Objections raised to "pe̍h-ōe-jī" include that the surface meaning of the word itself is more generic than one specific system, and that both literary and colloquial register Southern Min appear in the system (meaning that describing it as "vernacular" writing might be inaccurate).
They make patterns of sound, and the meaning that such patterns throw up can be quite different from the surface meaning.
"I told you that crashing was all too common," the poet says, and again there is more than the surface meaning to her words.
This might seem particularly perilous on a medium like Twitter, where sarcasm and other playful uses of language often subvert the surface meaning.
It's a phrase packed with rich matter; under the surface meaning that it has for her, we can interrogate it and find that, actually, when "nothing happened," something happened.
With the clock ticking, the discussion moved on, and the question of the grandmother's loneliness — of what else the story might be saying to a reader, beyond the surface meaning of the words in the numbered paragraphs — was left unexplored.
Indeed you feel that Armstrong's heart is with this group of heroic rabbis trying to recreate Judaism after their terrible loss and urging that scripture should always be interpreted as encouraging compassion even when it is against the surface meaning of a particular text.
Government officials said it could now take as long as four months to dig a new tunnel wide enough to lift the miners, one by one, to the surface, meaning that they could remain trapped in the gold-and-copper mine until Christmas.
Does this mean that he believed in creation or that if you strip away the surface meaning, he is really committed to eternity?
Satellite images show the 25 April quake did not rupture all the way to the surface, meaning there is potential for another big quake just to the south of Kathmandu.
