International English for low competence

One thing that I've started being fascinated and amused by specifically since I started working at the Finnish equivalent of Target (or a 1980s-90s Kmart) is the use of English by and for non-native speakers. As a lingua franca, really, but a written one specifically. Because the store is Finnish-owned and -run, but we sell a lot of products imported from other parts of Europe and a lot of stuff that's straight from China, with whatever packaging the companies came up with. Sometimes it's just complete nonsense, like this rather terrifying powder pink pocket mirror that says "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth" - sentence case but no punctuation.



(The towering hubris of just being like "Does that look good and make sense? Yes. I don't think we need to check with anyone who uses English competently.") Perhaps not quite as inexplicable, but definitely not susceptible to casual deciphering, is a giant freestanding cardboard display of catfood with a photo of a cat on the side: "JUST YOU, ME, AND ANY OF THE BELOW" (there is nothing else below except the floor; the catfood itself is next to or behind, but even if you parse this far, you're like - so I'm being... propositioned... by this Russian blue??).

But this kind of baffling is a rare event. Most of the time it's easy enough to understand what is meant (or at least it is once you know what the product is) and the clunky phrasing, accidental innuendo, or misdirected modifier error is the sort of thing you would pass over without much notice in the course of a conversation if it were out loud. I've started collecting examples of this:

• cookie name: "Choco Whoopies"


• product description: "assortment filled trolley" (toy wheelie suitcases filled with drawing supplies)


• product description: "fat balls" (seed-and-suet birdfood balls)


• product description: "High energy giant fat stick" (seed-and-suet birdfood with its own hanger)


• On a package of flavor-infused honeys: "Honey delicates from Finland!"


• On a package of boiled peanuts: "IMPORTANT FOR DAILY MEAL AND SNACK"


• product description: "Natur Premium pet fish cat" My beloved pet fish cat!


• On a package of catfood: "Family plate chunks" yum, that delicious family plate! Stoneware or silver?


• On a display box of snacks: "Do the natural!"

Witcher series 2 costume observation period beginning!

I really enjoyed that Twitter thread that Wax read the other day (so I assume it's been going around but I also don't know who wrote it) about how a fantasy show, specifically the Witcher, can still be historically inaccurate, and it was completely right in its focus on the fact that Geralt's very tight pants couldn't look like that without elastic fibers because natural materials don't do that and the whole thing about how industrialization would have to exist in the society for those to happen. And as the tweeter pointed out, you COULD make up an explanation using the magic in this world for the technically impossible fabrics and constructions, but that requires assumptions about the way the world works and they didn't bother to write those bits.

I'm willing to postulate a fairly simple explanation for the new season 2 tight pants that were the amusing subject of her (again, correct) rant, though: as long as we only see Witchers wearing them, we can say they wear fighting outfits with special enchantments to prevent seam splitting on them.

In verse, it's obvious that the enchanters or sorcerers or whatever they're called are making their clothes with magic at least some of the time, so it's not the physical impossibility of their wardrobes in the first season that was so irritatingly historically inaccurate so much as the fact that the designs were all obviously modern because they borrowed from both modern and pre-modern fashion elements kind of at random, as opposed to telling a somewhat coherent visual story about the garments' cultural backgrounds. (Karolina Zebrowska has a great video about them that contained pretty much all my thoughts on the subject and a little more - which her videos usually do - although I think she maybe came to a different overall verdict.) Fashion has only started to do that in the modern era, and it's not even plausible without a lot of factors, not least the faster garment creation and the faster communication of the modern era. I mean, you could just imagine that the sorcerers have a little self-referential culture where they are each other's fashion audiences and they are also creating all the garments with magic, I guess, but. This still sounds dubious to me. Especially given how geographically separated they are. And that wouldn't make sense of all the other things that were historically incorrect about the fashion of series 1.

So I hated the costuming of series 1 passionately enough that I was quite hopeful when I saw they had switched costume designers for series 2, and I admit, the first images of Geralt's armor gave me great pause because they are, obviously, silly as hell - much sillier than before, really - but at least they showed signs of being silly in a different way. Wax is on episode 2 now, and thus far it still looks possible that series 2 will be coherently silly, albeit obviously not possible that it will be 'historically correct' exactly. But so far, I would say it has presented a look that is coherently sort of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre meets Fabio-style romance novel covers (which are the 200% obvious source of Geralt's looks). I will be interested to observe.

(It remains to be seen whether the writing as revealed in subtitles will look un-irritating enough for me to ask Wax to remove her headphones and turn the sound on. The dialogue was absolutely unbearable for me in series 1.)