WHEN it was recently reported that CNN had named Ris Low as one of Asia’s 25 “most influential” people in 2009, a few Singaporeans I know wanted to renounce their citizenship.

But then, when the Government announced on Monday that non-citizens will have to pay higher school fees, they changed their mind, realising that a 19-year-old dethroned beauty queen is perhaps the least of their problems.

I would contend that Ms Low is not only one of the most influential Singaporeans of 2009, but is Singaporean Of The Year.

Too bad there’s no such Flame Awards category.

Actually, the CNN report was somewhat inaccurate.

In the first place, it wasn’t CNN, but a CNN-affiliated website called CNNGo. You may say it’s the same thing, but it’s like equating American Idol to the Singapore Idol website. There is a huge difference.

And it wasn’t a list of the “most influential”, but of “Who Mattered Most” – which only trivialises the list even more.

Regardless, it added to Ms Low’s notoriety and extended it beyond our coastlines.

On top of that, the ex-Miss Singapore World also made it to Yahoo! Singapore’s 2009 top 10 most searched list.

Interestingly, the CNNGo list and the Yahoo! top 10 had one thing in common apart from Ms Low – the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware). And the only thing that Ms Low and Aware have in common is that they’re female.

One of them has seriously tarnished the image of Singapore women this year while the other... uh, okay, maybe they have two things in common.

But Ms Low’s singular achievement, as correctly identified by CNNGo, is the coinage of the word “boomz” and its proliferation in local popular culture.

Remember “Shut up and sit down”? It was the most memorable quote that came out of the Aware saga. “Shut up and sit down” T-shirts were printed, but unlike the “Boomz” T-shirts, they weren’t sold at New Urban Male and the would-be catchphrase never really caught on.

Hoping that lightning would strike twice, Ms Low herself tried to introduce another buzzword, “shingz”, but failed because it was too self-conscious and calculated.

The “boomz” boom was a happy accident. (Okay, maybe more of an annoying accident for some.) No one planned it, least of all Ms Low herself.

Of all her mistakes, from linguistic to the credit card fraud, I thought the dumbest was her not getting a cut of the New Urban Male T-shirt sales.

One of the year’s greatest ironies is that it all started because of protests that the “bipolar” teen was unfit to represent our country in the Miss World pageant, which eventually led to her representing Singapore on CNNGo’s “Who Mattered Most In Asia” list.

If only those protesters had shut up and sat down, Ms Low would’ve faded into obscurity just like the woman who eventually took her place in the Miss World pageant did.

Instead, she is now, by my reckoning, 2009’s Singaporean Of The Year.

S M Ong writes the weekly Act Blur column in The New Paper On Sunday.

This article was first published in The New Paper.