Caution: handling Bangladeshi garments can seriously damage your vocabulary.

In all the opinion pieces about Bangladesh, why has no-one mentioned the severe damage clothes made there inflict on the English language?

In today’s Dhaka Financial Express, there’s a weird piece about a writer’s friend, one Antony Giangos, picking up Bangladeshi-made shorts in a New York JC Penney last Monday (May 27) and announcing “Bangladeshi garments have unique lustre and captivating look”.

Extraordinary, when you realise that just four years earlier, in November 2009, the same writer was shopping in an H&M store. A customer picked up some Bangladesh-made T shirts and told no-one in particular “Wow! These shirts are really nothing short of sumptuous and have unique luster and captivating look.” (I don’t understand how the speaker changed his spelling either, but…)

It must be something about Bangladesh air. Two years before that, we’re told – also in an H&M store in New York, in May 2007, “ten people had bought” cotton T-shirts “within half an hour”. This time it was a woman called Emily Roderick – who apparently attends “feature writing classes” with the same writer who revealed that “Bangladeshi garments are nothing short of sumptuous but have unique luster and captivating look”  

Are the Bangladeshis putting something into their garments to make anyone holding them come out with sycophantic gibberish? Does proximity to Bangladeshi clothes deprive writers of all creativity and sense of style? Or is it some devillish conspiracy to destroy the brains of New Yorkers?

Whatever it is, someone ought to do something about it before the plot does real damage