LINGUIST List 4.652

Wed 01 Sep 1993

FYI: More Fun

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Directory

1. Sam Glucksberg, Re: 4.648 Fun: inappropriate English
2. Karen Kay, Re: 4.648 Fun: inappropriate English
3. Monica Macaulay, Re: 4.648 Fun: inappropriate English
4. Dilworth B. Parkinson, Re: 4.646 BBC Style, Fun
5. MARC PICARD, Re: 4.648 Fun: inappropriate English

Message 1: Re: 4.648 Fun: inappropriate English

And, there's the venerable and redundant "shrimp scampi".

Message 2: Re: 4.648 Fun: inappropriate English

> From: wachal robert s <rwachalumaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu>
> Subject: Re: 4.646 BBC Style, Fun
>
> How about the menu cite: "beef with au jus"

Or better, "beef w/ au jus sauce"

Karen Kay
 karenknetcom.com

P.S. This has been much discussed on words-luga.cc.uga.edu.

Message 3: Re: 4.648 Fun: inappropriate English

I was going to try to hold back from jumping on this bandwagon,
but I just can't. My parents just got back from Japan, where
they collected many lovely examples of English used creatively
(like the softdrink cited in an earlier post). But my absolute
favorite was the luxury car manufactured by Daihatsu, called
the We've. Yes, We've. As in 'We have'. Straight and to the
point, no?

Message 4: Re: 4.646 BBC Style, Fun

Egyptian publications were once full of ads for "Taki Furniture" and
"El-Shark Insurance". These are, of course, partial translations of names
of companies whose Arabic version make perfect sense, but they do sound odd
in English.

Message 5: Re: 4.648 Fun: inappropriate English

 I was visiting a friend in California some years back, and one day she
showed me some coffee mugs she had bought with different animals on them and
their names in French. The dog was LE CHIEN, the pig was LE COCHON and the
bull was...LA BULLE! They had been made in Japan or Taiwan, and for years I
couldn't figure out how LE BOEUF could have wound up as THE BUBBLE. Then one
day I was relating this anecdote to a fellow linguist, and he immediately came
up with the following solution. Obviously, he said, in trying to translate
BULL into French, whoever it was looked up the wrong entry and translated
THE (PAPAL) BULL into LA BULLE (PAPALE)!