The traveller halts

Unflattering qualities in good writers: wan condescension and an unwillingness to meet halfway.

Amusing though Matt Yglesias' modest proposal may be, I'm afraid the demand for a corps of globetrotting grammarians to scour the developing world for bad English is, roughly, nil. Sure, there are a million "oddities" out there to elicit our derision or James Fallows' "sympathy." But they're here to stay, and not only that; they're not wrong!

The sign in question isn't hanging there to satisfy our American sense of proprietorship over every corner of the globe. Its purpose is to communicate basic directions, to us and to every other non-Chinese-speaker. Okay, so "The Traveller Halts" isn't beautiful, like most literal translations. So long as it's intelligible, though, it's correct. And, as per Matt's point, each of us knew exactly what it was supposed to say. You could call the phrase a gaffe in the Kinsleyan sense: it said exactly what it meant.

Global English isn't pretty, or even immediately intelligible to a native speaker. It has no discernible rules and frequently misappropriates vocabulary. But it works in a purely transactional fashion. If it offends your aesthetic or grammatical sensibilities, well, get used to it. Or laugh at it! (Maybe this example would have been more clear cut.) But wipe that sneer off your face, or it'll freeze that way.

English as she is spoke has been mangled for centuries; such is the price of ubiquity. What's new is these pidgins propagating in reverse, in accordance with the logic of the new marketplace. If English owes its prevalence to British and American economic and military hegemony, so, too, as China and India emerge as the largest markets, their Englishes, however painful or amusing to our ears, will have the competitive advantage. What Fallows calls a "standard" English translation like "No Entry" will not be standard for much longer. Or was it ever standard at all? I'll be paying attention next time I pass through Amsterdam, Frankfurt, or Dubai.

On the street here in Bombay you'll encounter three languages. Transactions occur not in the vernacular but in the imported tongues, Hindi or English, or most frequently in a mixture of the two. This patchwork is, to all listeners, confusing. Rare is the case in which two parties theretofore unknown to one another emerge from a conversation certain that they were understood. The presumption is the reverse, and that the effort of listening entails a great deal of interpretation.

At the airport, where the split second it takes us to reinterpret a sign could mean a missed flight—or, for a pilot, a missed runway—we naturally apply a more stringent threshold for intelligibility than we would to a conversation, a TV advertisement, or an instruction manual. But who gets to determine that reasonable standard? I've got an idea: whether you spent any time literally scratching your head. That's a bar low enough for this sign to limp over.