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You see a lot of poor English in Japan. On signs, clothing, vending machines, everywhere, there are English slogans which make no sense or are wholly inappropriate. There is even a Website, www.engrish.com devoted to such cock-ups. I’ve seen more than my fair share of these slogans in my time here. As well as the uncountable number of times I have seen English which just makes no sense at all to the native speaker, I have witnessed a garage called “Fucking Garage”, a woman wearing a t-shirt on the back of which it said, “Fist Fucker” and had a telephone number, and a café which offered “Coffee and Pain”. I have also had a sweet little three-year old girl come to class in a pretty pink t-shirt adorned with colourful flowers, in the middle of which, in small print, was a single word. That word was “Fuckers”.
Grammatically poor English, for some reason, is often seen on cars. Four-wheel-drive jeeps or any vehicles with a spare tyre on the back seem particularly prone to have something nonsensical written on the tyre’s cover. Usually it is something intended to create an outdoorsy feel, so it might, for example, say,
A country life is human enjoy.
Let’s bringing dog and fetch the stick
happily. Can you feel happiness in nature?
Likewise a boy racer’s sports car with massive exhaust pipe, go-faster strips and a ridiculously oversized fender, might have a few words of adhesive English words on the tinted back windscreen. Perhaps, Creamy Space Boy. For Your Comfortable Ejaculation!
Today, though I saw a people carrier with tinted windows which had something that was perfectly correct grammatically on the back window. It was, however, perhaps more curious than any random-words-stuck-together slogan I have seen before. It said simply this: How do you like Wednesday?
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