• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A random perusal of L’Express, the newsweekly, turned up this potpourri: La Fashion Week parisienne en 50 street looks. Le Point, still another newsweekly, contains sections called “Mode et design” and “Tech et net.” A story about a rising Spanish star was headlined: la success story d’asak adic.8

GIBBERLISH

Gibberlish is written or spoken Gibberish with an Amglish tinge. It usually means a meaningless collection of words created by incompetence or accident, similar to a massive malapropism.

But there is always a chance of a hidden meaning lurking in the verbal underbrush. So it cannot always be cavalierly dismissed or derided. The most common habitats of Gibberlish are e-mailing and texting. The disease can usually be identified by a mysterious string of letters and numbers that seems to be understandable but is not.

Once again, George W. Bush has set the standard, this time for Gibberlish. He did so on December 13, 2005, in answer to a question from a woman in the audience about his plan to privatize Social Security. He said in part,

Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to that has been promised.

GREEKLISH

There are two types of Greeklish. One is a technical linguistic transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet of Greek into English letters and vice versa. Various websites contain converters that will automatically do the job. But because of the un-Roman shape of some Greek characters, the Arabic numbers 3, 4, and 8 are substituted for them.

This type of artificial language hasn’t gone over well among the natives. In 2004, a few Greek websites threatened to ban any such variations of Greek as a danger to the future of demotic (Modern) Greek. Other critics contended that the Roman letters did not do justice to the Greek ones they replaced.

The other form of Greeklish is the substitution of common English words for Greek ones in newspapers and magazines. Irene Grossman, a Greek teacher in the Washington, D.C., area, spotted many such words in a random perusal of the Athens daily, Kathimerini, for February 14, 2011. English words were used not only for sections of the paper, such as Real Estate, Articles, Newsletter, and Good Life, but for other parts of the paper as well. Among the verbal mixes was the English word test spelled in Greek letters.

HINGLISH

India is a land of many tongues with no one language other than possibly English serving the whole nation. Until recent decades, Hindi had the most speakers, and British English served as a lingua franca (bridge language) for the nation. More recently, Indians have switched to American accents in order to handle the hundreds of thousands of service jobs outsourced by U.S. corporations.

Hinglish is a mix of Hindi and English, with an Indian accent that sometimes renders it difficult for native English speakers to fully understand. Examples include badmash (naughty), timepass (spare time), and fundoo, a version of cool.

Much of Hinglish comes from advertising agencies. The result is lots of mixed messages, such as “Thanda mani Coke, Hungry kya?” and “What your bahana is?” Coke’s slogan in India is “Life ho to aisi” (Life should be like this).

In 2006, Baljinder K. Mahal, a teacher in Derby, England, created a dictionary entitled The Queen’s Hinglish: How to Speak Pukka. It features lots of verbal blends of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjab, lingos that add to the English already in Hinglish. Among the book’s Hinglish words are airdash (to travel by plane), would-be (fiancé or fiancée), eye-teasing (sexual harassment of women in public), postwalla (postal worker), freshie (new