Have you ever in an idle moment fed a well known piece of prose into babelfish or some similar programme, and refed it through two or three languages before geting back to English? The results can be hilarious travesties of the lingo what we speaks.

Those emails amuse me too. I get several most days and they always raise a chuckle. It must be quite a sophisticated gobbledegook generator they use.

On the subject of bad translation mentioned above, there are some famous ones from the third Star Wars film:

"Long Time Ago in the Faraway Galaxy"

"Revenge of the Sith: The Backstroke of the West"

"It's just a flock of fish to fame for it's person"

"You two careful, he is a big"

"You are a sacrifice article that I cut up now"

"Giving first aid the already dishevelled hair projection"

"The front is a lemon avenue flying straightly"

"The Presbyterian church likes enjoys you not"

etc. etc.

The full list including screenshots is here:

http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html

Cheers, Tom.

I wonder if they still teach elegant variation in schools... I bet they don't!

I'm not sure they teach elegant anything anywhere any more..... (I can't believe I just wrote that. Maybe I should just go and lie down somewhere....)

I would be surprised if some kids knew what 'elegant meant. I saw a 13 year old trying on a dress in a store changing room. She had the figure for it, it draped elegantly and looked fabulous on her until she could no longer maintain her posture. She rested in what was for her, a comfortable slouch. Just beforehand, I had complimented the girl and told her how elegant she looked in the dress. "What does that mean?"

Out of the spontaneous exchange, two things occurred; I was impressed that she could ask me what I meant, but saddened that a young person of that age did not understand a compliment because she did not have the knowledge of what I would have thought,was reasonably ordinary vocabulary for her age. I guess I should have gone into 'fab' or 'cool' mode. I wonder if she would have understood 'mode'; probably not.

The second thing that occurred was, before she had gone home, the girl had added a new word to her personal word store.

Education here, in general, is not bad, so other influences are at play. Certainly, sprog and her friends at that age would have had no trouble with understanding the concept of being elegant, except that was the age it didn't bother them. As for Elegant use of language, depending on interpretation of that thought, that's another story.