Author Topic: In self-defense, we must see through deliberately devious English jargon  (Read 4619 times)

Joe Carillo

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If it were not such a witty and entertaining read, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf’s Spinglish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language (Penguin Publishing Group, 368 pages) would be so depressingly infuriating you’d want to smash the faces of the people who foist all those devious English jargon on straight-talking, on-the-level citizens like you.


Consider just a few specimens of the tortured, maddening English phrases the book has captured, deciphered, and arrayed alphabetically (but not here) under its covers: “campaign contribution,” bribe; “affordable portable lifestyle beverage,” bottled water; “learning opportunity,” a mistake or failure; “alternative dentation,” false teeth; “adult entertainment,” pornography; “audible verbal self-reinforcement,” talking to oneself; “bereavement care expert,” undertaker; “clothing optional lifestyle,” nudism; “ambient noncombatant personnel,” refugees; “career associate scanning professional,” a grocery store checkout clerk; “enhanced interrogation techniques,” torture; “coercive diplomacy,” bombing… (Are you sure you want more after all that obfuscation?)

These are what Beard and Cerf call “Spinglish,” which they define as euphemisms, slang, and jargon that are “designed principally to deceive... (and) contrived for self-serving purposes. It comes out of advertising and public relations agencies, law firms, think tanks, political campaign organisations and military planning groups—anyone and everyone eager to hide the particular self-interested agenda they are pursuing.”

So if you want to put up a strong, self-defense perimeter (personal protection) against being victimized by Spinglish practitioners, or if you just want to go about your own business and life without resorting to deliberate confabulation (lying), better get hold of a copy of Spinglish very soon and—if you can take sustained torrents of verbal abuse with good humor and equanimity —read it from cover to cover.

Read Ron Charles’ review of Spinglish in WashingtonPost.com now!

Read an excerpt from Beard and Cerf’s Spinglish in PenguinRandomHouse.com now!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Henry Beard founded the National Lampoon along with Doug Kenney and Rob Hoffmann. Prior to National Lampoon, Beard collaborated with Kenney at the Harvard Lampoon during the late 1960s, producing nationally distributed parodies of Life and Time magazines and a book-length parody of The Lord of the Rings called Bored of the Rings. Since leaving National Lampoon, Beard has authored and co-authored over 30 humor books.

Christopher Cerf is an American author, composer-lyricist, voice actor, and record and television producer. The winner of the 2010 Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education, he is the creator of the acclaimed children’s television show, “Between the Lions,” which aims to help kids, particularly the poor and minority children, learn to read.

ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In Utterly Lost In Translation: Even More Misadventures in English Abroad (John Blake Publishing, 288 pages), British author and comedian Charlie Croker has brought together some of the very best language howlers he encountered during three years of globe-trotting—in hotel foyers in Rome, Barcelona, and Kazakhstan, in supermarkets in South Korea, in restaurants in Austria and Bulgaria, and in airports in Argentina and in whatever country his travels brought him.


Emma Pietras, in a review of Croker’s Utterly Lost In Translation in the Mirror UK, presents for the reader’s delectation several of the worst English language blunders Croker had stumbled upon: this signboard on a busy stretch of road in India: “Go slow – accident porn area”; this special request to drivers in an airport in China: “Please confirm your car is licked”; this sign in Kazakhstan hotel room: “There is a bowel of fruit in each room”; and this signage of a hotel jeweler in Thailand: “Porn gems.”

Road sign in India

Read Emma Pietras’s review of Utterly Lost In Translation in Mirror.co.uk now!
« Last Edit: June 06, 2015, 07:59:08 PM by Joe Carillo »