Friday, July 12, 2002

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Ah, the Google Mirror:
elgooG
Can you decode the message we sent to M13?

Self-Decoding Messages
ADAM SMITH WRITES:

Finally, the office in which I was working had a set of
English instructions for the phone system that had been typed up by one of
the Japanese in the office. At one point, the instructions were meant to
include the sentence "Hook the phone," meaning (I assume) "hang up the
phone."

The author of the instructions apparently didn't know how to spell "hook",
so I suppose he tried to sound it out. There is no "hoo" sound in
Japanese. The closest is something like "foo", which generally gets
transliterated as "fu". As for the "k" sound, the author apparently
decided that in this case "ck" was more likely to be correct than just
"k".

So the end result of all this was that the instructions contained the
sentence "Fuck the phone." For the Americans in the office, it was good
for about ten minutes of barely-contained laughter.

Japanese Engrish from YOU