I was going to wait until I accumulated a few more of these... certainly they are everywhere and certainly I wouldn't be an expat if I didn't bring it up at least once in this here blog.
What they mean, if one could speculate, isn't important. What's important is the downright surreality of their appearance... they are signs that don't signify ... or do they?
An article in The Week (my favorite news source - a weekly mag that compiles the world news of the week via a myriad of, sometimes contradictory, sources: everyone from Al Jeezera, Nigerian Times to WSJ, El Monde, etc. have their say on the event of the week... it's the old blind man and the elephant trick... I recommend it to everyone who's been blinded by staring down the same old funnel of mainstream media) lamented about the incoherency, spite and outright offensiveness of China's use of English.
But I say
1. We're all bastardizing the damn lingo either way you look at it in this digital gizmo age of anything/instantly goes...
2. The Chinese are a lot better at our English then we are at they're Chinese
3. The results are often uncanny, beautiful, albeit naive creative expressions a la the Exquisite Corpse... which we'll get to more of next time, or the time after.
1 comment:
I love the guts boys. There were two of them on our ferry to Putuoshan last year, so cute with their guts on display.
I'm a language snob, but I don't think Chinglish - or Engrish, Spanglish, Singlish, etc - poses that much threat to the quality and "purity" of the language. At its best, it can add a new dimension through the prism of mistranslation and meaning. (And it's cute.)
I find native speakers' botching of English far more worrying.
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