Back in November, I discussed what happened when Tom Cruise used machine translation to connect to his Indians fans. Since I am in Japan, I come across bad English translations on a daily basis. I hadn’t posted any on Linguistrix because Chinglish/Janglish is very common stuff and you get them dime by the dozen. But today I found this one that is incomprehensible in at least two languages (I have to check up my Chinese friend to find out whether it makes any more sense in Chinese than it does in English/Hindi.

If you’ve been online on FB/Twitter today, you must have noticed that the Indian part of the inter-web has gone crazy over a supposed screenshot from a Star News telecast. I say supposed because my Facebook feed has been flooded with all kinds of stupidity in the last few days—from images of Gods magically appearing on the top of mountains to claims that Louis Braille was an Italian king—so naturally I have developed a deep distrust of all society.

Back when we were in Canada, Ramu and I used to love ginger biscuits, whereas Sangram and Goel hated them, giving us the opportunity to finally use 'Bandar kya jaane adrak ka swaad' (Wiki: Someone without refined tastes cannot appreciate a fine thing) literally. In general, however, I would rather not want to experience famous idioms and proverbs literally (sar mundaate hi ole pade [Facing the repercussions of an action right after you take it] would be particularly painful, especially since I once got caught in a terrible hailstorm in Stuttgart).

After 3 years of traveling alone and spending 2 years telling others how to do it, I did something as stupid as forgetting my bag in the bottom luggage hold of the bus after I got down at Kyoto station on the freezing cold morning of 27th January, 2012. Luckily, I realized this within less than 2 minutes of getting down, and thus began a series of frenzied calls to a ‘Japanese Only’ emergency number.

I have always had a love-hate relation with analogies, though it has mostly veered towards hate. I agree that they can occasionally be illuminating and can make difficult concepts more palatable, but I have often considered them evil and felt that they do more harm than good. Usually, they over-simplify a concept to “dumb it down”, so to speak, but end up creating easy-to-kill straw-men, or make arguments go into a tangent just because people start arguing over the analogy instead of the original premise.

Last night, at about 2 a.m., I was jolted out of my sleep by a harsh sound. There seemed to be a lot of noise all around but I was too groggy to make sense of what was going on. When I came back to my senses a few seconds later, I began making sense of the noise—‘FIRE! FIRE! THERE IS A FIRE ON THE FOURTH FLOOR! PLEASE EVACUATE IN AN ORDERLY FASHION’, followed by something similar in Japanese.

Enough. You have troubled us enough. Yes, you. Don’t run away. I am talking about you only. Everytime you are going for dinner with us, you will be nuisance whole time. First you will make sarcastic comments—“Why are you looking in menu card? anyhow you will eat only paneer”. Then you will pounce on our food also. When waiter comes with non-veg food, you will give silly smiles and ask him to serve to you only but when he comes with veg food you will tell him to serve to everyone.

Kapil Sibbal wants Facebook etc. to continuously monitor content so that anything that insults any one in the ruling party is nipped in the bud. And now, an Indian court has ordered FB and other social networking websites to remove offensive content by Feb 6. The plaintiff has submitted a CD full of objectionable content found on online media, and wants it removed. Language and censorship go hand in hand. When you have people who want to say stuff, you have people who don’t want it being said.

In what’s minty fresh news, Liverpool striker Suarez was given an 8-match ban for racially abusing Manchester United defender Patrice Evra. You may read about it here. Santosh Ananthakrishnan sent me the link to a discussion about the same on WebDiplomacy Forums. I am a football n00b, and reading news reports about this incident has been an ordeal due to a bevy of unfamiliar names and abbreviations, but from what I have understood so far, the defence is that whatever Suarez called Evra is actually a playful and casual term where Suarez comes from.

Ojas Patil suggested long ago that I write a post about causes of language change. I had forgotten it until E, who’s already given me post fodder once via a comment on a Linguistrix post, asked me a follow-up question on my reply to his comment-question. It was heartening to see that E appeared reasonably convinced by my answers to his first question, and his question is quite interesting— So how does language or grammar evolve (Because it certainly _does_ evolve)?