Author(s): Neil James

Language Books

The information superhighway brings more text to our door than ever before. It's just that most of it gets mangled along the way. Twenty years ago, Harold Scruby's original Manglish became an instant bestseller. This version preserves some of his classic Manglish examples with mostly new material from the shame files of the Plain English Foundation. Modern Manglish explores the traditional linguistic traps of mixed metaphors and mispronunciation, new words and old cliches, and euphemisms, tautologies, and jargon. It also exposes the latest Manglish in serially offending professions such as politics, business, and the law. When exactly did we all become 'stakeholders seeking to leverage our paradigms to achieve best-practice scenarios moving forward'? Alongside these are the newest contenders for the Manglish crown, ranging from sports talk to silly signs, from IT speak to Twitterese, and from food speak to fancy-pants job titles. For your delectation and perhaps chagrin, here are the worst excesses of Manglish in 21 handy chapters, illustrated with more than 60 cartoons from Australia's premier editorial cartoonist, Alan Moir.