The survey by
toy company Hasbro Singapore showed that 63 per cent of
Singaporeans said jaywalking is a taboo action they are most guilty
of. (Yahoo! photo)
Raise your hands if you have jaywalked across a road because you
were too impatient to wait for the "green man" to appear or too
lazy to climb up the overhead bridge.
Don’t be shy, after all you are far from the only
one to do so.
A recent survey by the Singapore unit of multinational U.S. toy company
Hasbro found that 63 per cent of
Singaporean respondents said jaywalking is a taboo action they are
most guilty of. Other top taboo actions include littering, cutting
a queue, smoking in non-designated areas and faking illness for a
medical certificate.
In the survey, 734 Singaporeans aged 16 to 50 were
given 19 taboo actions and asked to pick one that they were most
guilty of committing.
They were also asked to pick their favourite local
expression used in everyday conversation from among 21
choices.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the top choice for nearly
half of the respondents was “Alamak”, which is a Malay expression
of dismay or surprise.
Coming in second with 40 per cent of the votes is “Kiasu”, a
Singaporean term to describe someone who is overly competitive and
afraid to lose. This was followed by expressions such as “Act
blur”, “Siam” which means “get out of the way” in Hokkien and
“Gila”, the Malay definition for crazy.
These findings were released on Tuesday in
conjunction with the launch of Hasbro’s latest Taboo Singapore game
edition. Taboo is a party word game where players will take turns
to describe a word on the cards to their partners but without using
the five associated words or phrases seen on the
cards.
The company launched the first local edition of the
game back in October 2006.
The new Singapore version comprises 400 local guess
words, which covers familiar acronyms such as ATM and ERP as well
as expressions like “Blur like sotong” and “Yaya
papaya”.