‘Umbrage’ Book Display Placed At Harbourfront Public Library
The word ‘umbrage‘ has become part of Singapore lingo overnight after Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) CEO Ng Yat Chung made it viral during a now-iconic rebuttal to a journalist.
Many have joined in on the memes, but the National Library Board (NLB) did the characteristic thing of capitalising on a word that wasn’t in common use until recently.
In response to the viral trend, the Harbourfront library put up a display stand with a selection of books for widening one’s vocabulary.
We hope nobody took umbrage to the stand.
Harbourfront Public Library has ‘umbrage’ book stand
The display stand was spotted at Harbourfront Public Library on Saturday (8 May).
Titled ‘Umbrage and other words you should know’, the book stand features some of the following books:
- 1001 Words You Need To Know And Use: An A-Z of Effective Vocabulary by Marvin Manser
- Word Play: A cornucopia of puns, anagrams and other contortions and curiosities of the English language by Gyles Brandreth
- 1000 Words To Expand Your Vocabulary by Joseph Piercy
- Making A Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation by David Crystal
- You Are Not Human: How Words Kill by Simon Lancaster
- How to Sound Clever: Master the 600 English Words You Pretend to Understand When You Don’t by Hubert van den Bergh
As you can see, there seems to be a pattern of wordplay and learning vocabulary found through the displayed books.
Library visitors can take the opportunity to learn not just this new word but many others to impress friends, strangers, and perhaps even journalists.
But hopefully, one doesn’t take advantage of this increased vocabulary to berate others. Uttering your indignation at something can be done fairly and respectfully to others.
A chance to further one’s vocabulary
For what it’s worth, Mr Ng has single-handedly introduced a new word to our lexicon.
As amusing as the word is, it’s also helped increase our vocabulary and hopefully, even encourage more to widen our wordbanks.
Cheers to NLB for taking the opportunity to further our vocabulary in a light-hearted manner as well.
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Featured image adapted from Facebook and Facebook.
