General

“It has the granite countertops.”

General

I heard this two nights ago during an episode of “My First Place” on the HGTV channel.

The real-estate agent in the episode was showing a house to a husband and wife who were about to buy their first house together.

The agent was promoting the house’s features. When she walked into the kitchen with the couple, she said, “It has the granite countertops.”

The definite article “the” caught my ear because I would have omitted it and said, “It has granite countertops.”

Pondering the agent’s use of “the” in front of “granite countertops”, I realized that “the granite countertops” sounded more expensive than would the phrase “granite countertops” without the definite article “the” in front of it.

But why?

I believe that adding “the” gives a feeling of “one and only”, which gives a feeling of exclusivity, which gives a feeling of higher value.

So try starting a phrase with “the” when you want to increase perceived value.

If you split-test this in your own marketing and see a statistically significant difference, then please let me know what happened — even if I am full of bunk!

Hyphenation book now available!

General

Nineteen Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens, my new book about hyphenation, launched this morning.

And you can now get this $19.97 book at absolutely no charge!

I highly recommend that you read all about Nineteen Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens as soon as possible and make a quick decision about whether it is right for you.

Go here to read all about Nineteen Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens.

UPDATE: My How to Use Hyphens book is now available in paperback and ebook editions and has replaced the Nineteen Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens PDF. Learn more here!

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.