Eanglish

In exactly a week here, I’ve never seen anyone wearing clothing with Korean characters on it. T-shirts with English writing, however, are wildly popular. As they are on storefront signs, the slogans may be perfectly correct, not quite there, or completely wacko. A lot of the time, it doesn’t seem to matter what the English words mean, although they often attempt to say something positive and happy. I guess the wearer may not know what the shirt is trying to say. I’m calling the botched attempts KorEanglish, or Eanglish.

Here are the first-week Eanglish t-shirt medals:

Bronze: “WISN IS CHARMINGLY DISORDERED” (Hard to argue with that.)

Silver: A picture of a cute teddy bear wearing round-rimmed glasses, a shirt with the name “Radar” on it, and a khaki watch cap that says “4077th MASK”. (Extra points for a Korean kid wearing a M*A*S*H shirt.)

Gold: “LEAVE OUT YOUR DEAD. BE HAPPY” (Okay.)

Oh, and I don’t have a good ending for this post, so I’ll just throw this in, because I keep forgetting to mention it: Pizza Bingo, the storefront I mentioned several days ago, makes really good pizza. Here are three things I didn’t expect: the pizza comes in a box tied with a white ribbon; the veggie pizza has corn on it; and the pizza comes with a little plastic tub like Papa John’s buttery sauce: you open it up and what do you find? Sweet pickle chips.

…and just to tie it into the Eanglish theme, the box has a picture of a sunflower and says “LIKE A FLOWER! Well-being Pizza Bingo”.