I work with a vendor in shipping my group’s products worldwide. This week the vendor received an e-mail starting with:

Thanks for your definitely defecation.

Does he mean “straight poop”?

For an experiment, I went to Google’s language tools and tried translating from English to Chinese (Simplified) and then back to English again. The result: “direct wave.” That’s probably more a limitation of Google’s admittedly beta automatic translation.

I think the e-mail’s author is playing with us. Regardless, his English is much better than my Chinese. ;-)