In my high school boarding years, my Housemaster once pointed out that most non English mother tongue countries stress on the importance of the grammar of English in their education; whereas the English mother tongue countries put much less emphasis on their grammar since they have been using them daily all their lives. That led to many grammatical mistakes on their side since their grammar could be only as good as their childhood (del piers /del – for some reasons MT keeps dropping the del tags) peers for most of them.

While checking the latest version of Cobuild, the examples are even more “interesting”. “One of the men shone a torch in his face.” I suppose this comes from “punch him in his face” not “punch him at his face”. Then the example of “amateur theatricals” is no more, replaced by “Did you shine at school?” with the explanation “Someone who shines at a skill or activity does it extremely well.” I would hardly call schooling a skill or an activity, but on 2nd thought this isn’t too far from the truth.

I also find some legal English to be rather strange at times despite the necessity for the lawyers to have all areas covered but I don’t know British/legal English well enough to give much comment.

That said, “He shines at amateur theatricals.” also sounds odd to me. I have tried searching the net and several paper dictionaries before I posted the blog message. Although some listed with a “[in/at]” sign, while all gave examples with the preposition “in” in regards to such context, none gave any example with the preposition “at” except where it meant a place or an event rather than an area of expertise.

I’ll try to do some more research in this regard.

Is Ella Koon the soloist/model that Sam Hui brought into the entertaining business or the better looking one (don’t know her name at all) of AT17?

Mind you, I don’t think it’s correct to say that someone shines at communication skills. “Communication skills” is just too vague and abstract, this does not make sense and stinks of cliche.

Communication is hard. Putting big words together as such is no different in nature to the Chinese translation of “fsck fried cow river”.

And I like AT17. I also like Ella Koon. For VERY different reasons thou.

The format of the show seems to be “educational” no matter how “fun” they meant to make it. Anyone involved could and should have reported the mistake, unless no one knew any better.

Mediocrity for a quick buck is most Hong Kongers’ motto….

I make mistakes here. Even though this is not at all educational, I reread my posts many times over days and keep correcting my mistakes here. It is not perfect but I try my best and welcome all corrections.