I wrote an article yesterday. One of my Chinese reader left a angry comment because he/she thought my English is poor. Yes, my English is poor, and the word poor can not describe my English level. He/she said it is bullshit, and I think bullshit is more precise.
But so what? I love my bullshit English way. For years, I use my bullshit English talk with American, write E-mail to my domain hosts. All my grammatical errors didn’t bother them, they knew what I tried to express exactly. But to my fellow countryman, my grammatical errors can always make them rush into the red rag. Why?
4 years ago, my friend Michael Anti, a former journalist, was trying to write some articles in his blog, for God sake, in ENGLISH! Most of comments were trying to teach him what is the correct/proper English written by Chinese. Guess what? Anti gave up English writing, and replace his English blog with a Spanish version! We do have many kind English teachers in China.
It is not a joke. Many Chinese graduates can not even say whole English sentence, but they are all the English grammar masters with kind of sexy dumb style. If you ask them: How are you? There will be cause the most famous answer: Fine, Thanks, and you? But if you change a little bit, like: What’s up, dude? Here comes the sexy dumb style—this grammar guru will look up blankly and slowly, and answer you with charming hesitation: C…ceiling?
From then on, the guru will change into a one-word-one-timed creature. And the guru’s brain is boiling, because the brain is trying to search every grammar book in memory to find the right answer which fits “What’s up”. If you want to see how the brains dripping out of a human being’s nose next time, live, just try Aloha.
Gurus are really proud of their grammar. Because they’ve spend more than 16 years on it. Good grammar means high score. High score means personal success. And how dare I to insult the base of their success? Those shrill comments are my karma.
But I don’t think the English world is that intolerant. Even “long time no see” can be a idiom, and English dictionary seems is all O.K. about it. When all the Chinese grammar masters were pulling each other’hair to debate how to translate Guanxi into English properly, the American editors just put this word in Newspaper. They didn’t waste a minute to discuss if Guanxi is countable nouns or not. This is English, it just absorbs anything new, anything interesting, anything valuable. Because language is a kind of tool, not a course. As a tool language can help people to express themselves. Even broken English can express something meaningful to enrich English world. On the other hand, the thought of writing a perfect article without any grammatical error is killing the article itself.
Yes, my article is full of grammatical errors. Yes, you can call it bullshit English writing. But just like sky using thunder to express itself, land using river to express itself, I use my bullshit English writing. Bullshit English writing is my watermark in English world. You can not cover sound up from thunder, you can not wipe yellow off the river, you can not take meaning from my bullshit English writing.
I have no interesting in your perfect English grammar heaven guaranteed by your stupid correctness pixel by pixel. Bullshit English is fine. It is a part of mine, and you just can not take it down.
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