It’s your expression. Own it. It’s your culture. Live it. What’s protected thrives. What’s inside survives. No, this neat little poem is not some neo-colonialist rant, extolling the virtues of protection and possession. It’s marketing, taken from a packet of plastic CD covers I bought. So my “expression” and my “culture” amount to a small, square piece of plastic. If Operación Triunfo, Big Brother, Hotel Glam and the rest are anything to go by, they may be right. And talking about the language of branding, coincidentally Ibidem has a go at the subject today, where he discusses the abuse of the English language in Spanish press releases. These, and restaurant menus, and CD sleeves, and magazines, and everywhere, are often the butt of English speakers’ humour – and I myself quite enjoy a good menu error. Sometimes a slapdash approach to English by non-natives does annoy, as when newspapers get English spellings wrong – but I’m not annoyed because I’m a linguistically offended Brit, it’s because I expect newspapers to treat other languages with the same respect they treat their own. Also, language is a fact, and newspapers take facts seriously. It might be worth looking out for these - foreign language errors in Places That Should Know Better - and posting them (both English and Spanish errors, of course). Marketing people in Spain obviously feel it’s hip and attractive to use English to brand certain products, whereas their counterparts in England and the States don’t feel it’s hip and attractive to use Spanish – and one rather sad reason for this, among all the thousands of reasons, is that at least a little bit of English can be understood by a lot of people in Spain, where no Spanish at all is understood by practically everyone in the English-speaking world. Anyway – hasta mañana.
--------