I just saw an online ad for a t-shirt. The slogan has me confused. It said the following:
I NEVER DREAMD
THAT DAY A GRUMPY’‘D
AM BRUMP
OLD MAN
BUT HERE I AM
HERE I’M AM
KIILLIN’ IT
Okay, I have the general sense that this is supposed to be “I never dreamed that one day I’d be a grumpy old man. But here I am, killing it.”
But what’s the deal with the godawful mistakes? Is this shirt printed someplace where they don’t speak English? Is it supposed to be a parody of bad English?
Or is this a reference that I don’t get? Is this something from a movie or tv show or video game?
Speculation, but I think the short answer is AI slop + engagement bait. It’s nonsense that got you to click on a link, or at least made you linger on it longer than it had any right to your attention.
The internet is full of genetic algorithms, of course, and internet ads are perhaps the most frustrating. You know the clickbait articles in the endless scroll section at the bottom of even legitimate sites, e.g just about every news site out there? Used to be you’d pay someone to crank out 500 of those a day, feed them into a genetic algorithm, and the ones that made the most money would rise to the top, regardless of quality or usefulness. That often means rage-bait or other nonsense that happens to entice our monkey brains.
Of course, now nobody is paying anyone to crank these out, it’s all AI generated crap. But here we are talking about it. The internet has been useless for years now. It had a good run. Maybe. Maybe it was all a waste.
I don’t feel that the case here. The website was selling a number of t-shirts (and other products) that had legit pictures of the products being advertised. None of the other t-shirts had this kind of mistake-filled slogan. So the context appears to be that this is an actual t-shirt that’s for sale as illustrated.
I’ve seen t-shirts not unlike that in Japan, where someone’s making an effort to sell a “cool shirt with an English phrase on it”, but it’s a bit… off.
Do you have a link then? Obviously nothing comes up when I search that phrase, except a bajillion variations of the correct phrase on shirts.
It would make sense that the site you’d ultimately go to would have normal shirts. The engagement bait is there to get you to go to the site and buy something else.
Temu sells a lot of T-shirts, sweatshirts, etc., with slogans on them. Some of which are perfectly normal English with the meaning clear and plausible for a t-shirt. Some are pretty outré, but you could still imagine somebody wearing it in public or to the right party.
Then there are the ones with not Engrish, but rather a couple nonsense words in the middle. Or legit English words that make zero sense in that context.
My take is some combo of the vendor relying on AI and on machine translation. The Chinese-only speakers at that company have no ability to read, much less proofread, their products.
Agreeing with other posters – even if the website in question is selling other t-shirts with “legitimate” (i.e., non-mangled) stuff on them, this one feels absolutely like either a bad AI creation, or an unintentionally terrible translation. I don’t recognize the tortured language as being any sort of actual reference to something.
Hi, I actually design T-Shirts for Amazon. That is AI slop of common T-shirt designs of the “I never dreamed I’d grow up to be an awesome ____, but here I am killing it”. The vast amount of variety in the blank fillers probably threw it off.
Interesting. I’ve noticed a couple of online t-shirt stores that offer lots of “Worlds greatest [_____]” for remarkably obscure activities or occupations. World’s greatest notary public, world’s greatest fry cook, etc.
None are mangled that I’ve noticed, but there can’t be a market for more than a handful of some of these shirts worldwide. Suggesting they’re all essentially generated examples of possible t-shirts, and the product is really “custom printed T-shirt, your words here”
I just dredged up a memory of a kid in my high school who had a T-shirt that said something very close to that: “custom printed T-shirt, your words here”. That was in the mid 1970s.
Yup, but the thing is it takes literally seconds to change a “world’s greatest dad” design to virtually anything else, and even if you only sell one or two it was worth the time since this are print on demand and you don’t need to actually stock any of them.
