A Fatwa on the Patois

I had a dream last night in which I was flipping through a number of documents. Each seemed to have at least one typo or misspelled word. One of these was “agressive” and I found this particularly annoying.

While it didn’t occur in this dream, I’ve been seeing too many badly worded instructions from Chinese manufacturers and, even worse, poor language skills exhibited by those advertising smartphone apps. If you want me to download your game or app, perhaps you can have a flawless 30-second commercial for it? But the evidence shows this is not true.

There are tons of these out there, so much so that I’m writing a short film where two people talk in phrases inspired by this sort of pidgin English or typonese as it’s been called. Patois, by definition, differs from the standard language, and I fear that people will actually start talking like this soon, and speaking in the mode of the instructions from these products:

“I am not satisfied with receiving things.”

This means if you grace dissatisfaction with a product. Hoo boy!