Friday, June 24, 2005

Speaking Hinglish

One place they really do use the full English language in a unique style (although not always in the way it SHOULD be used!), is in the daily newspaper. These are some examples of what they have written :

* When the Sheikh died, they reported that the people, the trees and even the robots were "drooping their heads with sorrow".
* Talking about the misuse of missed call messages on cellphones : "This ubiquitous chime could ring you out of your senses while you are blabbering out a valedictory speech. It is a ruthless money-saving menace which has found favour with the money-minded".
* Vehicle and pedestrian accidents are caused mainly by : "drivers of vehicles and pedestrians".
* An article on absconding maids : "They often play crumble ways with those who offer them jobs, screwing them up to the extent that their satisfaction is pledged". Huh??
* A man who was decapitated : "found himself choking with emotion when he was given a ticket to return to his homeland". YOU would choke too if you were decapitated! It seems the person actually had his legs amputated.
And, once again, we were misunderstood ...... We took our sheets and DH's shirts to the laundry - they wash and iron them for a small fee. However, when they came back, the laundry owner had written a code number in pen on the back of the shirt collars and on the sheets. Obviously, so he knew which belonged to which customer. When we went back the next time, DH told him : "We are cross with you, you write on shirts and sheets with pen, we do NOT want to SEE numbers on our sheets and shirts, understand?"
Yes, he understand - WE could NOT SEE the numbers - so the next time, he took a bigger, thicker, blacker pen and wrote in 1 inch numbers, so that we COULD see. Now it looks like we pinched our sheets from some hotel or hospital. And DH looks like an escaped convict with his prison number written on the back of his shirt!!

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