Mind Your Language: We Don’t Call Them Juice Boxes or Sodas

I always find it interesting to discover the differences between Singapore Standard English and American Standard English. It’s cool to discover and I’d thought I’d share these so that if you’re in Singapore for a visit, you won’t feel so lost. Just the other day I found a poor visitor to Singapore so traumatized by the cashier at a Fast Food place. She kept asking him loudly, “You eating here?” repeatedly. In the US I think you would say “To stay or to go?” Hope I got it right. Here we say, “Eat here or take-away”. Not too grammatical, but that’s how it goes.

What you call Sodas, we call Soft Drinks. They are called soft, as opposed to hard drinks which contain alcohol.

photo by bookjunkie

What you may call Juice Boxes, we call Packet Drinks.

photo by bookjunkie

About bookjunkie

Blogging about life in Singapore & recently cancer too.
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6 Responses to Mind Your Language: We Don’t Call Them Juice Boxes or Sodas

  1. 365days2play says:

    “You eating here” is not that difficult to decipher, even if it may be grammatically incorrect. I highly suspect the person was unable to understand the accent and therefore could not make out the words.

    “To stay or to go” isn’t all that grammatically correct either. “Eat here or take away” seems to me more self explanatory. Americans have to realise that the English language originated from another country, and that it is now used in many various countries. In NZ , Aussie and UK, they say “take away” too. This comes from the fact that they literally have take away shops such as the fish and chip shops with huge “take away” signs.

  2. floramoreno says:

    Usually you get asked “for here or to go?” in the US, but you were pretty close. =)

    And they are called soft drinks in the US sometimes too; there are also regional differences for those types of drinks. People in California usually call it soda, but some places back East or in the Northwest call it pop or soda pop. You can check this map out if you want to see for yourself: http://popvssoda.com:2998/

  3. Crystal says:

    Random thought…if you were to ask all the American bloggers what we call this (and held up a can of coke) you would probably get different answers, too, depending on what part of the US we grew up in. Soda, pop, fizz, and tonic all come to mind.

    • bookjunkie says:

      Love this…thanks for much for sharing Crystal.

      I just love discovering things like this that you can only learn from a native 🙂 so cool!! In Singapore I never hear pop, fizz or tonic so it’s quite refreshing 🙂 Soda I have heard, probably on TV.

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