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This isn’t the only “ungrammatical” expression (relative to global standard English) you will encounter in India. Could it be that some person or some company

This isn’t the only “ungrammatical” expression (relative to global standard English) you will encounter in India. Could it be that some person or some company simply put this expression on their trucks (thinking it’s grammatical), and because it seemed useful other trucks followed, until it became the standard? Edit: this isn’t to be proscriptive about what’s correct/incorrect in a given country. My definition of “global standard English” is in a comment below.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Eh, sometimes you just gotta do the needful.
- riteshpatel 5y ago
  You win the internet today! Coming from a British-born Indian, I hate that phrase so much.
OJFord 5y ago
What is 'global standard English'? If you're American, consider that I (British) can find plenty that's 'wrong' with your English, judged by mine. Indian English has as much right to its own standard of correct as American English. (It's possibly a more widely spoken dialect! Depending probably on whether we say e.g. Europeans learning with heavy US film/tv influence are AmE speakers.)
- elzbardico 5y ago
  For me who am neither American or British, Global Standard English means American English in practice. I may find British pronunciation more logical and easier to understand, I may even prefer the spelling of some words in British English, but English is the world second's language, in a remote team where half of us are not native speakers, it is easier to adopt the most influential version of the language as the canonical one.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >What is 'global standard English'? I don't think it's formally defined, but there are some phrases that are widely accepted as "normal" by English speakers regardless of geography and others that are peculiar to a certain dialect. I'd be very surprised to hear someone outside of Australia say they were "fanging for a dart", for example.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    It's hard for me to understand why both you and I are getting downvoted for recognizing that people default to a subset of a language they have in common. I suspect if we were talking about "standard Russian" this wouldn't be so contentious. Every region has its own way of speaking, its own idioms and acceptable grammatical constructions. That doesn't mean the regions can't speak a unified generic version of the language. That generic version will still have grammar rules to obey or break.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Because it was a rhetorical question, I wasn't actually asking what people consider to be a 'global standard English', I was asserting that that's nonsense. There are many dialects of English across the globe, the Indian dialect as valid as the American; the fact that there's enough common ground between them that we can understand each other doesn't change that (it's surely prerequisite for calling it a dialect and not a different language). I certainly don't switch to 'global standard English' or AmE when I'm talking to someone who isn't British, and I doubt anybody thinks I'm speaking incorrect 'global standard English' as a result.
      - newsbinator 5y ago
        You're reading a lot into what I've said (e.g. hearing that some versions of English that are in use can be invalid). One way to tell that I'm not invalidating any particular version is that I put "ungrammatical" in quotes. Whether we like it or not, when non-natives from 5 different countries get together in a room in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka, the subset of English they're speaking is largely the same as when non-natives from 5 other different countries get together in a room in Lima or in Gaborone. The language they're speaking has grammar rules. It can be thought of as "standard Global English" because it's identifiable, distributed, and distinguishable from American English, British English, Singlish, etc.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  Global standard English is the English that a mixed international group of non-native but competent English speakers defaults to in an important meeting. I.e. a simpler subset of grammar: only 3 basic tenses, minimal and explicit use of conditionals to differentiate hypotheticals from reality/expectations, avoiding idiomatic or slang expressions, preferring regular and frequent conjugations over irregular / infrequent ones, preferring simple verbs over phrasal verbs, minimal reliance on definite/indefinite Articles as modifiers/counters, etc It’s still a subject-verb-object language that includes the Be-copula though.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Eh, sometimes you just gotta do the needful.

riteshpatel 5y ago
You win the internet today! Coming from a British-born Indian, I hate that phrase so much.

OJFord 5y ago

What is 'global standard English'? If you're American, consider that I (British) can find plenty that's 'wrong' with your English, judged by mine. Indian English has as much right to its own standard of correct as American English. (It's possibly a more widely spoken dialect! Depending probably on whether we say e.g. Europeans learning with heavy US film/tv influence are AmE speakers.)

elzbardico 5y ago
For me who am neither American or British, Global Standard English means American English in practice. I may find British pronunciation more logical and easier to understand, I may even prefer the spelling of some words in British English, but English is the world second's language, in a remote team where half of us are not native speakers, it is easier to adopt the most influential version of the language as the canonical one.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>What is 'global standard English'? I don't think it's formally defined, but there are some phrases that are widely accepted as "normal" by English speakers regardless of geography and others that are peculiar to a certain dialect. I'd be very surprised to hear someone outside of Australia say they were "fanging for a dart", for example.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  It's hard for me to understand why both you and I are getting downvoted for recognizing that people default to a subset of a language they have in common. I suspect if we were talking about "standard Russian" this wouldn't be so contentious. Every region has its own way of speaking, its own idioms and acceptable grammatical constructions. That doesn't mean the regions can't speak a unified generic version of the language. That generic version will still have grammar rules to obey or break.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Because it was a rhetorical question, I wasn't actually asking what people consider to be a 'global standard English', I was asserting that that's nonsense. There are many dialects of English across the globe, the Indian dialect as valid as the American; the fact that there's enough common ground between them that we can understand each other doesn't change that (it's surely prerequisite for calling it a dialect and not a different language). I certainly don't switch to 'global standard English' or AmE when I'm talking to someone who isn't British, and I doubt anybody thinks I'm speaking incorrect 'global standard English' as a result.
    - newsbinator 5y ago
      You're reading a lot into what I've said (e.g. hearing that some versions of English that are in use can be invalid). One way to tell that I'm not invalidating any particular version is that I put "ungrammatical" in quotes. Whether we like it or not, when non-natives from 5 different countries get together in a room in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka, the subset of English they're speaking is largely the same as when non-natives from 5 other different countries get together in a room in Lima or in Gaborone. The language they're speaking has grammar rules. It can be thought of as "standard Global English" because it's identifiable, distributed, and distinguishable from American English, British English, Singlish, etc.
newsbinator 5y ago
Global standard English is the English that a mixed international group of non-native but competent English speakers defaults to in an important meeting. I.e. a simpler subset of grammar: only 3 basic tenses, minimal and explicit use of conditionals to differentiate hypotheticals from reality/expectations, avoiding idiomatic or slang expressions, preferring regular and frequent conjugations over irregular / infrequent ones, preferring simple verbs over phrasal verbs, minimal reliance on definite/indefinite Articles as modifiers/counters, etc It’s still a subject-verb-object language that includes the Be-copula though.