In his speech to Congress last night, President Obama said:
“We will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.” [Transcript here.]
Background to the punchline to come: Some of my work takes the form of reediting books that have been copyedited overseas, typically in Chennai or Mumbai, India. The pay for these jobs is pitiful, sometimes as low as 50 cents per page, but I take them on when my schedule allows to make a little birdseed money. (Not so much the 50 centers, but a buck and change per page? Fine, whatever.) You see, there are two main forms of English: British and U.S. (Canadian English might count as a third, but it’s mostly based on the British form.) Indians, because of their British colonial past, learn a British English variant: -isation vs. -ization, colour vs. color, etc. Indian editors also tend to delete articles (a, an, the) and insert stray commas for mysterious reasons, and capitalize nouns at random. My job is to fix all that and more. But what I really enjoy are the funny rewrites of our kooky idioms. More Photos
