blogging in the language of cool

For some reason, the English language is considered wildly attractive, even exotic, in this part of the world. Anything Anglo-Saxon equals ‘much better than anything our own culture has ever produced’. So much so that it is often used as the following:

1) A marketing trick. Heed my word, merchants of the world: if instead of ‘New Donuts’ you write, say, ‘Nouveaux Donuts’ in the window of your greasy food and watered-down coffee joint, the clientèle will double overnight, and the sales will go through the roof.

Sales increase also guaranteed in shoes, cosmetics, hairdressing services, freshly butchered meat, yachts, and bears. Words you can use include: New (Nouveau, Neue, Nuovo), Free (Gratuit, Kostenlos, Gratis), Great (Exquis, Herrlich, Eccelente), and others to that effect.

2) A way to become instantly cool. This goes out to every teenager in the former Eastern Bloc: brush up your English. It gives you access to levels of awesomeness previously unheard of. Such gems as Whatever, Really, Like, BTW, and so on enrich your language and make you gloriously aloof.

Similarly, if you just use English words instead of those bland things they call words in your country, you will come across as independent (sorry, I mean indie), artistic, maybe even mysterious. I also recommend you put random English phrases in sharpie on all your hoodies. And sneakers.

3) A literary device. Because really, who wants to read stories and poems in those boring old Slavic languages? They all sound the same anyway. However, if your writing is full of English words or even sentences, it becomes so much more sophisticated.

Who needs metaphors, allusions and alliterations! Give me a story stuffed full of gratuitous foreign language insertions any day. I love reading with a dictionary. Finishing a short story in under four hours is just lame, I’d much rather spend a day on it, looking up words.

So, all this advice - absolutely kostenlos. Don’t you find this just eccelente? Tune in next week for the next installment of Linguistic Rants: ‘Your Music Is Better Than Ours, Sulk Sulk’.