The Art of Murdering the English Language
Today while browsing through the barely mediocre selection of used video games at the EB Games found at the Fairview mall where my husband and I stopped in search of lunch, I ran across this game. Curious, I picked it upm thinking it could be interesting. It had the appearance of a point and click adventure game. So, I thought, “let’s see what the summary says”.
I flipped it over and began to read the woefully short English description. I paused suddenly, doing a double take. Did my eyes deceive me or did I see an error? Not just any error but an error that would change the entire meaning of the sentence? Eagerly I re-read the description and proved my suspicions. Here we have a game that had been shipped out to North America retailers from Europe, and the editors couldn’t even take the time to polish the box.
Indeed, there proved to be an error in the text of the box I picked up. The sentence that stuck out in my head was this: Become Nicole Bonnet, a young female FBI agent and except the challenge. I’m sure you can see the obvious error in this one. It would be easy to miss unless you are used to reading English a certain way.
After seeing it, I took out my Razr and tried vainly (yeah, it was futile) to take what would have inevitably been a blurry picture of the text on the back of the box. Alas, it was made of failure and as such, the end was result was no true photographic evidence. I searched, upon returning to my apartment in utter vain to find a picture of said box. My efforts were in pure futility, as I found the correct version. But, I can still remember the version I saw and unlike the one i found online, this one had small paragraphs written in a yellow serif font in two distinct paragraphs on the back.
Of course, it’s bound to be errors that will be missed when the team writing the descriptions doesn’t speak the language that the game is bound to wind up in.
As an aside, I’d like to add that one of the suggested titles for this post was “Confessions of a Grammar Nazi”. I decided not to go that route… though my husband seemed to think it would have been fitting.
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