Monday, February 25, 2008

Bad English

I had to take time out of my important, high profile, fast paced, busy schedule (note: one or more of the schedule modifying adjectives may be completely false) to show you some lousy English. The following isn't Engrish from Japan, it was a location-tracking advertisement link on Project Playlist which is geared towards the young, hormonal Myspace audience:



I have parsed the sentence "We have Tracked One of Your Friends Likes You" every which way and it still doesn't make sense or follow any American English grammatical standard. It's either missing a relative clause or a comma or conjunction or pronoun or something, it just "ain't right".

So my guess it that the originator of the link and/or site (which probably is an attempt to get personal information or payment from the naive user) in not a native speaker, or even in the United States. Even those of below average intelligence still have mastery of their native grammar, so I don't think it's the mistake of "the dumb in-law we had to hire". It could just be a typo at the hands of a native speaker, but you'd think they'd proofread before displaying it to millions of users. The error itself should act as a warning that the site is dodgy.

BTW, I updated the posting I made below.

4 comments:

Sariah said...

"So my guess it that..." sounds like your own post may be a little dodgy! lol. j/k
It's funny that you post this b.c I always see email in my box like this and I always delete it. Bad grammar is always a dead give away. Now, I know I don't have great grammar, but I'm not THAT bad!

Anonymous said...

Or...you are totally misreading this sentence. To my knowledge complementizers are optional in English and the sentence would read, "We have tracked THAT one of your friends likes you." <== an extremely grammatical sentence.

Anonymous said...

Are you a native English speaker? I mean, you do know the word "parsed"...

But this sentence is grammatical!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Consider the sentence: The oyster the oyster the oyster split split split.... this is actually 100% grammatical in English, just confusing (look up psycholinguistic research by R.R.Hurtig)!!

and so is the example you posted.

Consider:
"We found out one of your friends likes you"

It's the same as the example with a different verb inserted in.