Engrish

Another rewarding trip to the Engrish site, to look at the recent additions yielded this beauty. What, you may ask, is Engrish?

"Engrish can be simply defined as the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design.

Most of the Engrish found on Engrish.com is not an attempt to communicate - English is used as a design element in Japanese products and advertising to give them a modern look and feel (or just to "look cool"). There is therefore less emphasis on spell checking and grammatical accuracy (note: the same can be said for the addition of Japanese or Chinese characters in tattoos)."

This has often amused me - I saw a girl at a concert last night, who by all appearances looked pretty cool. She had the hair and clothes of the archetypal "rock chick", plus the obligatory couple of tattoos on her shoulder. Closer inspection revealed them to be a couple of Chinese symbols. Heaven only knows what these symbols actually mean, but she was probably told they represent her name in Chinese, or "Harmony", or something equally laughable.

In the same way, David Beckham got a tattoo on his arm of his wife's name ("Victoria"), in Hindi. However, as this article points out, the editor of a Hindi magazine spotted that the tattooist had actually misspelt it. They had actually spelt it Vihctoria", probably because they were English, and did not know Hindi.

Thanks to J-walk