FRANCE SUCKS

December 2nd, 2005 by Sarin

Many people have either heard or been to Engrish.com. It is a humurous website that pokes fun of the prevalance of American culture in Asian countries. These go through the range of photos of Asian locals wearing T-Shirts with English phrases that make no sense whatsoever, to merchandise where the English words aren’t even spelled correctly (hence the name Engrish.com). Browse through the site for a good laugh.

While the Chinese and the Japanese might think it’s cool to walk around showing off their love for American culture, for the love of god, please do it right. It’s as if anything that even remotely resembles English letters will be a big seller, and I hope it is all the manufacturers who are getting the last laugh. However, in their culture it is perfectly acceptable to walk around with a shirt that nobody can understand. In the states, any dude who bought a shirt because it has cool Asian symbols is just considered a poser.

Similarly in Cape Verde, you express your love of American culture by buying anything that remotely resembles English. But also, it even goes as far as replicating logos of known American mutinational companies onto anything that exists. Here you can find shirts where the English text and maybe the logo looks right (albeit fake), but they are still buying it for the sake of buying it. I can reason that maybe they don’t have as many choices and they should just buy whatever gets off the boat, but when you see grown men sporting Marilyn Manson shirts, kids writing (and not spelling correctly English phrases) all over their school uniforms, and old ladies wearing “surf girls” shirts it starts to get ridiculous. I can almost guarantee you that most of them know what their shirt means, and even when you point out that the word is spelled incorrectly, they won’t care.

Of course, the funniest case I’ve seen of Americanism in a developing country happened the other day when I was at this restuarant. It was just a normal day, but in walks this teenager with a white T-Shirt on with big bold black lettering that read “FRANCE SUCKS”. The spelling was perfect and it was obvious that this shirt was a hand me down from America (of all shirts to hand down… why this one?). It turns out, the teenager as a waiter there and was working the tables.

Now, please remember I laugh at stupidity and character defamation more than anybody else. So of course I started cracking up so bad, I had to contain myself. Obviously nobody in the restuarant could understand why I found anything in the room to be funny, but someone walking around with a T-Shirt that totally degrades France and not know what it means is absolutely hilarious. It had to be in a developing country to make it even funnier. I’m sure he probably caught the word FRANCE, but having to explain the verb “to suck” is beyond my threshold of seriousness. I had to control myself from laughing for the next 5 minutes.

And I’m still laughing to this minute.

But still, seeing English phrases on T-Shirts that are either misspelled, grammaticaly wrong, or just plain out retarded like this one, it never gets old. Because you know somebody who doesn’t know any better is going to wear it, and you won’t help but to crack up. And now I regret not bringing my “She’s so lucky” T-Shirt.

As an American, I guess I could return the favor, but the only line I could think up is:

“My Portuguese is horrible, but at least I can read this T-Shirt”

which according to Global Link Translator Pro for Windows, translates into

“Meu português é horrível, mas pelo menos eu posso ler esta camiseta”

Of course, that would be very mean and there will be none of that.

Editior’s Note: But don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t hate France at all. It’s actually very high on my list of next travel destinations as I’ve had several Cambodian Frenchies stay over my mom’s house and none of us have ever returned the favor. My French is still non existent, and visits to places like Montreal and Dakar did nothing to help it. Eventually, I’ll be there to visit family in the country, and hopefully my French and Khmer will be good enough to talk to them. It will still be quite a while till after Peace Corps, but I’m sure I’ll be brushing up on my language when I am back in the states. Hopefully by that time, the violence in Paris has worked itself out.

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