12 March 2011
WARSAW, Poland -- The Polish Language Council (PLC), the official body tasked with encouraging the correct use of language, took the country in a giant step in a different direction.
The PLC issued a resolution that the public should not use the word "Angol," as it is a rude way to refer to an Englishman. Unfortunately, the resolution wasn't corrected before publication and it contained four orthographic mistakes.
"What an embarrassment," said a PLC member. "But it's the European Union's fault."
The European Union insists on employing workers without taking into account their nationality as long as they are citizens of an EU member. Thus, the PLC had to employ two Englishmen. Their stellar resumés stated that they worked as editors for 15-20 years. Unfortunately, they edited English texts and don't speak a word of Polish. "We blame those freakin' pommies," said the PLC member.
But our quick research discovered that those Englishmen actually corrected two mistakes before publishing, which clearly means that PLC made six mistakes, not four.
"Bullshit," the PLC member commented, before storming off.
The situation in Poland has prompted the European Parliament to discuss the question, "May a member country set strict language rules and blame other people for making mistakes?"
"It sounds like discriminating against people for the way they write," said a European Parliament member from the Czech Republic. "The main task of the EU is to prevent people from discriminating against each other."
A group of European Parliament members proposed to ban all the language councils in the EU member states. "We support freedom of writing," said Jerzy Buzek, the President of the European Parliament.
A Norwegian observer at the European Parliament issued a note in which they warned EU that it may cause a much worse communication problem than Norway is currently having. "Here in Norway, everyone can write and speak the way he likes and nobody can point out he made a mistake - no one's language is better than anyone else's," he said.
Slovenia is actually the only EU member state that is against the idea. One of its European representatives said, "We have 2 million people and 50 dialects and now they want to create a situation, in which 500 million people in EU will speak in ten thousand dialects... Well, maybe it's not a bad idea: This way we will stop talking to each other. The EU sucks."
Replies
Wasting time with bull shit.
People are dying of hunger and war and they have language issues. How much money was used to correct that?
Money that could have fed a child for a week.
It is insane!