In 2004 my uncle painted the front of his shop in Samarkand blue and asked his youngest son to write something in English on it, because the street had started to fill up with tourists and the boy had the best marks in his class.
The boy was thirteen. He worked on it for two evenings with a brush and a dictionary, and this is what has been on that wall for twenty-one years:
WE HAVE ALWAYS FRESH BREAD IN MORNING HERE.
Every word in it is a real English word. None of them is in the right place. Always has walked in between the verb and its object, where nothing is allowed to stand; in morning has lost its article and arrived before here; and the whole time-and-place end of the sentence is back to front. In proper order it is eight words: We always have fresh bread here in the morning.
Tourists have been photographing that sign since about 2006. There is a guidebook from 2013 with a photograph of it in the Samarkand chapter, and a Polish woman once came in and asked to be photographed underneath it with a loaf in each hand.
The boy is thirty-four. He teaches English in a school in the same district, and he has been teaching word order to fourteen-year-olds for nine years.
In 2019 he came with a tin of paint and a plan to fix it.
His mother stood in the doorway with her arms folded and asked him one question: how many people had come into the shop because of the sign, and how many had come in because of the grammar?
He put the tin down.
The sign is still there. He photographed it that afternoon, and it lives on the second slide of the presentation he uses in class. He puts the wrong sentence on the board, and then the right one under it, and then he tells his pupils that the man who wrote the wrong one has fed a family for twenty years with it.
"Order matters," he says. "Courage matters more. Now open your books, and do not write I like very much English in my class again."