I grew up speaking English. I am married to a man who grew up speaking French. Although by now we are both bilingual (and will often switch languages from one sentence to the next!), we still put the subtitles on when we're watching TV. For one thing, the words on TV go by fast! And I confess that I've kind of gotten used to them, even in English. It's kind of a laziness thing - it's so easy, when you don't understand what someone just said, to glance down at the bottom of the screen for confirmation. Or to read ahead when you get impatient. Sometimes I have to force myself to stop reading and appreciate the timing and delivery of the actors on screen.

But the truth is, subtitles are a TON of fun. Because more than just occasionally, for one reason or another, they get...interesting. Sometimes you get weird letters, numbers, even squares and stuff that looks like HTML. Sometimes, depending on the cable reception, letters are dropped, and words are scrunched together or plopped into the middle of other words. You get some pretty funny-looking stuff this way! My husband and I always have fun trying to read that out loud. I also get a kick out of words that are misspelled, or misunderstood by the captioner and written down as some other (real) word that makes no sense in the circumstances. Then there are the times when you go from a captioned TV spot to an uncaptioned one, and the last few words of the captions just hang there.

Watching TV with subtitles is like a window on a secret world. Suddenly you are aware of things you never would have noticed otherwise! You learn which shows tend to have good captioning, and which ones tend to be two or three sentences behind what is said on screen (you wonder - is someone sitting in a room somewhere, listening to the show and typing the captions as they go? That's what it looks like! They even hesitate over difficult words - it's true!) or just have the weird squares and HTML. It brings a whole new level to marketing, because you know which companies invested the time and money to have good captions on their ads. And you know those spots for TV shows, where they show a clip montage? You can tell which ones of those were hastily done, because instead of captioning the commercial itself, they simply pull the footage without touching the captions, so you see captions from the scene the footage was pulled from - sometimes words you don't even hear in the commercial!

But the best part of subtitles is that there is TONS of funny stuff that you would never see or think of without them. I'll share with you a few of our favorites.

The first Christmas present I ever gave my husband was a season of Law and Order: SVU on DVD. I love the show, and I knew he would like it too, but he would never have an opportunity to see it on TV, being an American show (now that we have cable we get American channels and we do catch an episode from time to time.) One night we were watching an episode, and one of the detectives turns to the D.A. and says: "You're going to have to trust me." Except that the subtitles said "You're going to have to RUST me." We both started giggling, then chuckling, then laughing outright! It was particularly funny because this was the captioning for a DVD, so you would think there would be a bit more quality control than on a TV show! We found other misspellings on other episodes, but for months afterwards, anytime the word "trust" came up in conversation, one or the other of us would say, "You're going to have to rust me!" And we would start laughing all over again. It was, I think, our first real in-joke as a couple.

Another good one happened a few weeks ago, when there was a dandruff shampoo commercial right before it went back to the program we were watching. So we ended up with something like this:
This program contains material
that is not suitable for all audiences.
and gets rid of unsightly dandruff flakes!
Viewer discretion is advised.

But my current favorite happened just last night. For some reason, news programs tend to be particularly bad about subtitles. Star Trek was over and it was time for Jeopardy!, which usually comes on right after the news. So I change the channel, and I see the most PERFECT subtitle blooper I have EVER seen:

War moles!

And that's the news for this evening at 6, I'm So-and-So Such-and-Such for Channel XYZ, and we'll see you again at 11!