NATIVE English speakers may perhaps be forgiven a tendency to raise their voices when speaking to natives of other lands. Perhaps many of them feel the need to bludgeon with sheer volume where inscrutability often holds sway. 

I was once stationed in Indonesia with a pop show band. We played a couple of months in Hard Rock Jakarta and a couple months in Hard Rock Bali.

While in Jakarta, the band was housed in a lovely place called Kuningan—an exclusive enclave of Indonesia’s elite. The place was quite likely the Jakartan equivalent of Beverly Hills.

One morning, the band’s road manager, Howell, and I felt a hankering for fried eggs. Sadly our kitchen had no eggs in stock. So we took it upon ourselves to purchase a few dozen eggs at the neighborhood mom ‘n pop store.

Knowing the English proficiency of your average Indonesian on the street, we asked to buy in Tarzan-esque vernacular.

“We…ummm…,” Howell began tentatively,  “like… buy…eggs. You know? Eggs?”

The lady in charge of the store looked befuddled.

“Ahhh…” she sighed, then looked around for whatever it was we seemed to want. She fished out a bottle of Coke and looked at us hopefully.

“No, no, no,” Howell continued. “Eggs. You know, eggs?”

She then tried to hand us a pack of cigarettes.

“No,” I said emphatically. I made an oval shape with my hand. “Eggs.”

She smiled and presented a loaf of bread.

Howell, struck by inspiration, said, “No, no… like this. You know chicken?” He flapped bent arms about and bobbed his head up and down in a perfect pantomime of chickenhood.

“Buk-buk buk-buk,” he clucked, flapping his arms whole-heartedly. “Chicken?”

“Ahhh…” the lady said tentatively.

Howell then pantomimed an egg materializing out of his rear, clucking the whole time for good measure.

“Ah!” she gasped in sudden realization. “Telur!” she exclaimed. (Telur is Bahasa Indonesia for egg.)

She disappeared for a moment then came back with an egg.

“Ahhh…” We all sighed in satisfaction—Howell and I at having made ourselves clear, the lady at having understood the two English-speaking foreigners and successfully making a sale.

Vignettes of amusing attempts at English abound.

There was the time a couple of us were in an elevator in an ultra-high-tech Jakarta skyscraper. On a plaque which seemed to be made of platinum was embossed the mystifying admonition to “Please use the parking area when the raining time. So not wet.”

And in Bali, posted on a billboard above a dangerous blind curve, was the warning: CAUTION: FREQUENTLY ACCIDENT AREA.

Also in Bali, in a disco frequented by tourists of all stripes and nationalities, was posted this friendly remark—“Due to the we have a party on the Monday night, please to know we will not be the open on that mon-night. Please to be coming the back on the Tuesday, the Wednesday, the Thursday, or even…if you like…the Fri-night.”

Metro Manila is itself no stranger to felonious assaults on the King’s English.

One of my personal favorites—hung at the entrance to a small subdivision near my house is the announcement: “We are close from midnight to 6am.”

Well, thanks for the warning! I promise to flinch if you come a bit too close.  

Another classic Pinoy malapropism: No parking on both sides of the street.

Well, of course! Short of cutting one’s vehicle in half in a craven attempt to park on both sides of the street, how could one begin to do so in the first place?

A better way to express the thought is, of course, “No parking on either side of the street”.

Another personal favorite: In case of fire, use stair.

Not a whole flight of stairs, mind you. Just one stair. In case the fire reaches towering inferno levels, one could make just one triumphant step to safety.

Or how about this befuddling road sign? “ENTRANCE ONLY. DO NOT ENTER.”

Speaking of befuddling road signs, I once came across a road sign doing proud duty in a parking lot in one of Metro Manila’s newest malls. Right smack dab in the middle of the parking lot, the sign admonished, “NO PARKING ANYTIME.”

There’s an Internet café near my house which cautions its staff, “do not disturb customers if necessary.” I suppose it’s ok to disturb them unnecessarily.

A word often mangled in these parts is “convenience.” It can be a very inconvenient annoyance.

There was once a 7-Eleven type store right across my house that billed itself as a “convinience store.” A store meant to be both convenient and convivial, perhaps?

I’ve also seen (and taken a picture of) a road sign apologizing for the “inconveniece” of the road repair work being done. Thank God no nephews were involved.

All I can say in defense of us poor misguided nonnative English speakers is, in the words of the long-legged queen of Pinoy malapropism:

You can fool me once; you can fool me twice. You might even fool me three times. But you will never fool me four!