Engrish is the English that appears on Japanese signs and shirts. It is meant for local consumption, and is meantmore to look 'cool' than to actually mean something. Since they rarely go over this local English with a good editor, some really crazy stuff shows up. I think the general hilarity of the results pretty much says more than I can!
4 comments:
the wind blows through my mind too...whoooooo
what exactly is a 'pimple house'? or is it best if i don't know.
Yah, it was just a sub-store in a large dept. store. Why they named it Pimple House I will never know. Certainly didn't make ME want to shop there!
You say "sub-store" as in subordinate store, a store within a store, not a sub-shop? That would be Engrish with a vengeance. The juxtaposition of hoagies and dermatology clangs.
The Engrish examples seem to demonstrate how a pictographic language induces the mind to work through stringing images together to convey meaning, rather than the more ideational use of words. I think this is what you saw in the Demon/Hero street-play that you described as creepy, which is how we feel when supra-rational significance confronts us. I had that feeling repeatedly watching the movie where the train rolled along on submerged rails. Uneasy that I was being told something I couldn't understand rationally, but was still true. "too...whooooooo" indeed. Pops
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