refers to the species or to humanity, mankind, as a whole.
On the other hand, in Old English, the words “wer” and “wif”, were used to refer to “a man” and “a woman” respectively, while the Proto-Germanic “mann” had the primary meaning of “adult male human”, but could also be used as gender neutral, as is the case with Modern German “man”, corresponding to the pronoun in the English utterance “one does what one must”. It is from “wif”, that we get “wifman”, which is the origin of the modern “woman”.
As such, the etymologies of the two words
are distinct, and their modern co-relationship is a massive coincidence, and a
form of convergent evolution of philology.
The word “woman” is not derived from “man”, and any recent charges of
sexism are born of ignorance, and greatly mistaken.
The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Can parents take out life insurance policies on their children without them knowing?”
If the child is below the age of majority, their consent is not required to take out a policy on them, as long as insurable interest is proven. Parents have insurable interest on their children until they start working.
Once the child is considered legally an
adult, which may vary from 18 years to 21 years of age, depending on where you
are, their consent is required for such a policy, and they will, as the life
insured, know about the policy.
The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why does Singapore not send back all the foreign workers, and take in Rohingyas for construction? Singapore can earn more since we do not have to pay them. We just have to give them food and shelter.”
Are you suggesting that Singapore take in refugees, and turn them into slaves? This is not 1000 BC, and we are not building monuments to the god kings. This is the 21st century, and we are building modern infrastructure, using modern technology. We need semi-educated and educated people to operate machinery. That is why the work permit system emphasises skilled labour through the different costs of the foreign worker levy.
Aside from the fact that this is clearly against international law, and a violation of human rights, this means taking in hundreds of thousands of people with no related skills, of a different culture, and entirely disenfranchised from the community. Do you know which society was built on that level of slave labour? Ancient Sparta. It meant an over-militarised society that needed to put down frequent revolts. Sparta faded away, and became a sort of theme attraction during the time of the Roman Empire.
Slave labour is a disincentive to innovation and technological development. That is the opposite of Singapore’s values. Slaves need to be fed, with little return on investment, since educated slaves will revolt, and create disorder. Either way, the cost benefit analysis is not attractive. In a modern capitalist world, slavery does not work, and that is why it really died. During the American Civil War, the slave-holding South was always going to lose to the industrialised North. Slavery was a disincentive to industrialisation. This would guarantee Singapore eventually fails.
Singapore is an
exercise of social engineering on an industrial scale. It would not make sense for us to undermine
that by taking in an entirely new group of people, from a source of labour we
have little interaction with, and destabilise our social contract. Foreign workers come here for a better life,
acquire skills, and bring it back home.
The absolute best and brightest stay and apply for citizenship. Refugees, especially refugee slave labour,
are here to stay. If they are
problematic, they cannot be repatriated anywhere. There is no work permit to cancel.
