When you alight

I must admit, my loyalties are conflicted. I came here to teach English (and not just any English, but the Queen’s own English, since our textbooks insist on such civilized phrasings as “If you become ill, you should go to hospital”), yet I adore the fractured and accidentally poetic dialect already in place. Taiwanese English in general inspires great affection in me, but I have an especially soft spot for MRT English.

At each station, a recorded female voice cautions us, “When you alight, please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” It’s grammatically correct, but it transforms us all effortlessly into little birds in someone’s seventeenth-century sonnet.*

[ * or picaresque novel: Don Quixote, part I, book 4: ‘Here comes a fair troop of guests, and if they will here alight we may sing Gaudeamus.’]

Those of us on the platform, moreover, are requested to allow passengers to alight before boarding the train, and this request is invariably honored. Taipei residents, when not driving, must be the most considerate people in the world. Everyone lines up v. properly to board or disembark (alight) from the trains, and then lines up v. properly to ride the escalator. (Beware, Great Britain — you’re about to be usurped as the monarchs of queuing!)

Inside the train are v. few seats, which are intended for “elderly, infirm, or passengers with baby” [N.B.: the baby may be either inside or outside the womb]. The reminder of this fact reads: “Let each and every seat be priority seat.” It struck me as a beautiful phrase, somehow, like the proclamation of peace after a war over blue plastic territory, and I could imagine the author of that sentence proudly recalling the phrase ‘each and every’ from his or her English class several years before.



P.S. Some of my favorite instances of Chinglish ( = Chinese + English) are those which have an unintentional but amusing compounded significance. At Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall yesterday, we saw a little dispenser of hand sanitizer labeled HANDY WASHER. Little handies, v. handy indeed, and in Germany it would mean a place to wash your cell phone. ;-)