as she is spoke

English

Etymology

From the title English as She Is Spoke popularly given to a 19th-century Portuguese–English phrase book, O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez by Pedro Carolino (1855), notorious for its inaccurate English translations. Though used as the title of the book’s 1883 London edition, the phrase does not appear in Carolino’s text itself.

Phrase

as she is spoke

1. (humorous, sometimes derogatory) Deliberately ungrammatical alteration of as it is spoken.
   • 1896, Grant Allen, Under Sealed Orders: A Novel, page 38:

     ‘To read, not to talk—that is to say, not well. […] That’s how I speak Arabic, as she is spoke, you know—no better.’

   • 1898, The China Review: Or, Notes and Queries on the Far East‎, volume 23, page 35:

     Doubtless some examples of Chinese as she is spoke by foreigners who stick to the dictionary and neglect to make the colloquial changes are as amusing to the Chinese as those of some foreigners who try to speak English are to us, for example the German ministerial student in Chicago who quoted a text of Paul, ‘The ghost is willing, but the meat is feeble.’

   • 1967 September 11, Judith Wright, “To Barbara Blackman”, in Patricia Clarke, Meredith McKinney, editors, With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, published 2006, →ISBN, page 183:

     […] many outside poets had French as their international language rather than English, so (not understanding French as she is spoke but only written) I at least was reduced much of the time to trying to catch my own train of thought, rather than listening to other people’s.

   • 2014, Susan M. Butler, The Aitch Factor‎, →ISBN:

     The other aspect of this process that hurts the old-guard native speakers of English is the loss of culture – their culture – that has been embedded in English. Newcomers to English don’t recognise references to Shakespeare or the Bible so what kind of impoverished English do they speak? […] There are very few such references to be found in English as she is spoke by the upcoming generations.

2. (by extension) In practice.
   • 1891 August 1, The Albany Law Journal, volume 44, number 5, page 82:

     But if this be so, or if courts believe it to be so, the sooner the aid of this higher power is invoked to give law “as she is spoke” by judges on the bench some affinity with reason and “common intelligence,” the better for these courts.

   • 2006, Margaret A. Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, volume 2, →ISBN, page 1023:

     He was right: AI modelling of ‘law as she is spoke’ is a tall order.

   • 2008, Ewan Tempero, James Noble, Hayden Melton, “How Do Java Programs Use Inheritance? An Empirical Study of Inheritance in Java Software”, in Jan Vitek, editor, ECOOP 2008 – Object-Oriented Programming […], →ISBN, page 668:

     We are interested in understanding “Java as she is spoke” — that is, in the way Java programs are actually structured in the real world — rather than how we fondly imagine Java programs should be written.

Further reading

• English as She Is Spoke on Wikipedia.Wikipedia