Monday, October 24, 2016

To err is error

I get a lot of flak for not pronouncing some Hindi words properly. My h-sound sucks—literally and figuratively. I can't take a stand between khoon and koon or todha or thoda, just like a girl named Alka might get called Halka by me. It's terrible but i'm working on it. To make matters worse, this disorder has seeped into my English as well. I've noticed, on several occasions, my h-sound goes out of the whindow. These are the reasons i prefer to stay quiet when humans gather around me. It's a mental block and forces me to stick to talking to people in private. Which is strange when i openly nurse my ambition of becoming a professor someday soon!

Anyway, i went to hospital this afternoon to get my flat-mate diagnosed. He's not feeling well. I noticed three posters there and couldn't help clicking them. All three of them had copy errors. For someone who writes for a living, it's a given to point out mistakes in others' work, particularly when there's no need to say it out loud! (If that wasn't the case, i'd humbly shut up and look somewhere else.)
OK, let's start from the left. The first poster's first word itself is flawed. It should be INHEN/INHEIN instead of INHE and ZARURAT/ZAROORAT instead of JARURAT. The second poster's first word is flawed again. It should be FOREN/FAURAN instead of PHOREN. Phoren is a corrupted derivative of foreign and means the same in the Indian subcontinent. This is actually ironic when you consider the fact that the poster is inadvertently suggesting the idea of a treatment in a foreign country! The third poster is a masterpiece in bad copywriting. It should be HAIN instead of HAI and the subtext is full of syntax errors. There's an apostrophe after YES instead of a comma and the sentence ends with two full stops. 

I'll stop here at once.

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