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Ainglish for Americans
04/21/06
by Shaw

Geez. English is a hard language to learn. You hear this complaint all over the place, often from people learning it as a second language, but just as much from native speakers. (Aside: there is at least one website humorously and inoffensively dedicated to the difficulties that Asians have in learning English as a second language... the site I am thinking of is, slightly more offensively, titled "Engrish".) My inclination is to agree with this, but I haven't the experience required to make and measure such a statement myself. I am certainly not a linguist, and I only speak one language (English) well enough to really say I understand most of the rules, and I speak and understand Spanish well enough to read nitpick the grammatical mistakes on bilingual signs posted all over DC. Usually, the English signs are in pretty good order, except for a few oddities that offend my sensibilities, such as Clay's peeves "they're, their, there" and "your, you're", and people that use quotation marks to emphasize words rather than bold/underlined/italics. An example of the latter is the following text from a few signs in my pediatrician's office (which I have not visited in 15 years). I remember this because it pissed me off when I was 7:

We "do not"
accept credit cards.

"Please"
wipe your feet before
entering doctor offices.

The best is the handwritten one where they wanted to emphasize the whole message:

"Thank you for not smoking"

If the last sign were an isolated example, you could argue that they were just quoting from some ad campaign, but the previous two signs clearly establish the principle that quotation marks mean emphasis. Amazingly, I still see this in practice all over the place.

In any case, spelling errors and grammatical and punctuational affectations like this are forgiveable, because at least the message is clearly communicated, and is likely done so at the maximum level of coherence possible for the message-giver. What I really can't understand is the willfull and pointless destruction of English by parties completely aware that they are either making up phony words or speaking incorrectly. This is usually done solely to pander to one demographic or another, and with no resulting added value to the message.

Clay discussed an example of this phenomenon in one of his early Deadly Hippos columns here. In his column he complains specifically about the McDonald's slogan, "I'd Hit It," for their burgers, which was mostly utilized in commercials consisting entirely of black guys standing around McDonald's burgers and talking. Unfortunately the public reaction to Clay's column was nil, and McDonald's continued on their crusade to capitalize on the towering popularity of rap music and get every ebonics-loving person in the US to buy their products. The next campaign was the horrible "QPC. Pound one." ad for the Quarter Pounder with Cheese [QPC]. After that came the TV ad where the black woman on the airplane confronted a flight attendant who tried to remove her unfinished chicken nuggets from her tray table, grabbing the flight attendant's hand and saying, "you better don't." They smartly re-edited this ad and put out a new version with something slightly more grammatically straightforward, like "you had best not touch this, may it please the gentleman." This was of course followed by the initiation of their credit card machines, advertised at the entrance of every McDonald's with a sign that had a picture of a Visa and the words "Yeah, we take 'em!" underneath. Horrifying. I leave McDonald's at that, since a Google search seems to indicate there are already a good number of articles better than mine referencing the McDonald's slogans.

Of course the target demographic for wantonly bad language is not always urban African Americans--kids get their share too. I have never understood the preoccupation with backward letters in children's advertisements. When I saw a sign for Toys "R" Us at the tender age of 1, I couldn't read and probably didn't even know where I was. By the time I was old enough to recognize and interpret the writing on the Toys "R" Us, I was also old enough to know, first of all, that the letter R was not a word and was clearly meant to evoke the word "are," and secondly, that the letter R was clearly backward. Why would anyone allow that sign to pass through quality control, I wondered. It didn't even occur to me that someone would do this on purpose... I honestly believed there was a mistake and I saw what no adult did. This had the effect of making me believe that the chains of stores represented with the backward R (toys/babies/kids "r" us) didn't merit my business, even as a 3-year old.

Toys for idiots

This rejection of the ad campaign is exactly the same feeling that one of my black students had when we talked about the McDonald's ads: she felt insulted by the clear pandering. If this is the universal reaction, then why do these ads even make it past the drawing board? That's another column--as the time approaches 3am I should actually mention what I sat down to write about.

On my ride home tonight on the Washington, DC metro, I saw a sign that really worried me. In the above cases, the perpetrator has been private business, and while the intent was clearly to noticeably broaden appeal to a particular group of people, it was done so in such a way that the language was really just a tool to get out the message; it wasn't the message itself. The sign I saw on the metro broke both of these barriers. I didn't have a camera with me, and the signs are brand new, so I can't show you a picture, but you'll have to take my word for it. The text is basically the following:

sumpinspicious (sum' pin spi shis): An untended package or bag that you see sitting on the ground or in the Metro, to be reported immediately to any Metro Transit Authority officer.

The important things are that the sign was placed by the Washington Area Metro and Transit Authority (WMATA), a division of the Washington, DC government, and that the sign is set up specifically to resemble a dictionary definition. Surely this setup won't fool any American into believing that this is a real word, right? But Washington is a city of international visitors. Maybe the chances are slim that someone will leave DC thinking they have learned a new English word, but I ask you: did this sign communicate anything that another more straightforward sign wouldn't accomplish? Such as a sign that said, "Please report all suspicious packages," maybe with a picture of a lone backpack on a seat? No, the only possible reason for the formulation of this sign is to continue the flagrant abuse of English solely for the purpose of grabbing the attention of Metro's African American riders. Why do I assume that? In the McDonald's case it was clear they were advertising to black people because all of their ads featured black people... in the Metro case it isn't necessarily safe to assume there was an implied target audience. But I submit this to you: search on Google for sumpin spicious and see what you get. In fact, I'll do it for you: click here. When I do this search, five of the top ten results are quotations from slave narratives!!!

I don't know why this one sign annoyed me enough to write this column, but it just occurred to me that this column isn't funny and there's nothing I can do about it now. I have to get up early tomorrow morning so I can get McDonald's before work. Shit.

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