From Yinglish to sado-mastication

Abstract

In Shanghai in the mid-1930s, Lin Yu-tang was dubbed the ‘King of humour’. In Hong Kong in the 1980s, this title might well have been bestowed on Nury Vittachi, whose articles in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the ‘Lai See’ column of the South China Morning Post won him an enthusiastic reading public who relished his wry commentaries on the quirks of Hong Kong life as well as the revelations of scandal in government and business that accompanied them. Nury Vittachi is also a productive writer, and has thus far produced over a dozen comic books charting the highways and byways of Hong Kong, co-authored an expose´ of the local sex trade, and written a novel of cross-cultural encounters: Asian Values (1996). In addition, Vittachi has also played a leading role in setting up Dimsum, a new Hong-Kong-based journal for Asian writing in English. In the following article, Vittachi takes a humourous look at the idiosyncrasies of local English usage, not, it should be emphasised from the perspective of the linguist, but from that of the humourist.