Hoo-boy, am I ever having fun with this!
It started out from necessity, having my ears a bit plugged, so in order to catch the dialogue on the TV and not disturb the neighbours, I turned on the captioning option. I’ve left it on just for fun, though some days it’s more a strain not to bang your head than it is a giggle.
If you ever want to see what kind of impoverished vocabularies people who have gone through our dumbed-down reading and English classes have got, then this is the way to do it. Some of the mistakes are simply hilarious, as on one of Sir David Attenborough’s bird shows, where he was talking about a budgerigar, and it came up on the captioning as bugery guard.
Sometimes the captioning is so bad, that I wonder how those who rely on it solely have any clue as to what is really going on! I’m not talking about the odd – or even more – typo, as I know if I had to keep up my keyboarding to the speeds some of those folks talk, it might look a lot like Hungarian. But things like on the newscasts, countries’ and people’s names spelled so wrongly that if you didn’t already know what they were talking about, you’d never guess at all from what was written.
For those of you who need some cheap thrills and astonishments, turn on your captioning. It can really be a hoot!!
