The Origin of Engfish In high school my Junior English teacher gave a lecture on Engfish. In the academic world this phenomenon can be described in further detail as the lack of academics or the proper use of formal language in the structure of writing. Some have said it is made up facts, misunderstandings and miscommunications. I live for these, considering I believe my life is one big misunderstanding. I can’t deny that each day I exist, I make facts happen. I’ve lived in many places and have been subjected to multiple dialects and accents.
Misunderstandings branching from jargon, babel and odd mutterings during interpersonal communication within these multiple subcultures have made me into a word whore, as opposed to an enunciation/intent Nazi. I picked up on phonetics and thus began my own system or language.
While living amongst a Navajo tribe one of my friends came to school donning a t-shirt with a band design logo silkscreened on the front. The band’s name: Word Salad. I thought this would be great juxtaposed with the already existing Engfish. Even after learning the psychological connotations to this expression I began listening more for what I would consider to be EngFishWordSalad, my new written language.
While in Sociology class I even created a logo or crest containing a big lipped fish expiring air bubbles with a mechanical robotic arm spinning on its crown. The idea behind it was that of the fish, which travels in a school of like aquatic species glubbing similar thought bubbles. Over time the fish has evolved into a pseudo industrial, single function human anatomical limb, which it uses for simple daily routines. I thought this made sense on a larger spectrum of human evolution, industrial revolution and on into the today’s technological era.
For inspiration I jumped from the jiving board in search of those people who were seemingly unaware of the patterned speech they used and reused repeatedly to express themselves or the world around them. I cast my rod into the sea of words and phrases that were out of context, syntax or abhorrently irrelevant and inappropriate. I found pleasure in “you see the thing is”, “I reckon” and especially “Fuck”. I went deep juba-diving to understand why people desired to give the “because”, “what for” and “it”. I dragged my net and always came up with those who thought everything was “cool”, “neat”, “nice”, “awesome” and “okay”. Later as the evolution grew more distinguishable, I scaled dude-fish, rad-fish, aight-fish and fine-fish, most of which I thought were great-fish, all of which played or acted as a single fin maneuvering the colloquial liquid language of slang. I dined hearty on brain food. A WordSalad always complimented my EngFish sand-which.
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