Do Not Overlamp
by Paul McGoldrick
It is easy to laugh at unfortunate English. "Do not overlamp" was an exhortation in the instructions that came with a new light fixture that I mounted last week. The product, from The People's Republic of China, was better built that the "Union Made" product which I removed, but the instructions were classic gobbledygook. So it seems the Chinese have taken over the sorry English that we'd come to expect from Japan for the forty years prior. Do you remember a Japanese car manual explaining how you would become intimate with your new vehicle? Or the classic on a kitchen knife set, "Keep out of children?" Now the Japanese, in their commercially-exported products at least, seem to have more native English speakers on staff than most companies in Mexico.
The Japanese still lead, however, in the strange slogans and expressions that find their way onto clothing - hats, shirts, etc. Writings that mean absolutely nothing at all or are totally out of context are used willy-nilly on consumer products and as storefront names: A beauty shop named "Poop" and a clothing store "She's Seat" are typical, while I have seen on a subway advertisement "Boys Tastes Good" and a common assurance on restaurant menus among the very few (i.e. expensive) that are printed in English (most of the time you choose food by pointing to the realistic plastic replicas), "Vegetables are washed in water passed by the chef." (If you are an oficionado, by the way, engrish.com is an exhaustive repository of some of the best malaprop translations.)
Those of us who are in love with the stupendous Fuji Television production Iron Chef -- a mainstay in our house -- enjoy a weekly dose of translations which give animation to the food which often has "feelings" and tries "to talk" to the tasters. "I think this sea urchin is very happy right now," enthuses the obligatory giggly ingenue actress.
But screwed-up English doesn't just belong in the Far East. Many parts of the world use a patois that is a mixture of a number of tongues. Mostly these seem to be in countries that were ruled by the British. In countries that were French-controlled that didn't seem to happen: Go to Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, or Benin in West Africa, and the people use what (to my ears at least) is perfect French. Move to the Seychelles and the patois is a French-English mix that is strange; or move one country westward, to Nigeria, and the language is pure Pidgin.
When I first went to Nigeria I promised myself that I would not speak or use Pidgin. Within a week I found I had to, just to understand anything. But the words are still curious. My brand of Pidgin was Lagos Pidgin, formed from English and one of the three dominant dialects, Yoruba. Some of the expressions are delightfully obvious once you understand them: A traffic jam is a "Go Slow," for example, while a public transport -- conventionally VW buses -- that will swerve across the road to pick up yet another passenger from under the nose of a competitor, is a "Damfo"…short, one surmises, for 'Damn Fool.' You hail them, of course, by the very obvious "Along!" Other words come from the Yoruba, like "Agaracha," which is a woman of "easy virtue." And I would strongly urge visitors to avoid "Ngwo Ngwo" as the first course of a meal, it being a soup made from parts of a goat that you don't want to know about - whereas "Afang" is a very tasty soup made from some sort of leaves, beef, crayfish and palm oil.
But it's the expressions that use or derive from "No" that really cause the newbie to shake his or her head. What is the difference, for example, between "Go," "Never Go," and "No Go?" "Go" means I've been there and have come back, "Never Go" means that I haven't been there yet, and "No Go" means that I am refusing to go. So, now you understand that rule, what on earth does "No do no do" mean? Something like, "before I could blink." And what about "No bi small?" Well a "lot," of course!
So coming across "Do not overlamp" made me blink marginally, but no more than I did when I was asked, in a Tokyo store, whether I wanted my purchase "reformed." That was a request as to whether I wanted a garment altered, just as overlamp is a warning not to use too high a wattage lamp in the fixture.
Na so I see am o!*
*That's how it is.