We're not making this up. We're not allowed to make this up.

"'Stephen Harper has no conviction,' Dion said."

Nope, it's Liberals who have those.

H/T National Newswatch.

From CTV today and the Rutherford Show on January 12 of this year

"Since the election I came in Alberta seven times."

No comment necessary.

"he should have invited us since a long time"

I've addressed this; so should he. But interestingly, this time, CTV didn't clean up his mangling of the language.

H/T to Joel.

At 2:05

Video.

"I think I am the most influential leader of the opposition since a generation."

2 Things:

1. It's in a generation, Stephane. Stop translating directly from French; it makes you sound like a tool.
   
2. Most influential? Are you kidding me? Are you on some kind of crack?
   

I'm still trying to decipher this one

"We wanted both. Economic prosperity and social justice. Not only we wanted both. But we thought and we were so right, that the best way to have a strong economy is to put all the barriers down, to help all the people to give their talents and their skills, to help them with sound social policy, to be more, to be healthier, better educated, more confidence in life, and because of that, stronger players in the economy, and once you are a stronger player in the economy, the economy is stronger, and you have more room for social justice, and you do a stronger economy with it..."

Yikes.

Video.

Can this ever be topped?

I know, it's not Dion, but it's got to be one of the silliest things ever said:

"I don't know, a proof is a proof. What kind of a proof, it's a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof it's because it's proven."

Take a guess as to who it is. As if you didn't know.

Dion vs. Harper: second language

Hardly surprising, Harper speaks better French than Dion does English.

I can vouch for this, as je suis bilingue. Actually, 2 and a half languages, but that's beside the point.

Harper's French is hardly perfect, but he certainly is comfortable using it. I don't know that I could say the same about Dion with respect to English.

I haven't seen much recently in the way of Dion mangling the language, though. Either a) he's spending more time with his tutor, b) he's saying less whilst in the spotlight, or c) the media are doing a better job of cleaning up his speech. I suspect it's a combination of all three.

A headline

Hoo, boy, I know it's a typo, but doesn't it just sound like him?



H/T Steve Janke.

Yikes.

I sat down and listened to the Ottawa Citizen interview with Dion and I must tell you, there were a couple of problems.

• There were many annoying blips in the audio, making it difficult to hear at times.
  
• The microphone being used was terrible, so the voices were all echo-ey and tinny.
  
• Sometimes Dion was speaking either in tongues or so quickly or both, that whatever was being said was completely unintelligible.
  

That being said, like other people I found myself trying hard to stay awake listening to it.

I offer these nuggets of wisdom from the man who would be Prime Minister. Some of them I got myself, some I got from Kate's site, and some from Olaf.

"No, I must say I have always been a lover for nature...um, love with a nature and, as a Quebec city kid it's not difficult to be in the wood -- twenty minutes and you are, it's a beautiful lake in the woods, and I love that, and I'm always reading and very concern about protection of nature and involved and so on..."

After, Olaf goes into some good analysis about what this all amounts to. Some of his observations:

"* Conjunctions and articles: he says he's "a lover for nature"; "not since the last weeks"; and "I will be in competition with the Budweiser".

* Verb choice: he says, for example, that scientists are saying that 400 chemicals "request action right away", as opposed to "require".

* Plural nouns: he said "there are beautiful lake in the wood" around Quebec city; and refers to "these fourteen years old kid"."

If you want to see more, and I suggest it as good reading, go to his blog post about it. Onto mine.

"Now I was on the driving seat for the environment..." (Must have been painful.)

"When I decided to come in this race after the defeat..." (Wow, what a dirty race.)

"This is what I have done since a month..." (common mistake, because in French when you have been doing something for a month, you say "depuis un mois" but nonetheless it's something that should be taught to new speakers of English.)

"I've always been a lover for nature."

"I came, as you know, in politics, because my country was in danger to fall apart." (2 big errors, and both errors that should be evident.)

"Today there is a report saying that the provinces don't share information between themself." (Singular, and a word that does not exist. And "between" refers to only 2; any more than that and it should be "among" or "amongst".)

"They have difficulty to compare themself, because they are in competition, they don't like to be seen as less good than the other one."

I understand that, for doing this (in fact for having this blog at all), Jarrett (whom I respect a bunch) will say I'm being a douchebag, and maybe so, but politics is fought in the gutter. I speak french better than Jarrett says he does (but my intuition tells me that he speaks better than he lets on), and in return I know what mistakes are common with what level of francophones when speaking English. Some of the mistakes, like Olaf mentioned, are common ones--but they, unfortunately, stem from thinking in French and translating to English--they're idiomatically idiotic. Similarly, there are idioms in English that just don't go into French--ça ne se dit pas--and in doing so you expose yourself, rightly so, to criticism.

And besides, as Kate points out, it's not like it hasn't been done before. In the end, I'm okay with being a douchebag. Why? Because it's fun.

As told to Global National

This is offensive in a couple of ways (a pot(belly?) shot at the Prime Minister, and a mangling, encore une fois, of Hanglish)

"We have changed bedroom in the exercise room."

"My successor, maybe Mr. Harper, will have the opportunity to lose his overweight now, because we have this exercise room."

Semi-intelliglible response to the so-called attack ads

From his own website:

"Build on 3 pillars, to combine, to reconcile, more than any country in the world why not, economic prosperity, social justice, and environmental sustainability."

"Yes, it's very ambitious, but it happens that we are very ambitious for our country, and we're concerned about the fact that the current government doesn't have it, doesn't understand what we need to do to go there, to the contrary, oppose everything, oppose populations against themselves, oppose the environment, the economy, and neglect the social fabric of Canada."

From an interview with Peter Mansbridge

"If it's a problem for a significant number of Canadians and if it's a liability that may keep Mister Harper in power it prevent us to do the three-pillar approach that I want to be true for Canada, to bring together more than any other country in the world economic prosperity, social justice, environmental sustainability, then I will do this sad thing, then, to renounce to my French citizenship that I receive from my mother."

Compiled by Greg Weston

"I don't want to kill the milk cow. But I want to make sure that the milk will still be good and there for our grandchildren."

"A key role, uh, in how much money will fix, and how much jobs will make in a sustainable way."

Calling all bloggers

I could sure use some help with this project. I sent the link to Kate's site (thanks for letting me get in the plug, Kate!)

If you have any, let me know at my email here, or leave a comment!

First post

This is a blog to demonstrate that murdering the English language isn't the sole domain of Conservatives. We all know that George W. Bush is a horrible off-the-cuff public speaker. Jean Chretien brutalized both official languages. I will glean the internet (with your help) and post here the best of the worst.

Keep in mind that the media have already cleaned up his speeches to resemble English. So this will take some investigation (YouTube and such).

If you have an addition, please send it to:

stephanedionsays@shaw.ca