Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
There was a letter in the GDN last week entitled ‘English or Jinglish?’
where a certain not-so-gentlemanly gentleman pointed out that there appear to be a variety of not-so-English English words in print and that it was his understanding that it was the editor’s job to notice these mistakes before they went to print. The reply was that there is no such thing as a perfect newspaper and that when you have several deadlines to meet on a daily basis, noticing every single mistake can be hard to do.
Considering we work in a weekly and still manage to have numerous mistakes I can’t disagree with that. However if the time was taken to answer that particular letter, then surely the time should have been taken to point out to Mr.-English-pedant that the word ‘Jinglish’ doesn’t actually appear in any real dictionary and is in fact a word derived from the also unreal derogatory term ‘Jingly’ used to denote Asian people who ride around on bicycles constantly ringing (jingling) their bells. Sadly racism is rife all over the world and unless there is a miracle cure for it, it is something we have to put up with on certain levels for a long time to come, but when you are trying to be sanctimonious about the English language, my humble advice would be against opening yourself up to ridicule by showing yourself to be racist.... Just a thought.
