I Judge You For Using Incorrect Grammar
Yes, I do. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. It annoys the hell out of me when I see, read or hear bad grammar, and I notice it everywhere; on people’s blogs, on massive billboards, on huge multi-million advertisements that takes up the entire page of a newspaper, out of people’s mouth, and even from protest rallies down on the streets.
For the love of God, I beg you this – if you cannot possibly know the whole functionality of such words like ‘is’,'am’ and ‘are’, or not knowing the past present future of a verb after words like ‘has’, ‘is’ and ‘were’, don’t just assume that it’s not important and that people won’t notice it. They do. I do too. And the reason why nobody says anything about it is because they don’t want to hurt your feelings by telling it to your face that your English sucks.Well tough, because I’m going to break it to you: Your English sucks real bad, it sucks even more than anything that has ever been sucked before.
And if you don’t do anything about it, the whole world will still be laughing at your face. If you can’t even put a bit more effort to learn it correctly, just don’t bother using English at all, because what you are doing is wrecking the whole point of using the language in the first place. And what’s even worse is that you are flaunting it for everybody else to see it too. It’s as if you’re screaming it out loud for everyone to hear, “Hey, people look, my English sucks!’
For Indonesian bloggers with bad grammar: Instead of creating a global image for your blog, you’re just inviting people to laugh their asses off of that piece of yoke you call blog. No matter how nicely done it is, if you use English with fugly grammar, then people from English-speaking countries all over the world will just think of you as lazy ignorant twats.
For ad firms who call themselves “the creatives”: If you can make that much money out of creating some ad that doesn’t make sense to anyone but it’s merely bought because everyone is jinxed to thinking it’s cool, then you can hire a properly-educated English teacher to teach the whole lot of you the difference between the word ‘elegant’ and ‘elegance’ and the knowledge on how to use both words properly, you dumb eejits.
For Indonesian so-called actors and actresses who think they’re celebrities just because they’ve been in one stupid local TV series: Stop mixing Bahasa and English, it makes you look like retards in expensive clothes. Although you know perfectly well that retarded people throw up all over themselves – because that’s exactly what you look like right about now. Messy, disgusting and just plain stupid.
And for street protesters: I can understand your background limitation in English education, but because there are so many of you I’m sure you can afford better spokes person to fix your errors.
If you like this article, you will also love Rima’s writing on Stuff Indonesians Like #7: Being Fluent In Foreign Language
12 comments
Thank you, Therry, for this posting. Your English is impeccable. Keep it up. If you haven’t done it already, send some of your opinion articles to The Jakarta Post. You’re such a good writer.
Jennie
pake bhs indo deh soalnya english gw masi parah… emang tuh koq males amet yah padahal tinggal cek grammar di ms word.
kalo yg poster demo itu sih bener2 parah
bener2 bikin ngakak…
@ivan: makanya…tingkatkan bahasa Inggrismuu…biar bisa eksis di dunia blogging memblogging…yeahhh
@jennie: thanks for dropping by! I’d love to send some of my articles to Jakarta Post, especially the one titled Survivor:Jakarta, what do u think?
Agree! It’s a warning for a person like me who keeps making small yet significant mistakes while writing in English. But then, when you’re tired, sometimes your brain just cannot work properly.
By the way, thank you for visiting my blog.
hold on, where did you hear the word “eejit” from??? that’s v irish!
@johnorford:
I happen to be a fan of Marian Keyes, she’s a very successful novelist from Ireland and most of the characters in her books are Irish.
It really makes me want to go there, though, cause she describes Irish people as being very fair and matter-of-fact but friendly in their own ways
aha, that’s great that u know some irish gaul
irish are fair? we are mostly a bunch of tricksters
hehehe
@John Orford:
That might ring some bells of truth to it, because Marian once described the way Irish people like to give street directions as the following:
“Do you know where the road forks to the left? You do? Good! Well don’t go that way. Go past the house that used to have the yellow door, past where Murphy’s shop used to be before they knocked it down. And when you get to the end of the road and there’s a pub at the bottom of it, you’ve gone the wrong way, but so what, you might as well have a drink, anyway.”
But it’s due to the Irish hospitality that they’d rather say anything rather than saying ‘I don’t know’ because it’s just as bad as inviting people to dinner and expect them to bring their own food.
Well I guess that’s not too bad, isn’t it?
It’s an uphill battle. Many Indonesians don’t even care if they misspell words in their own language.
One ironic example is a banner for an educational fair. They wrote, “Pameran Pedindikan”.
http://thefool.multiply.com/photos/album/17/Pameran_Ini_Rupanya...
@isman:
I knew there was a comment from you but it got ran over by the others and I missed it!
Saw that picture of the banner … I am speechless.
How come people think this is not important???
I once read a blog, which was written by an Indonesian woman who is married to a white guy and she wrote her blog entries in the worst English you could imagine. It’s the nightmare of all English teachers and readers. When I told her about that (I sort of knew her back then – before I severed all link of communications due to some arguments we had earlier), she freaked out, saying that it was her own blog so she could write whatever she wanted there….which is true, but please…have mercy on my eyes and my brain…(To tell you the truth I have no idea how she communicates with her husband with that kind of English. Body language, perhaps?)
Yeah man. Body language, coquettish stares and sex, probably. LOL.
But apparently if you’re THAT close to your spouse, you can communicate with him/her just by using your eyes.