Author: Kirk

Engrish.com

Foreign Languages, General, Outsider's Perspective

Do you need a laugh today? Go to Engrish.com.

My wife’s cousin’s husband (almost sounds like we are hillbillies, eh?) retired at an early age and now seems to spend all of his free time on the Internet.

This means that my wife gets tons of email from him — covering everything from conspiracy theories (No, I do not believe that the World Trade Center was bombed by the U.S. government.) to humorous videos (including my favorite: Evil Baby Eye).

Yesterday he sent to her several photos from the website Engrish.com, and every photo made us laugh!

The site accepts photos taken by readers who have spotted bad English on signs, labels, T-shirts, and other products from non-native-English-speaking countries.

Besides the humor — and there is a LOT of humor at Engrish.com — what I enjoy about the website is trying to understand how the translations into English became so mangled and twisted.

Some bad-but-humorous translations seem to be based on a non-native-English speaker hearing an English word enunciated poorly and converting it into writing such that the written form is an English word but not the same one.

For example, the photographed sign shown here refers to “groups” as “grubs”. If you squint your eyes and muffle your ears while reading and saying it aloud, you can see and hear how “groups” became “grubs”.

Other mangled translations seem to fall into categories such as these:

Beyond the photos, what makes Engrish.com especially funny is the comments from the site’s readers.

Many people say that dissection of a joke takes all the fun out of the joke, but those who become good at dissecting jokes become good at creating new ones.

I believe that this principle applies to mistranslations, too, and I could imagine that someone could write a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation on how translations go askew from one language to another.

Anyway, even if you are not interested in the mechanics of how words get mistranslated but you enjoy mistranslations for their humor alone, then you will enjoy Engrish.com.

“Cleanse”

Verbs

This verb bugs me.

What is wrong with using the verb “clean” instead of “cleanse”?

Why have two extra letters to refer to the act of, say, cleaning one’s face?

Why must it be “Cleanse your face with Scrub-o!”?

Why cannot it be “Clean your face with Scrub-o!”?

Perhaps some people who use “cleanse” like the “z” sound at the end of the verb.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following verbs (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “clean” — 320,000,000 matches
  • “cleanse” — 13,800,000 matches

This tells me that “clean” is 23.2 times as popular as “cleanse” on the Web.

A “quantum leap” is NOT impressive.

Euphemisms, Nouns, Self-negation

Have you ever heard someone say something similar to “The company made a quantum leap in productivity this past quarter.”, as if trying to say that a lot of progress was made?

I do not know the origin of the phrase “quantum leap”, but you should know that this euphemism, which is especially popular in American business, is essentially a self-negation.

The classic definition of the noun “quantum” is the smallest quantity of radiant energy that can exist independently.

A “quantum” in physics is the energy that is equal to the frequency of the associated radiation times Planck’s constant.

And a “quantum leap” refers to the discontinuous, instantaneous jump of an electron in an atom from one quantum state to another.

So taking a “quantum leap” truly refers to taking the smallest leap possible — not exactly what most Americans mean when they say it.

I suspect that many people misapply the phrase “quantum leap” so that they can sound smarter.

But they end up sounding a bit ignorant or pompous to anyone who has been exposed to even a little bit of modern physics.