2 posts tagged “idle ranting”

I was reading the New Yorker’s scorching review of ‘Speed Racer’ today, (‘Our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?’), and the following sentence jumped out at me:

There’s something about the ululating crowds who line the action in color-coördinated rows;

Coördinated?!

Ö?!

What language is this article written in?

Since living outside the U.S. on and off for the past five years, this has become one of my favorite phenomena: Americans who pepper their English with umlauts, tildes, ratatat-R's and one-word accents in an effort to appear cultured.

‘I’ve just come back from a weekend in München,’ your hungover friend from Minnesota says on a Monday.

‘They have the best tartiflette in pa-ree’ says Connecticut, scrolling through Eiffel views on his DigiCam.

‘Oh, you live in Copen-HAW-gen?’ Upstate New York knows that the insertion of a long A into a foreign word equals instant sophistication.

Maybe I’m a purist, but I don’t think there’s any shame in pronouncing words Americanly when you’re speaking, you know, English. Saying ‘Copenhagen’, or ‘Munich,’ or ‘Japan’ isn’t incorrect. It’s just English. The language you are speaking. When I speak Danish, I say København. If I was speaking German, I would gladly say München, or Neue York, or Das Szhicago or whatever.

The only reason people lapse into another language for a few syllables is to prove how worldly they are (‘What’s it called in English? Oh yes, Munich. Such philistines’). Similarly, the New Yorker is rocking the umlaut just to remind you that they know where the word cooperate comes from: Some umlautey language with polka dots above the vowels. I’ll bet they keep that gay little crown above the O in Côte as well.

They only keep the artifacts of the cool languages, though. We get words from Sanskrit and Arabic, too, but I don’t see the New Yorker writing backwards and all squiggly when they use ‘Cheetah’.

Look, word origins are interesting, but if we’re gonna steal words from other languages (and what is English if not linguistic jumbalaya?), we might as well just steal them all the way. We don’t use the Æ anymore (Hi Denmark!) for Old Latin-rooted words like encyclopedia or pedagogue. I don’t see why Naïve gets to exceed its dot quota just so the New Yorker can sound like a college freshman who just got home from ‘totally backpacking the shit out of Europa, bro’.

After noting yesterday that much of what I love about Denmark comes from its quaint sense of propriety, imagine my surprise this morning when The Copenhagen Post grinningly noted that 'Denmark is looking to pep up the country's stereotypical international image as a quaint and proper country.'

What? Seriously?

Bendt Bendtsen, the economy and business minister, said breaking the nation's reputation as the land of Hans Christian Andersen, bacon and butter will be a tough assignment.

'That image is nice enough, but it doesn't give a proper representation,' Bendtsen said Monday as he introduced the proposal. 'First and foremost we're a modern society that makes cutting-edge products and provides services of the highest quality, something that isn't well-known in the rest of the world.'

Gee, he's really on to something. Because when I'm trying to make my travel plans for the year, things like 'cutting-edge products' and 'services of the highest quality' are fucking foremost in my mind.

But what really got me pissed off was this bit:

Some DKK 150 million will be used to create a new Denmark Fund that will promote major events that draw international attention to the country. Another DKK 60 million will market the national as a top tourist destination, while DKK 24 million more will be used to woo qualified foreign students.

'Woo qualified foreign students'? For what purpose? The entire time I've been in this country, the government has done its xenophobic darndest to keep me from staying. Between granting me a one-year study visa for a two-year study program, waiting six inexplicable months to renew that visa after a year, barring me from Danish classes and medical care simply because I moved from Aarhus to Copenhagen, and now making a deliberate effort to block me from getting a job here, I think Bendtsen should be focusing his efforts elsewhere. Until this country starts to treat those foreign students as anything other than a burden, a pastel-tinged advertising campaign isn't gonna cut it.

Sorry; It's as boring to write about this stuff as it is to read. But I'm consistently shocked by the government here, which does everything in its power to keep foreigners from coming and assimilating, then has the audacity to fund programs to 'woo' them. It's like promoting opportunities for 'qualified women' to date Ike Turner.