Mispelt!
As a six year old the only thing about school that made me cringe was dictation. The teacher would say a word and I would slowly loop and twist my pencil into forming it on paper. Hoping it was right. Spelling bees stung hard.
A relief now as I can write without constantly checking my spellings hoping to make sense with limited vocabulary. I can communicate. My palms still wait for the wooden ruler to slam down on them when I spell a word wrong. Thwack!
Coffee break. I head down the lane towards the small restaurant. A Ganpati statue stands guard suffocating behind marigold garlands. The Angles and Saxons would not be too pleased with him right now because what took them centuries to develop lies dead on the board above his serene head. COFEI HOUSE WELCOME
I finish my masala dosa and i wait for my chai. I look at the street lined with numerous hoardings; bright red,orange and blue typography, twisted looped signs that say JOIN THE VACATION CURSE FOR STD XII
Sigh! The English language and its glorious history we learnt in school flashes before my
eyes.
On my way home,roadside stalls show off food in psychedelic wraps. A red dragon with front and rear end on fire followed by a trail of yellow letters,hangs perilously from the ceiling. The board reads something to the effect of hungry eyes or ears. There is more scribble . Dish one SCHEZWAN PAWNS.
Chess anyone?
Stuck in traffic the truck in front of my cab has not gone for a p.u.c check in all its 500 years. My vision is blurred as the carbon monoxide clears out slowly. I see words through the mist HORN OK PLESE.
The one who wrote these signboards would be beaten black and blue by my teacher. He would be hit unconcious. How can someone spell something as simple as coffee, wrong?
Maybe he has a heavy accent that says coffeeeiiii! An accent,that is Tamil or maybe Bengali? A city like Mumbai has a sound box with a Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati,Bihari and many more accents put together.
You can walk in and have cofei. Play chess with the chinese waiter.
As long as the boards are the right way up, we manage with the misspelled instructions on them.
The city of Mumbai with its numerous hoardings and signposts, the words spelt like toy blocks put together by a preschooler to get the picture on them right, wobbly and out of place.
Would you put the entire city through a spell check? It would ask you if you want to spell it as Bombay, Bombai, Mumbai or Mumbay!
I think back at all my compositions that were sent home with red circles and my palms with new improved language lines, I remember my spellings. Thanks, to my teacher I can still hope to win at scrabble but I think I would lose or is it luse against the ones who painted the cryptic signs all over the city.
A relief now as I can write without constantly checking my spellings hoping to make sense with limited vocabulary. I can communicate. My palms still wait for the wooden ruler to slam down on them when I spell a word wrong. Thwack!
Coffee break. I head down the lane towards the small restaurant. A Ganpati statue stands guard suffocating behind marigold garlands. The Angles and Saxons would not be too pleased with him right now because what took them centuries to develop lies dead on the board above his serene head. COFEI HOUSE WELCOME
I finish my masala dosa and i wait for my chai. I look at the street lined with numerous hoardings; bright red,orange and blue typography, twisted looped signs that say JOIN THE VACATION CURSE FOR STD XII
Sigh! The English language and its glorious history we learnt in school flashes before my
eyes.
On my way home,roadside stalls show off food in psychedelic wraps. A red dragon with front and rear end on fire followed by a trail of yellow letters,hangs perilously from the ceiling. The board reads something to the effect of hungry eyes or ears. There is more scribble . Dish one SCHEZWAN PAWNS.
Chess anyone?
Stuck in traffic the truck in front of my cab has not gone for a p.u.c check in all its 500 years. My vision is blurred as the carbon monoxide clears out slowly. I see words through the mist HORN OK PLESE.
The one who wrote these signboards would be beaten black and blue by my teacher. He would be hit unconcious. How can someone spell something as simple as coffee, wrong?
Maybe he has a heavy accent that says coffeeeiiii! An accent,that is Tamil or maybe Bengali? A city like Mumbai has a sound box with a Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati,Bihari and many more accents put together.
You can walk in and have cofei. Play chess with the chinese waiter.
As long as the boards are the right way up, we manage with the misspelled instructions on them.
The city of Mumbai with its numerous hoardings and signposts, the words spelt like toy blocks put together by a preschooler to get the picture on them right, wobbly and out of place.
Would you put the entire city through a spell check? It would ask you if you want to spell it as Bombay, Bombai, Mumbai or Mumbay!
I think back at all my compositions that were sent home with red circles and my palms with new improved language lines, I remember my spellings. Thanks, to my teacher I can still hope to win at scrabble but I think I would lose or is it luse against the ones who painted the cryptic signs all over the city.
posted by scribbleamus at 7:49 AM
1 Comments:
I loved reading this. Thank you. I love that you are drawing from your own experiences, and reflecting- not just dismissing and snubbing but are really thinking about them and sharing them with people like me, from across the world in Seattle.
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