Making Fun (Of Unnecessary Parentheticals)

Folks, I am not a punctuation Nazi. I think I've made this abundantly clear already. However, as I noted previously, I will get a little twitchy when such mistakes create some fundamental difference in meaning. Thus, watch your parentheticals around me. Misplaced parentheses can not only change the flow of a sentence, but they can alter the information that is conveyed.

This is the cover for the new single "Making Fun (Of Everyday Life)," a novelty song released to promote the new video game "Rayman: Raving Rabbids 2." In general, parentheses are used to indicate extra or unnecessary information or inserts. In song titles, they indicate name duality. A song with parentheticals in the title usually has an official, "short" title and a "longer" title, typically due to the "short" title being part of a longer line in the chorus or other prominent place. (Pulling a random CD out of my collection--"Pure 80's"--I find "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" by Eurythmics. Those who've heard the song know that "Sweet dreams are made of this" is the first line of said song's chorus, but it's perfectly acceptable just to call the song "Sweet Dreams.") Occasionally, you'll find them used to show the discrepancy between a song's "official" title (what the artist[s] called it) versus what it is commonly known as. (I've seen a lot of people write "Baba O'Reilly (Who Are You)", though I don't know if any album ever referred to that song as such.)

What we are looking at here is an example of the former, certainly (I braved listening to it just to make sure), but the parenthetical is so oddly sectioned it baffles me. The whole idea behind parentheses, in song titles or in writing, is to indicate that the material contained within is optional or dropable. It can be cut without affecting the meaning of that which comes before or after.

The problem here (similar to my "rebel against/revel against" quandary several posts ago) is that "Making Fun" means nothing by itself in English. Well, literally, it would mean the process of creating fun, which is not quite semantically nonsensical. But it is clearly meant here to be part of the compound verb "to make fun of," which has a clear and definite meaning that is quite distinct from simply "making fun." "Making fun" by itself cannot be used to mean "to tease or mock." It is a transitive compound verb, and you can't split it, either (I temporarily forget my jargon). Just try and say "When I was little, I got made fun." Sounds awkward, doesn't it? "When I was little, I got made fun of." Better. "They made fun me." "We made fun the bad movie." O where O where has my little preposition gone?

Of course, if they rescued the "of" from the innards of the Parentheses Jail and put it back where it belongs, it'd still sound pretty strange. Prepositions without modified noun phrases sound pretty weird all by their lonesome. (But again, ending sentences with prepositions is perfectly normal. You do it all the time when you ask questions. If a preposition is at the end of a sentence, it just means that its noun phrase has moved somewhere else in said sentence or is implied.)

Why is the parenthetical even necessary here? "Making Fun of Everyday Life" seems like a pretty satisfactory song title to me. It's not even that long. There are plenty of even longer song titles that make do without.

In the vein of the original Rabbids promotional videos: "Bunnies Can't Use Parentheses Properly."

[Via GoNintendo]

Of creatures of the piscene persuasion and cylindrical liquid storage devices

I've been debating with myself as to whether or not I want to feature bad translations in this blog. I decided as soon as I had formulated the idea that "engrish" and other similarly mangled speech would be right out. Although it is often humorous, the goal of my blog is to make fun of people who should know how to speak English properly, but don't--I.E., befuddled native speakers. It is amusing when nonnatives err, but any second-language-learner will make those kinds of mistakes. Have you ever tried to learn a second language? It is guaranteed that, at some point during your education, you will sound like an idiot. This is going to happen whether you want it to or not, because it happened when you were 2, and such mistakes are hardwired into your cranium.

That said, I think that professional translations are fair game. Be they books, movies, or (heaven help us) video games, there are people who get paid to convert these works into English, for consumption by an English native-speaking audience. We expect these translations to express a level of language competency that we ourselves possess. We can tell when they've been bungled, as they don't quite "read" right to our minds. If done well, they can take what made the original text lively and engaging and successfully recreate it in another language.

If you have any experience with video games, however, I'm sure you know that that is one big "if."

It's almost too easy to pick on them. I feel kind of bad about doing it. But these are multimillion-dollar corporations here, producing products in dozens of cultures worldwide. How is it that they consistently manage to avoid finding translators who don't let these little errors slip through?

This particular error comes to us from the Game Boy Advance game "Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town." The Harvest Moon series, for those of you not familiar with it, is all about farming. You are a farmer and you run a farm. You grow fruit and vegetables. You milk cows. You cook homemade food. You make friends with townspeople, get married, and have children. It's a simple, docile experience, one that plays well with children (as my younger sister will attest), and it's great fun if you need to wind down after a long day. It's a surprisingly popular series, especially when you consider the fact that most folks' ideas of video games and the gamers who play them involve pouch-eyed losers and virtual robots that like to shoot one another.

The translation values of the games, however, are notoriously dodgy. Some games in the series, like the GameCube and PS2s' A Wonderful Life, are well written with clever dialogue and impeccable grammar. More Friends of Mineral Town, not so much. It's usually fairly comprehensible, but every once in a while, it heads solidly into bizarro territory.

My character in the game, "Farmer Ally," lives on the cheerfully-named Rainbow Isle farm with her husband Rick, daughter Vivian, and an entourage of cows, sheep, and chickens. One farmy morn, she rose sleepy-eyed from bed and gave her usual farmy greeting to her farmy family.

"Mama... nigh-night," said the rather confused toddler Vivian. But this particular piece of canned babble, though anachronistic with regards to the fact that it was 6 A.M. in game time, is not the focus of our confusion.

Farmer Ally conversed cheerfully with Rick, and he remarked on how fast dear Vivian was growing up. Also a fairly standard piece of speech. However, attempting to talk with him again, the good farmer ran into something far more peculiar.

I dearly wish I had the ability to make a screenshot of this. Alas, I lack even a cell phone camera to document this. So you'll just have to take me on faith when I report that Rick said...

"Oh... but girls always revel against their fathers..."

Let us ask our good friend Dictionary.com what went wrong here, shall we?

rev·el /ˈrɛvəl/ [rev-uhl] verb, -eled, -el·ing or (especially British) -elled, -el·ling, noun
–verb (used without object)
1. to take great pleasure or delight (usually fol. by in): to revel in luxury.
2. to make merry; indulge in boisterous festivities.
–noun
3. boisterous merrymaking or festivity; revelry.
4. Often, revels. an occasion of merrymaking or noisy festivity with dancing, masking, etc.

I don't know about you, but I've never heard of someone taking great pleasure against someone. I'm certain one could go so far as to say that revel in is a compound verb.

Obviously, poor Rick meant to say "rebel," but the disastrous closeness of the vowel sound /b/ to the vowel sound /v/, as well as their vexing closeness to one another on the standard QWERTY keyboard, have caused him to stutter in a most childish fashion. I don't suppose I blame him. It was early in the morning, and I doubt he'd had his Turbojolt XL yet.