For those who haven’t seen it yet, Engrish.com is a brilliantly funny site. The March 4, 2005 Engrish of the Day is from an advertisement that shows an etching on a coffee shop window, with this poem:
To stay at home and tend her even
And drown her post regrets
In Coffee and cigarettes
I’m mooning all the morning
morning all the night.
When I was in China in 1997 I saw a number of children’s shirts and sweat shirts with images of baby ducks and bunnies on them and random English words, such as “Shipping Manifest,” “Invoice,” and the like. I’m sure that if I could read Japanese or Chinese, I would find similarly amusing examples in the tattoos worn (I’m told, often upside down or reversed) by American youth.
My own Chinese tattoo of the word for “individual liberty” in sealscript, which is based on a chop I had carved while in China (and which is integrated into the design of this web site), has been certified to be right-side up. Ditto for the Sumerian word for liberty on the other arm.
The Chinese chop occasioned a bit of patriotism when I had it made. (Chops are the stone stamps, with names or words carved on the bottom, that Chinese people use for signatures.) I went to a chop carver in a large, open-air department store in Beijing, picked out a hefty stone with a 3-D Chinese lion carved on the top, and then pointed to the word for liberty in my dictionary. (I had checked for “liberty,” “freedom,” “liberalism,” and so forth and all showed the same characters.) The man looked at me over his glasses, scanned the area for witnesses, moved his hand to below the counter, where no one could see, and then gave me a very vigorous “thumbs up” sign. I figured that I had surely picked out the right word. He then wrote out “45” on a piece of paper and pointed to his watch: Come back in 45 minutes. I did so, paid for the chop (which included a nice box and a single piece of elegantly stamped rice paper), thanked him, and left. When I went to my hotel, I took out the stamped paper with the intention of asking one of the multi-lingual hotel clerks to verify its meaning. I took the paper out and before I could get out a word, the lady behind the counter looked at it and then up at me and said, “Ah, liberty…. You must be from the U.S.” I liked that.
The Sumerian word (ama-gi) I had tattooed onto my arm to honor the memory of one of the finest human beings I’ve ever known, Eric Shoemaker, who had died in an accident shortly before. Eric was a student a few years behind me at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and then went on to work at Laissez Faire Books in New York and in San Francisco. We kept in touch and I would see him once or twice a year when I would visit San Francisco. Eric was rather more of a free spirit than I was and had the ama-gi tattooed (here he is in the Laissez Faire office) to symbolize his life-commitment to liberty. His death was a terrible blow to everyone who knew him, as he was the kind of person who truly breathed decency into any room he entered. I had the ama-gi tattooed on my arm both to join Eric in his commitment to liberty and to remind myself every day for the rest of my life of one of the finest human beings I will ever have the good fortune to know.
My New York City tattoo guy put that chinese character upside down on my left leg!
I’m lazy, so it’s been a year and a half now, but I’ve got my Gainesville tattoo guy ready to fill the whole thing in with red and put the character in black right side up. Hopefully it’ll look all right when it’s done; it will certainly be better than having it upside down!
The last time I was in China (2001) I spotted a fashion victim with a motorcycle sidecar (Chang Jiang) which he had adorned with a swastika, a confederate flag and a giant peace sign. Okaaay.
My favorite case of “Engrish” was also in Japan, when I saw a teenage girl with a yellow t-shirt with a turtle on it surrounded by the words “Patina Corn Flakes Oh So Super-Check!” in a spiral pattern.
Not really an engrish story but amusing all the same is the fact that throughout central asia whenever you purchase goods you are more than likely to be handed them in a yellow plastic bag emblazoned in English with “The Pet Shop, 992 Pollockshaws Road, Glasow”. Apparently a one off order from that store to a Chinese bag manufacturer inspired the latter to produce a massive overrun in order to qualify for a Chinese government subsidy for uncompleted foreign orders. As a result this legendary emporium receives a stream of oriental pilgrims fascinated by it’s exotic mystery.
Yes, Eric was a very good guy.
Nice pics of him.
Thanks, David. I miss him terribly, as do all who knew him. It’s been nearly ten years since he died (December 31, 1996), but I still can’t believe that he’s gone.
ciyaneducn
nice post