Gratuitous English/Real Life
Examples of Gratuitous English in Real Life include:
- Aya Hirano, voice actress for Suzumiya Haruhi, wore a shirt saying "Did You Cum Twice Too?" and "Feel so dirty!!! I need a Tongue Bath!" at an official concert. Fans are pretty sure she didn't actually know what those words meant. Although you can never say for sure...
- Seeing how Aya has written lyrics for an English (well, more like very, very Engrish) song, you might want to reconsider that.
- It has recently[when?] come out that she lived in New York City for four years as a child, so odds are she knew exactly what the shirt said.
- Seeing how Aya has written lyrics for an English (well, more like very, very Engrish) song, you might want to reconsider that.
- As a general rule, Germans LOVE their Gratuitous English almost as much as the Japanese. Since both languages are very closely related (the Angles and the Saxons were German tribes before they settled England), English words integrate very well into the German language and while many words in both languages are almost or completely identical, some similar-sounding words mean very different things. They are known as Falsche Freunde in German and False Friends in English. (Interestingly, False Friends is not a False Friend). In General, using English words is the same as using Xtreme Kool Letterz.
- The most infamous example is of German discount store chain Lidl once advertising "body bags". They meant backpacks. Many, many producers still call their backpacks "body bags".
- Doubly ironic since "rucksack", the German term for the bags, is also used in English.
- The German word for a cell phone is Handy, which is even pronounced English, but a completely new German invention. (Though they are, in fact, handy.)
- Stephen Fry, by the way, finds it hilarious.
- Technical inventions are almost never translated into German. At least since the 90's, they are always called by their English name.
- German technical terminology is heavily influenced by English. Psychology scholars routinely create "Denglisch" words to replace perfectly good German words: "encode" is "kodieren" in German, but rely on psychology majors to use the redundant "enkodieren"; also, psychologists have imported the phrasal structure of the verb "remember" for use with the German equivalent - in German it should be "sich an etwas erinnern" or "sich einer Sache erinnern" (similar to "remind oneself of something"), instead they use "etwas erinnern" which sounds as strange to the ears of German non-psychologists as "remember oneself of something" would in English.
- Similarly, the use of "realisieren" (to realize) in the common English sense of "to become aware of something" has started to infiltrate German and supplant other existing expressions.
- Job titles are more and more translated into English, even though studies show that Germans are reluctant to apply for a job that is given in the ad as, say, "Key Account Manager".
- During World War II, the Luftwaffe carried out an incendiary bombing raid against the British city of Coventry. The destruction was so horrific that the Germans coined the word "koventrieren", meaning "to annihilate or reduce to rubble."
- The phrase "Worst Case Scenario" exists in German unaltered. Its use over any native phrase or translation is surprising given its importance in engineering.
- The most infamous example is of German discount store chain Lidl once advertising "body bags". They meant backpacks. Many, many producers still call their backpacks "body bags".
- This web site automatically generates Gratuitous English slogans.
- It goes the other way pretty often, too, especially where tattoos are concerned. The website Hanzi Smatter shows photographs of Chinese and Japanese characters used for shirts and tattoos and the like. It's Engrish put on its head.
- Car stickers as well. Especially funny if the Gratuitous Japanese is on an American or European car.
- Interestingly, there's also a growing trend for gratuitous English tattoos in China...
- Perhaps the funniest of the Engrish.com examples is Dick and Uprise, simply because it's impossible to tell what meaning was supposed to be conveyed there.
- There's a Norwegian band, created for a children's talent show, called the Black... Sheeps.
- "Modern Hebrew" in general. If you don't know a word and it is something modern, just elongate the vowels and say it with a Sephardic Hebrew accent.
