JOURNAL

In a couple of months, my husband and I will be finishing our mission here in Thailand. One of the things we chuckle about are the random English words that show up on shirts. Often they make no sense. It seems every shirt in street vendor's booths must have an English word or a picture on it--nice blouses, even. Sometimes the wearer has no idea what the words mean.

I stopped at a vendor's booth and pondered over this blouse displaying 

"JOURNAL".

  I'm sure that the t-shirt message creators have something in mind when they impose lettering, but so often miss their mark. But this one--"JOURNAL"--was too hard to ignore.

Was it a command? You must journal!--the perfect blouse (in spite of no sleeves) to wear when teaching a class on journaling,

Did the creator mean JOURNEY, or JOURNEY-IST (as in pilgrim) and in their limited English knowledge thought JOURNAL meant the same thing. Maybe she wanted to say JOURNALIST and ran out of room.

Maybe the creator wanted the shirt or the person wearing it to be a journal. Maybe? Just maybe. 

Or maybe they had no idea what the word meant but had the letters to spell it. I vote for that one. 

And I've also come to a conclusion that all shirts with misspelled words are sent to foreign countries.

Here is an example of "World Cup." Who would know the difference?