Knowledge is powerless

I’ve always been uneasy with the notion of Chinglish, as so often it’s an excuse to laugh at the fact that some foreigners aren’t entirely fluent in English. Ha ha. Of course there is no real equivalent in Asian culture (amusing examples of idiot gweilo making clumsy mistakes in Chinese), not because of westerners’ faultless grasp of oriental languages, but because we so seldom even make the effort and thus risk failure.

That said, there is fun to be had with the collision of languages and cultures. Sometimes a text makes perfect sense in objective terms, but still seems ever so slightly weird; for example, when a packet of Japanese incense is described as:

A convenient item to carry with you when visiting a grave.

And then there are those moments when all pretence to meaning is abandoned and what seems to be a random selection of English words are thrown against a wall; take the following, which I saw on a Bangkok billboard a few days ago:

You’ll find original super supecial road, it’s so great future!

Or indeed those that really are slightly off-target attempts to say something special in English, like this:


from the protests that took place in Bangkok earlier this year. As Andrew Marshall of Reuters explains, the slogan expresses (or would, if these purportedly educated Thais had got to the page that covers verbal adjectives) the disdain that many within the anti-Thaksin middle classes have for their poorer compatriots in the provinces, where the former Premier’s support is concentrated. But, presumably unwittingly, “UNEDUCATE PEOPLE” also communicates the agenda that countless governments and businesses and media concerns seem to be following these days, although few would admit it.