On Thursday, I had 187 unique visitors to the site. 174 of them were from the USA.
It occurred to me after my last post that writing a post that appeals to all “languages” is not maybe as easy as it seems. An example is that my esteemed bloggy pal and all round top banana CRSE (I should ask what it means, but I am guessing it is something like Chickens Really Shit Eggs) asked in a comment in reply to the post “And at the risk of sounding like ignorant American, what is marmite?”. Now, we all know the whole “you say tomato, I say stupid red thing that tastes like boiled rhino poop”, but it is the whole “language” and “products” thing which makes writing a post harder.
Languages are always hard. Especially when I often have to pick between “English (US) or English (European) when installing software. What about English (English)? You know the one…the one that we invented and is just plain “English”. It is not “European” and it is not “US”. It is the original content that has been adopted by the world and changed for their own needs. In fact, I was once in an English speaking country and was asked “So what is the main language spoken in England?”. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. The same person also asked if we have roads in England. It is worth mentioning that he didn’t own a passport and was not going to be getting one anytime this lifetime by the sounds of things. But I did edumacate him by letting him know that we do indeed have roads, and we are often attacked by the remaining dinosaurs left in the world. He believed me, I never let out the truth.
If I was to write a post and say “I sent them a cheque for £200”. I didn’t send them a “check for £200”, do a lot of my American readers know that we Brits say cheque? In fact…do you even care? Or maybe you read the posts and think “Holy hell, this guy is as about as stupid as it gets” because of “spelling mistakes” which actually aren’t to me.
So how many “jokes” are lost through translation? I have no idea! A lot of British humour is incredibly unique in the fact that it is often sarcastic toilet humour. I cannot do intellectual humour due to me being as intellectual as a bag of crisps. Or is it a bag of chips, depending on what country you are from?
Of course, it is just not hard to write humour that suits other countries, sometimes you can say something to a fellow English type person and wonder how they didn’t see the sarcasm.
During a long drive down a short road once, in the fields to the side of the motorway were fields of milk producing cows. You know…the pretty black and white patchy ones and not the pretty “steak making” ones. So I told my passenger that the reason you only get milk from the black and white cows is because when you cut steaks from them, they taste milky. Hook, line and holy hell, they believed me. I was going to go on and say that the steak cows milk tastes like steak and that is why we don’t milk them, but I was laughing too hard inside that I coughed up a little sick.
So I guess what I am trying to say is that every single thing I write is plain hilarious. So if you don’t get it, laugh anyway. Please.
wheelturninghamsterdead.com 