No fun
The Dutch activity of ‘funshoppen’ (fun shopping), which is all the rage, comes up often as an example of Dunglish that really irritates people. A ‘funshopgids’ is a fun shopping guide, which is just a colourful leaflet. As usual, it is a perfectly useless term, but as usual, English makes everything cooler when it comes to hyping up something bland. Fun shopping is shopping that doesn’t involve fetching groceries and running errands. Although Dunglish is being used to hype up something, it still ends up dumbing it down. While the Netherlands is still heavily debating the latest round of spelling changes, Dunglish marches on, as if it was immune to bad spelling. I find that disturbing.
December 29th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
Hyping up and dumbing down is what the Netherlands are all about.
Being smart/intelligent is almost regarded as a crime. In a few years, I fear, we all be americans