Monday's rantings

Monday night, an old friend of my mom's took me to her house for dinner. Her daughter (who's roughly my age) is a relatively accomplished English speaker, and I can be a little more relaxed about word usage around her (well, being able to speak English to someone in China's a blessing enough). She's been really into Prison Break, too, and we discussed a little about TV shows and bootlegging. I also gave her a quick rundown of open-source software, since it's easier for me to explain in English rather than Chinese, like I tried to last year to my cousin.

While at their place, I watched a bootleg version of Transformers, but the picture quality was so bad that it wasn't entirely worth it. I did totally geek out a little when Optimus Prime said "One shall stand, and one shall fall" near the end. It's totally reminiscent of the 1986 animated movie I loved when I was a little kid.

Two things I noticed when I was driven back: first, I figured out why Chinese driving freaks me out so much. If you thought drivers in New York or Boston are bad (they're actually not, if you ask my dad, who's driven for a long time at both places, but that's a different story), wait 'til you see Beijing. While disregard for common courtesy is commonplace (crosswalks are only at large intersections, otherwise, it's all jaywalking, and drivers don't make way unless necessary), there are also other driving practices that unnerve me. One is the driver's tendency to pass on both sides. While America traffic law states to pass on the right only when strictly necessary, Chinese drivers actively pass on both sides, causing dangerous weaving in traffic, and doubling the threat of something being in your blind spot. Second is the almost total lack of turn signal use, Twice, I have seen a car speed past us on the right and cross all four lanes of the highway without once turning on their blinkers. Heck, even my mom has complained that either drivers put on the parking brakes at a stop or remove their brake light altogether, because they don't want to replace the light when it burns out. It all leads to a dangerous lack of communication between drivers about each others' intentions, freaking me (who's learning to drive right now at home) out entirely.

Secondly, about the use of "Engrish" (English for the sake of having English there, usually with laughable or groan-worthy results), I'm just gonna rant a little about its usage. The daughter (I'm skipping names since they would probably confuse people) listens to a lot of American Pop, and regularly listens to the international music radio station. The DJ's know English well enough to pronounce names and titles without sounding stupid, but I hardly recognised any of the English songs they played. There were a few Justin Timberlake songs (curse him) and some bad cover by "Walk This Way" by some woman I didn't recognise. Either way, the "chart toppers" nowadays aren't things that I would really care for (see previous rant about my roommate's music). But back to the Engrish. At one point the DJ's spouted off an annoyingly enthusiastic, Engrishy "Okay!" and "Let's go!" that just made me sick. While I'm not commenting on their pronunciation or anything, it's the blatant usage of English-for-English's-sake-to-sound-cool (and simple English for that matter) that really bugs me. They throw out these little tidbits as though it would instantly spice up their language (imagine that episode of Spongebob Squarepants where Spongebob and Patrick learned to swear). While in English we do that with French with little phrases like "raison d'etre" and "tour de force," but they serve a distinct purpose; we use them to mean something. I compare what they're doing to saying "molto bene" obnoxiously in an Olive Garden. Speaking of French, the DJ's even tried their hand at it. After 14 years of learning English and 4 of French, you can easily imagine that I nearly flipped then and there. What came out of my mouth basically boiled down to threatening to hunt down their families and sacrificing their firstborn child to some unholy god.