Just a few days after about musing about Engrish comes a truely gemfilled find. Straight off of a page of MonkeyFilter, I've learned of a phrasebook titled English as She is Spoke. Makes sense to me! But ahhhg, where are the scans of the original edition? It must be quite a dusty relic.?English… really does read like a tome of "alternate English", with many of the words themselves in place but rearranged, like the existence of the language becomes a deck of cards, shuffled and reshuffled until the resulting order makes for a lot of —??s and a few !!!s.

More to the point, I wonder who's actually used this book in a serious capacity without being aware of its?uh?various misgivings. The anecdotes read like magnetic poetry in a blender at times, but one of my faves comes a section of Useful Words as classified into categories such as "Woman objects" (which is surprisingly skirt-lacking) and "Music's instruments". Get this:

• A flagelet
• A dreum
• A hurdy-gurdy.

Uh, not exactly Mr. Holland's Opus, is it? Although such a trio could make for good jigging music to get down to. More suspicious still is under the "Trades" section:

• Starch-maker
• Porter
• Barber
• Chinaman <— WTF?

…

Okay, I've never heard of that last one as a type of job, but if you want to work as a Chinaman (and my Dad most surely was one), be my guest. It gets more and more LOLarious?yew know, if this was some bastardized variant of ol' Tudorspeak, it might not be so charming, but can you imagine a world where everyone speaks like this? The lists themselves read like things you might expect to collect on a journey in a King's Quest game before slaying the evil wizard, and some of the animal names are plain fantastic too: heuth-cocks? Morpions? A sorte of fish?

What a catch of the day!