The recent hearing of YB Karpal Singh's sedition case brought out the truth about Utusan Malaysia reporter's misunderstanding of the legal term, 'ultra vires' which he mistook for 'insulting' and it caused untold damage to YB's reputation and created unnecessary tensions among the Malays.
Even with different dialects, like for instance, my Hakka wife used to mistook 'harm sub' (Cantonese for 'having dirty mind as in sexual innuendoes') for 'kiam siap' (Hokien for 'stingy')! Till today, she treats Fook Chau dialect and Teochew dialect as inter-changeable! Just imagine, Fook Chau is Greek to me and Teochew is quite understandable to me because of its closeness to Hokien. So carelessness in language can be a problem.
Recently, a Malay described someone as 'harm sub' and when asked, he was so sure that he knew the meaning. Yet, for all the descriptions I can only surmise that he meant, 'larn si' which literally actually means 'sperm' in a loose sense (I think) and generally meant to describe someone as 'cocky' as in rude and conceited! Now, the big difference is that a Chinese would not mind being described as cocky but 'harm sub' can be terrible in the sense that people can get the impression that he has itchy hands, and likes to take advantage of women by touching at every opportunity!
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