English, Please

I recently bought a [something in a box, don't recall just what, right now].

I got it home, then began a hunt for the item's [specific information]. What would have, should have, been an easy find became a hunt. The [thing] was made in the US and sold in the US, to be used in the US. Wouldn't the item's information be printed in English?

Information on the box was a bit like a simplified, overgrown Rubik's Cube. It was necessary to turn the box this way and that, to find the English. I scanned TheOtherLanguage. "Why", I wondered, "is this TheOtherLanguage more important to include on that box than the German, Irish, Scottish, Armenian, and Celtic of my children's heritage? And what about the languages of the Japanese, Italians, Sweeds, Maori, Chamorro and Mandarin peoples, aren't their languages as important as TheOtherLanguage?" Is it only those whose first, and apparently, only, language is TheOtherLanguage, who can't learn English, who require a hunt for information mingled with TheOtherLanguage? Or are manufacturers transitioning away from English, perferring TheOtherLanguage consumer?

Manuals I've long avoided. They're less like a Rubik's Cube and more like a child's "find the next step" puzzle. While the box included text in only two languages, the non-American language was decipherable from its resemblance to the second language I was required to learn to graduate from high school. Manuals, a.k.a. "instruction booklets", typically include one or two pages in English, and eighty-nine pages in other languages, although they still ignore the tongues of the Hawaiians, Greeks and Eritrean.

Looking at that box with its printed English (Americanized, of course) and TheOtherLanguage, I realized I really like Apple. I'm talking Steve Job's things like Apple Computers and iPods. An Apple package is printed in English, clean and uncluttered, with only the necessary words (Apple) and nothing to distract, frustrate or hinder the excitement of unwrapping the contents and plugging it in for the first use. The simple "how to" papers included are in English, too. Maybe Apple prints boxes in other languages for its Mac Nuts elsewhere, but here in US, Apple uses English.

I've made a decision. If something is made in another country and sold in US, it's just fine that the packaging includes another language, even if it isn't English. (Long's has lots of neat things with labels I can't understand.) However, if an item is made in the US for sale in the US, to be used by US, then English is an acceptable language. I will hunt for Made in USA product whose packaging doesn't disregard the languages of America's forefathers, rather respects the language our American forefathers learned: English (Americanized, that it is).

......................myRant Index