Okay, this is going to sound pretty curmudgeony, but dammit, someone’s gotta say it, so it might as well be me.
I try to understand them. Honest I do. But more often than not I can’t. And when I can’t I just have to hang up. Not really an option when I’m trying to sort out a problem with my credit card. Or worse yet, with the government! So why the fuck can’t they train and test these people for intelligibility before they hire them? Well, I did say this wasn’t going to be one of my wokier moments.
Okay, let’s be fair. There are more English-speakers in India and Nigeria than in the rest of the world combined. So clearly we‘re the ones with the accent, not them. They can understand each other. (Well, maybe not the Indians and Nigerians.) And apparently they can understand us. So why should they learn to speak to us with our accent rather than we learn to understand theirs?
It’s a fair question, but not a rhetorical one. The answer is that they needn’t learn to speak our English and we needn’t learn to understand theirs. Why not? Because we now have programs – programs that are readily available and cost less than pennies – that can translate their English to our English and our English to theirs. Some companies are already using them.
So why isn’t every company using them? Because some mentally retarded [sic] activists are claiming that the use of such programs is racist. Huh?! Because it implies that there’s something wrong with people who can’t speak the way we do. No it doesn’t. In fact that’s precisely what it doesn’t imply. Would they claim that a program that translates Italian to English implies there’s something wrong with Italians? Or if it went the other way that there’s something wrong with us? This isn’t just stupidity. Nor even stupidity on stilts. It’s stupidity that makes the simply stupid sound genius.
The only argument that makes some sense is that this technology threatens to take jobs away from locals who already speak like us. Hogtwaddle! If there were locals willing to take these jobs they wouldn’t be hiring Indians and Nigerians in the first place. This technology bypasses any need to train either their tongues or our ears. It’s win-win all round.
Unintelligible English is making me a racist. I don’t want to be a racist. I want to be woke. But throw me a bone, willya?
Categories: Editorials, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
Leave a comment