Weird manglish from the wild

Don’t be such a pre-Madonna!

There’s a pretty good subreddit, r/BoneAppleTea, dedicated to this.

One that I quite liked from real life is a friend’s daughter, who thought clothespins were CLOSEpins, because that’s all she’d ever seen them used for!

In your defense, mangled english is a pretty apt description of Manglish!

I’ve been in Malaysia and had some delicious aiskreem with kopi.

Oh, thank you for this, my new favorite subreddit.

First thing I saw there:

https://imgur.com/QQ8EMWi

OK, one more: A woman on r/BoneAppleTea posted that she was living bi-curiously through her daughter.

:flushed:

mmm

That’s one of the subplots of the wonderful film “Being John Malkovich”! :slight_smile:

He’s been diagnosed “perinoid skitso frantic.”

I’ve mentioned before that I pronounce it that way in memory of our neighborhood crows who were wiped out by the last epidemic, West Nile Virus.

Plus, I like being a troll like that.

He pitches with his right arm on dry land, and with his left when he’s walking on water.

I do, sometimes.

So many comments to make…

My personal pet peeve is “on accident.” No. It’s “by accident” or “accidentally.”

And this may sound like a corny joke but it actually happened on my dorm floor in my second year at uni. We had this one girl on our floor who was…not the sharpest knife in the drawer, to put it mildly. We also had a guy who was originally from France, but by way of New Jersey, so he was fluently bilingual with nary a trace of a French accent. And one morning he was explaining café au lait to her, big bowl you hold with two hands, that’s how they drink it in France.
“Wait, it’s French?”
“Yeah, of course. Café…au…lait.”
“Ohhhhhh…I thought it was Spanish! You know, café olé!” and she even made the “ta-da” hand gesture.
Everyone just stifled their snickers as much as possible and left the scene as quickly as they could.

This thread title also reminded me of Wenglish. I study Welsh, and one of the tricky bits in the language is the word order, typically a bit different from English. A standard sentence is VSO as opposed to English’s SVO. But the emphasis in a sentence is often moved up to the beginning. So native Welsh speakers, when speaking English, often have a sentence structure that’s a bit Yoda-like. “Furious, he was.” “Very tasty, this meal is.” and so forth. Needless digression, I know.

Very fascinating, your needless digression is.

My favourite t.v. subtitle was when “the Archbishop of Canterbury” was rendered as “the arch bitch of Canterbury”.

Fifty years ago, in junior high, I remember reading some 1950s humorist’s essay about “skid-talking:” the crash collision of metaphors. It’s a malady that afflicts my brother-in-law, sometimes to my great amusement when I hear him telling an employee to “put his shoulder to the grindstone” or dismisses a complaint as being “water over the bridge.”

A quick search of the Web turned up this, which sounds familiar enough that it might be cribbed from the essay I remember.

Embarrassingly, I just did this. I wrote and keep up to date the night audit check list at work. I was going through it the other night, and there was a sentence that made no sense. I read it several times, then fixed it while blushing.

“Skid-talking” from Do You Talk Double-Take by Corey Ford. Defined as “…more than a slip of the tongue. It’s a slip of the whole mind.” Two examples from the essay:

“From time immoral.”
“I may be wrong, but I’m not far from it”

A few years ago I saw a graffito that said,

Never stop giving up.

I can’t decide whether the artist was an idiot or a genius.

In the trash disposal shed at the factory where I worked, there was a sign, probably fished out of the painters’ shop trash, “Authoried personnel only.” Ever since I saw it, I wanted to have a sign made saying, “Unauthorized personnel only! If you belong here, get out!”

In my garage, there’s a magnetic sign I swiped just before the factory closed. It says, “CLEAN SOIL”. It was meant for fill dirt uncontaminated by chemicals, but it just seems wrong. Soil is, you know, soiled.

Building sites around here all have a sign “Hard hats must be worn on this site!”. Yet I often see brand new ones in use.