THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH

Soruce: www.speakup.com.br

ENGLISH SELLS

In the Counterbury Tales, Chaucer mocks The Wife of Bath for speaking French. She is not only ignorant, he implies, but pretentious. In 1980s, British yuppies were mocked for saying “ciao” and drinking cappuccino. Today, British high streets are lined with cafes called Dôme, Caffé Nero, Bella Pasta. We love foreign alphabets: spurious umlauts for rock (Moley Crue); bars with Cyrillic characters (CREMLIN); Chinese tattoos.

English speakers have always adopted foreign words to suggest sophistication. French has a certain “je ne sais qui” that English lacks. To talk of art, music and archeitecture, we speak of chiaroscuro, soprano and belvedere. German provides with psychological terms from Angst to Zeitgeist.

SOPHISTICATION SELLS

Now English words have become a sign of cosmopolitan sophistication. But beware of learning English from your T-shirt of pencil case. Consider example from European clothing:

SOMEBODY NEVER FADE

What does that mean? Perhaps “Some people are unforgettable.”

GOAT PUNK

I was bewildered by T-shirt, until I saw the illustration: a goat with a punk hairstyle. My personal favourite:

CHOCOLATE SPORTIN HALL

What could that refer to? The recreation room at Willy Wonka’s factory?

THE JOYS OF ENGRISH

Steven Caire’s book, The Joys Of Engrish, presents the bizarre English of Japan. If you don’t understand, don’t worry: neither do we.

Restaurant signs:

HOT BOWEL RICE

A bowl of rice is possible, but bowel means intestines.

On coffee jars.

IN WONDER WHY COFFEE TASTES SO GOOD WHEN YOU’RE NAKED WITH YOUR FAMILY.

Phrases that appear on pencil cases can be mysterious:

CATS KNOW VARIOUS THINGS

On rucksacks:

LITTLE WONDERS ARE GONE IN A FLASH, LIKE SQUIRRELS.

And on stationery:

HAPPINESS FROG

INSIDE EVERY GIRL THERE’S A STRIPPER LONG TO GET OUT

Do they mean all girls want to be strippers? Is that appropriate for kids’ notepads?

UNIMPORTANT BLUNDERS?

These phrases don’t make much sense. But who cares? They’re fashion accessories, not language courses. Yet some mistakes may be serious. British fire extinguishers are marked “Break glass in the event of fire.” The translation around Europe is totally confusing:

CRASH IN CASE OF FIRE

(Perhaps we can gloss that as: “crash your car so that there isn’t a fire.”). When kids walk into Westminster Abbey wearing “Get Fucked’ T-shirts, haven’t things gone too far? I’ve seen children wearing these slogans:

HALLUCINOGENIC DRUG COCAINE DEALER PLEASURE ZONE (on boys’ shorts) STIR BEFORE TASTING (on a girl’s T-shirt with arrow pointing down).

Are the designers joking? How offensive does it need to be before we care?

When they named the phone network WIND, did they realize it’s a British euphemism for flatulence?

TOO FAR

As long as foreignness sells, people will use and abuse English. It’s like smoking: everybody agrees it’s bad, but nobody will stop. Why not? Because it’s cool, and it doesn’t really hurt anyone – does it? Maybe we should consider how our mistakes look to others. Chinese symbols are trendy tattoos, but do we really know what they mean? One woman thought her shoulder tattoo meant “AIR.” Years later, a Chinese friend explained that in fact it means “FART.”

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