No Sensibility for Books... + My Linguistic Frustration

There are books that I have read more than twice. It happened when I wanted to refresh my memory of the works, which precisely shows the enrichment is not permanent, or simply when I did not have any new book ready. All this tells me that I am not an artist as Maugham seems to define it.

I’m not aspiring to be any kind of artist. But having been dealing with language work for many years, I think I have developed an eye to written materials that is keener than many people. Whether it is a short message (SMS), an email, a research paper or a contractual document, I often find people do not pay enough regards to what they write.

A case in point is when someone, writing in Japanese, uses katakana terms when equivalent Japanese terms are readily available. I see this case most often with Japanese who have some understanding of English. This sort of writing makes me wonder if they should not write the whole thing in English. Another case is also in Japanese. That is when a few more words or sentences would help me feel happy. These messages are so terse and blunt that they are not what I expect of anyone with a sufficient level of fluency in Japanese. When it is displayed excessively, courtesy is as annoying, but when I cannot find any, I get puzzled. Does the writer know how to write Japanese? Sadly, this second case too is found among Japanese who know some words of English.

Yet another example is the off-key English spoken by many people in this part of the world. It is certainly better than the pidgin English that Maugham mentions in Footprints in the Jungle. But hearing those people speak equals to staying in a karaoke room where all singers are tone-deaf. When I pointed it out to someone some time ago, she, perhaps being kiasu, countered me talking about Japanese whose English is hopelessly bad. I believe that people here have been exposed to English for so many years while this is not the case with Japanese, therefore they cannot be compared with each other. Then one thing nice about my work should be that I can see people who speak the language decently, no matter where they are from. Those linguistically tone-deaf people do not care.