Browsing through Ethiopian pictures on Flickr, I came across the one above. I glanced at the comments section and there was a guy complaining that the ad was senseless, among other things. So I took a second look  and it really was terrible, terrible sentence.

For starters, why is the word tigist in quotes? Do they mean patience or not? If the quotes have to be on anything at all, it should be on “second” … since technically that’s not an Amharic word. But what else should they use if they mean 1/60th of a minute? LOL. Well, I believe the Amharic word for second is sEkond. Ok, ok … maybe i’m nitpicking here!

The worst offender is really the last word : ‘lemetadeg‘. Correct me if I’m wrong but for one thing, it’s not a word. At least not in Amharic. If they’re trying to say ‘to prevent the loss of life and property…’, the word they’re looking for is a variation of maged. For this case, they should say lemaged.

“ye ‘second’ tgist hiywotna nibreting ketrafic adega lemaged”

Many people mess up ‘maged‘ and say, ‘metaged‘, which is really nonsense. But the ad didn’t even use lemetaged. They flipped some consonants (or entire feedeloch in Amharic) and ended up with lemetadeg. At best, the made up word at the end of the ad is a screwed up version of lemadeg.

In other words, with faulty grammar, the ad kinda says,

‘A second’s patience, to grow the loss of life and property …’

No f*%king kidding, Shell! A bit Hama Tuma-esque.

This is from 2006. In 2010, it would of course be more appropriate for BP to sponsor this ad instead.

“ye ‘second’ tgist hiywotna nibretin ke ma’idin mawCHa adega lemetadeg”

I also just realized that I really don’t know how to say ‘mining’or ‘drilling’ in Amharic. Mts.