Comment: English war of words

By Linda Gibson (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-03 09:39

One of the English media's missions is to help Chinese readers learn current, Standard English. Unfortunately, readers of Beijing's English media are presented daily with outmoded words that could have been heard in 19th-century Britain or colonial India.

"Bourse," "whingers," "thrice": Each of these quaint words have been printed in one such publication recently although none of them are used in America, the country that sets the standard for English. American English is the type that people who don't speak English want to learn.

If you don't believe that, you haven't seen the book Speak like Barack Obama, which prints the American president's speeches in Chinese and English. There are no books called Speak like Gordon Brown or Speak like Manmohan Singh. This state of affairs bothers some working for China's English media who are waging a guerilla war against the language recognized worldwide as the global lingua franca - American English.

Their weapons are words peculiar to the form of English spoken in their own countries. They strike by using such words to ambush a sentence or sabotage a headline. The results damage a news organization's credibility with people who know how Standard English should be written and spoken. Even worse, it misleads those trying to learn the language.

So as a public service to would-be English speakers and readers, here is a short list of what words not to use. Definitions were sought online at Merriam-Webster, a company that has published American dictionaries since 1847:

"Bourse" - a European stock exchange. The word refers to stock exchanges in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Italy, so one out of four references was technically correct. Americans use the term "stock exchange."

"Whingers" - This sounds like something taking flight. Neither Merriam-Webster nor the Oxford Dictionary had a listing for it, but a website, thefreedictionary.com., defined it: "Chiefly British. To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner." The correct word is "whiners," from the root word "whine."

"Thrice" - It refers to something that occurs three times, as in "once," "twice," and "thrice." There is no American term like it. The correct words would be "third," "a third time" or "three times," as in "Copy editors used the same wrong word three times." "In hospital" - Americans always use the article "the" in front of the word "hospital." They would say "at the hospital" or "in the hospital."

To be fair, most English readers would probably understand what is meant by the words "thrice" or "in hospital". But anybody who says "The whingers lost money on the bourse" will likely get only blank looks of incomprehension. Standard English is hard enough to learn without the added confusion of regional variations. Imagine trying to learn Mandarin from people who kept slipping Cantonese words into the vocabulary.