- There's a joke:
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"How do you say "Open the window" in Hebrew? |
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- Allegedly, in Israel, the back axel of a car is called a "beckexel", while the front axel is called a "beckexel kadmoni" meaning a front "beckexel", meaning a "Front Back Axel"
- This is Bitch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4_cWd_waKg
- Happens a lot in Quebec and other French speaking parts of Canada (such as some areas of New Brunswick and Ontario), along with Gratuitous French for the English speakers. For instance, many French speakers will refer to a waste can as "le garbage" rather than "la poubelle", though garbage is usually pronounced "gar-BAA-ge" rather than the English "gar - bidge".
- As noted, Quebec English is not devoid of French influence: for instance, convenience stores are known as dépanneurs, or deps for short, in both Quebec English and Quebec French.
- This trope is far from unique to Japan. In Scandinavia, commercials, music, even store windows are in English. This is meant to be cool and exotic, but studies in Norway suggest that most people actually prefer ads in their own language and that messages have a stronger impact if delivered in one's native tounge.
- The oldest pizza delivery place in the Czech Republic is called "Pizza Go Home".
- One Engrish fire extinguisher sign says "Hand Grenade". A Chinglish extinguisher sign says "Forbid to embezzle fire apparatus" [dead link].
- No less a philosopher than Friedrich Nietzsche was known to drop English (as well as French, Latin, and Greek) into his otherwise-German works. He usually used this when quoting from an English work, but sometimes used English words alone to make a point, to screw with the reader, or just because he felt like it. Since he spoke English, he knew exactly what was being said (so no funniness from misplaced words) but it makes reading Nietzsche interesting for English-speakers: if you're reading it in English translation, the footnotes that say "this bit was originally in English" are often kind of amusing, and if you can speak German and are reading it in the original, it's rather shocking to see the English in a sea of German.
- On the label of a bottle of (what appear to be) herbal pills, the following warnings are given the greatest emphasis:
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The condition may not fit the constitution and rarely. The use of this product, diarrhea, vomiting, and if the Case of modulating body rash, please discontinue use immediately. |
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- On the shopping site proffering this item, not much is conveyed by long paragraphs of boilerplate, other than an evident horror of the possibility someone might take offense at...well, anything. Same spiel concludes with the peremptory admonition, About three months into the bottle type bag also! The legend "Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd." clashes—at first glance—with a product touted as "Health Food Made in Japan," at least for Western customers who firmly associate Fuji Ltd. with photography, unaware of the corporate behemoth's likely diversification.
- One neofascist political party in post-Mussolini Italy was known to sprinkle English into its slogans, perhaps as a way of mocking Americans. One slogan, for example, denounced "l'idiozia dell'American Way of Life."
- The people of Thailand are surprisingly fluent in English, and evidently use it casually in Westernized or tourist areas. Unfortunately, they do not tend to know how to avoid Accidental Innuendo, as an advertisement for donkey rides once read "Would you like to ride on your own ass?"
- Common in Cantonese due to Hong Kong being a British colony in the past, in contrast to Mandarin Chinese where it is almost nonexistent. For example, a baby in (informal) Cantonese is "BB", as in, that is how it's actually written, there aren't Chinese or Cantonese characters for it.
- In Navajo, and presumably other Native American languages, lots of more modern words don't translate over. If you're driving over the rez and listening to the Navajo-language radio, it's not uncommon to be able to understand nearly a full quarter of an advertisement for things like a video game store or the radio station.
- Strictly speaking, in Navajo, anything can be translated, but it takes a long time—the Navajo for "tank" (as in the vehicle) is "chidí naaʼnaʼí beeʼeldǫǫhtsoh bikááʼ dah naaznilígíí" and literally means "crawling cart with a large causer-of-explosions that you can sit on and ride". Hence why most of the time they just say, e.g., "nitank yá'át'ééh" ("Nice tank.")
- This menu card supposedly translated for tourists. You'll notice that by saying "He/She came" they wanted to say "Wine".
- All too common in Brazil, to the point that politicians have proposed laws to forbid foreign words being used in advertising.
- Back to Gratuitous English