Language Log

Glat perch

Label in a Chinese fish market:

Ambarish Sridharanarayanan sent in this image of a restaurant menu from Chennai:

Looks like this one might have to be outlawed:

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At the top left and bottom left of this restaurant's home page, written in very small Roman capital letters, it says, "ORISSIC HOT POT", and that is paired with the Chinese name, "zhè yī xiǎoguō 這一小鍋" ("this small pot").

If we do a Google search on "orissic hot pot 這一小鍋" (without the quote marks), we will get 4 pages and 80,000 ghits, the first of which is bafflingly "jīngdiǎn shítou guō" 經典石頭鍋 ("Classic Stone [hot] pot").  If we do a Google search on "經典石頭鍋 classic stone [hot] pot" (without the quote marks), we will get 4 pages and 15,100 ghits.

Some random specimens…

This is one of the thorniest, orneriest Chinglish puzzles I've ever been confronted with.

Confused by this category of toilet brush. Can @LanguageLog illuminate what’s happened here? pic.twitter.com/lHaqM3OD3q

— Henry Hitchings (@henryhitchings) October 26, 2022

Hit the Engrish mother lode.  What an incredibly bountiful harvest!

We've ignored this (ig)noble variety of English for too long.  There are scores and scores (nay, hundreds) of wonderful examples on the Facebook group Engrish in Japan, which you may explore to your heart's content.  Since some of the posts cycle through multiple items (e.g., in the comments sections), they seem almost endless (I read them for hours).  For this post, I will focus primarily on a recent item, which is about onsen 温泉 ("hot springs" [and bathing facilities]) etiquette, but will also mention many others.

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From Yuanfei Wang in Hong Kong:

From Francis Miller:

With apologies for the glare from the plastic covering, this sign comes from the canteen at Lingnan University in Hong Kong:

Tim Frost found this sign last (southern hemisphere) summer at a lakeside in Argentina, near San Martin de los Andes.

Yet more fun (see parts 1, 2, and 3).

Don't JuYiGe

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Still more fun (see parts 1 and 2 on Chinglish examples from WeChat).

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