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Sunday, 22 February 2009 |
Dear Mr. English-is-Stupid.
I must defend my mother tongue's honor.
My last video, a nonsense poem, may seem like it bastardized English, but in fact it was a celebration of English. In it, I said this: “I'll have one bread please,” which is a quasi-quote from this girl: ZOMGitsCriss.
Her actual words were: “I eat one bread every day.”
Now, she's from Romania. Her first language is Romanian. In Romanian, that phrase is probably correct. But in English “bread” is a substance, like water and oxygen. I can't “eat one bread” any more than I can “drink two waters” or “breathe six oxygens.”
Why? Because substances don't exist. They are categories; purely linguistic constructs. You have an H2O molecule here, another here, another here. Each and all of these are water. But “water” doesn't exist, just these molecules.
Likewise, you have a slice of bread here, here, and here, and we call these bread. “Bread” doesn't exist, it's just a category, a word in English, which has no bearing on reality. Then again, English is the fastest growing language, set to become the first world language, and that's because it's the best. So I won't laugh if you stop to take a moment and thank the English language for the existence of bread.
Oh, but that's right. You hate English. You think English is stupid and boring. You know, there are a lot of starving children in the world, and bread could save their lives. But they're dead now, because English shouldn't be taken seriously, and thus bread doesn't exist. Thanks a lot. The dead children thank you too.
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