ENGRISH THE ORIGINAL JAPANESE PIDGIN LANGUAGE
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Hold up while I roll up my sleeves for some late night I can't sleep bloggin. This time it was because I was trying to think up gifts for the loved ones in my family. It seems tonight SG laid down the grinch on me and asked if we even have to celebrate x-mas. Wha? I guess so. So then I started thinking about going on vacation somewhere which got me to thinking about going to Belize or Bonaire for some diving. Then I got hung up on wondering if the Sonos music system can connect to Linux machines and what the Civic SI sedan really looks like and before I knew it I went from going to sleep to wide awake.

Damn, I just sort of made up that whole engrish being a Japanese pidgin language but I think it might actually hold. Seriously it seems to hold up if you only read like the first paragraph of that wiki page:

A pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of a mixture of other languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues. Pidgins have simple grammars and few synonyms, serving as auxiliary contact languages. They are learned as second languages rather than natively.

I don't know about you but if you've ever had a Japanese conversation partner the language that comes out of your mouths is pretty much a mish mash of things. Terrible Japanese on the English speaking persons part, so so English from the Japanese person and a strange mashing of Japanese and English in an attempt to create something that either one of you might understand. Then again if that doesn't work you can always smile at each other and say "Oppai Seiji" [Person who likes big boobs/I like big boobs/or something].

Engrish is one of those great aspects of Japanese culture whereby they use English in songs, conversations, advertisements and more to get a little bit more linguistic punch. I'm sure I've mentioned this before but then I'm getting older and drinking harder. Much harder indeed. How hard? Hard enough that gin now tastes good and whiskey is appealing.

Today at one point I got the urge to listen to a Japanese rock band called "The Pillows". Do not be lulled into a sense of comfort just because there are one eyed bears with gnashing teeth holding knives on their website. No this isn't a cutesy cover band full of 12 year old girls marching in step barely able to carry a tune. NO! This is the hard rocking trio of "The Pillows" and they WILL rock you like a hurricane of downey soft pillows. Truthfully though they really are good, really... seriously. The one song that got my attention was "Instant Music" for the reason that the lyrics while having a nice rhythm to them didn't really make much sense. It wasn't that they were in Japanese because I really wouldn't be able to understand them if they were. It was because the lyrics neither like Japanese or like English words translated into the Japanese phonetic system. They sounded more like the gibberish musical equivalent of singing "watermelon" over and over again when one forgets a lyric to a song.

So I looked up the lyrics and here is what I found, a true diamond in the mother fucking rough of Engrish. No WONDER I couldn't understand the song:

"MANYUARU RAIFU no ANIMARU" (Manual life animal?)

Huh?

"NÔ DAMÊJI na IMÊJI" (No damage image?)

WHA?

Sweet Jesus that's some good stuff and to top it all off I learned a new and useful phrase for the next time I go back.

"Kutabacchi mae yo".