Ahh, no, I was unclear. Thanks for pointing that out!
Hm... it's hard to say. I think it really depends on the attitude of the person. The more presumptuous, the more it pisses me off. I find Dan Brown's thing pretty egregious because it's in a published novel, and he so blithely pretends he knows what he's talking about that people would be misled. (I'm similarly bothered by the weird pseudo-Chinese they use in Firefly, but at least they can pretend evolution of the language over time explains the weird pronunciation and the fact that they talk like little kids.)
With Engrish, it's almost so much a part of Japanese culture to try to use English to sound cool that you just kind of sigh and move on. There are some totally gratuitous examples that bug me -- the one that comes to mind is in Saint Beast ~Kouin Jojishi Tenshitan~ they randomly have a narrator do some parts in English, kind of like bookends to the story arc. It's really badly pronounced English, and I don't see why they couldn't have had it in Japanese.
But even that's not as bad... I guess -- and maybe this is pejorative of me -- I see Japanese people as being all shiny-eyed and "English is so cool, let's use it!" and Americans as being more calculating about using elements of Asian culture and then being bad because they don't bother to do enough research.
I don't know. I guess there really is no difference between when a Japanese person chooses an English word as the name of their restaurant to make it sound cool, even though it means something utterly inappropriate, and when an American chooses a Japanese word for the same reasons.
...that was probably a longer answer than you wanted. ^^;;
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2007-06-01 06:40 pm (UTC)Hm... it's hard to say. I think it really depends on the attitude of the person. The more presumptuous, the more it pisses me off. I find Dan Brown's thing pretty egregious because it's in a published novel, and he so blithely pretends he knows what he's talking about that people would be misled. (I'm similarly bothered by the weird pseudo-Chinese they use in Firefly, but at least they can pretend evolution of the language over time explains the weird pronunciation and the fact that they talk like little kids.)
With Engrish, it's almost so much a part of Japanese culture to try to use English to sound cool that you just kind of sigh and move on. There are some totally gratuitous examples that bug me -- the one that comes to mind is in Saint Beast ~Kouin Jojishi Tenshitan~ they randomly have a narrator do some parts in English, kind of like bookends to the story arc. It's really badly pronounced English, and I don't see why they couldn't have had it in Japanese.
But even that's not as bad... I guess -- and maybe this is pejorative of me -- I see Japanese people as being all shiny-eyed and "English is so cool, let's use it!" and Americans as being more calculating about using elements of Asian culture and then being bad because they don't bother to do enough research.
I don't know. I guess there really is no difference between when a Japanese person chooses an English word as the name of their restaurant to make it sound cool, even though it means something utterly inappropriate, and when an American chooses a Japanese word for the same reasons.
...that was probably a longer answer than you wanted. ^^;;