Thursday, January 20, 2005 |
18:27 - Tnurnb
http://www.midwinter.com/~koreth/chopstlcks.html
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Kris handed me this chopstick wrapper he'd picked up at lunch. I was going to scan it (Janet!), but I had the nagging feeling that I'd seen this particular piece of quintessential Engrish somewhere before...
Lo and behold, Google knows all!
(In fact, there are so many hits for scans and transcriptions of this wrapper that it must be an extremely widely-sold brand. I may, in fact, have seen it in a Bill Bryson book. But in any case, Kris' wrapper has much better typeset text, but all the misspellings are faithfully preserved—and while some of the scans show the word on the back as "thurnb", on the one I have in front of me it's clearly "tnurnb". Now that's a word that needs more widespread usage.)
I find it especially interesting in this case because it was clearly transcribed into text by someone who not only didn't know English, but whose only familiarity with the Roman alphabet consists of hunting and pecking on the keyboard for matching shapes.
Welcome to Chinese Restaurant!
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