Muddled Language

A brief aside:Yes, I know it's been awhile. I appreciate everyone who has missed my posts and complained (really, I do appreciate it becasue it shows you care!) and I'm sorry for my absence. I can only blame lizalou (though it's really my fault) becuase I've been writing her letters about the kinds of things that I would normally post here. So, by the time I sit down to write a post I'm already bored with the stuff I could have written about and end up writing nothing at all. In the future, I will copy parts of my letters to use for the basis of posts because I'm writing the letters on the computer now. That should make everyone happy.

Now to the meat of the post. Beef stew. No, not really. Actually, I'm talking about instruction manuals. I'm working on a manual for a hand mixer at work right now, and they sent me the manual written by the factory in China for reference. I'm sure you can imagine where this is going.

Apparently, I've been calling beaters by the wrong name all these years. They are actually “muddlers.” And that dough hook? That's a “decorative tail” of course. And the beater eject button is properly called a “fork holder.” Where's the fork? My favorite sentence is “Inserting beaters.” Yes, that's a whole sentence, and it seems that at some point they realized they were actually called beaters rather than muddlers. Not all the sentences are fragments, but that doesn't mean they make any more sense. For instance, consider the following: “Hold with one hand the mixer from the handle and with the other place the beater. Put it in the hole, press and twist it until beater clicks into position.”

So, needless to say, this reference manual has been really helpful to me. I haven't laughed this hard since I got that email about the world's worst album covers.