What IS it?

I bought one of these today. There are no prizes for guessing what it is, but there should be.

I just can't stop being an English teacher

"I installed several of them in one gulp, including AdBlock—a great though dubiously ethical way to keep lots of tabs open without slowing down your computer." (Slate)

Shouldn't that be 'ethically dubious'? 'Dubiously ethical' sounds like how devil-worshippers would feel if they were inadvertently doing something good.

Hey, wait a minute!

A few days ago I was sitting in the park enjoying some spring sunshine when a man with a clipboard approached me.

"I'm conducting a survey," he told me. "Do you have time to answer a few questions?"

"I'm very sorry," I replied. "But I don't understand Japanese."

"Oh, I see," he said. "Where are you from?"

"New Zealand," I said.

"I hear it's very beautiful," he said.

"Thank you," I said. "Yes, it is."

"Oh, well. Excuse me." He wandered off to accost someone else.

Today the phone rang, and it was some woman selling something. I responded in much the same way.

"Sorry," I said. "I don't understand Japanese."

"You're a gaijin?" she said, surprised.

"Yes," I said."

"Oh. Sorry. I can't speak English."

"That's too bad," I said.

She excused herself and hung up.

Both of these conversations were held entirely in Japanese. I have had similar conversations so many times that I have stopped expecting the penny to drop. Perhaps, when someone tells you politely that they can't understand while at the same time demonstrating that they understand perfectly adequately, it's just too much to handle. Perhaps it causes a brain freeze. I imagine a little spinning wheel in their heads, like the one on my computer when it gets hung up on something and everything stops working.

But I sometimes wonder if the little ball ever stops spinning. I wonder if any of them ever wake up in the night and say,

"Hey!"

Tall, blue...

I was marking homework the other day, and one of my students had written about his previous English teacher:

He has tall, blue eyes, and very cool.

---

Today I spent the entire day at university trying to finish off grading and so on, but I also had one final exam still to do. I finished the grades for all my other classes, but for that one class I will have to go in again, because the exam was at the end of the day and I didn't have time to mark the papers and finalize the grades before the office closed. That was annoying. I wanted today to be my last visit until April. I tried REALLY HARD to finish, but just couldn't make it.

In fact I may have tried too hard. When I came home The Man told me that I looked like a wax dummy of myself.

That was a freaky thought, but not nearly as freaky as tall blue eyes.

How to pick your nose

I took this picture in my local supermarket, next to the checkout. It is not, in fact, instructions on how to pick your nose (as my friend suggested when I sent it to him).

But can you guess what it is?

Notes

Overheard in the teachers' room:

"You smell nice, Paul. What have you got on?"

"Eh?" (Vague frown.) "I don't know. I just sat in the car with Dan."

I don't know why we all found that so funny.

---

Also overheard in the teachers' room, after a long rant about some investment gone bad:

"The good news is that financially I'm set for life if I die next Tuesday."

---

One of the teachers gave me a little present yesterday (Friday). It was in a paper bag, wrapped carefully in tissue paper. I took the bag and looked inside.

"Ooh, thank you!" I said. "Is this what I think it is? A little something to help me get through the day?"

"NO!" he said, laughing in horror. "It's for you to take home."

"But it could help ENORMOUSLY," I said. "Especially for my last class."

"Don't open it until you get home!" he said, sternly.

It was a bottle of home-made umeshu. I still think it would have gone down quite nicely before, or perhaps during, my last class.

---

In the classroom, dictation can get some interesting results. I took notes of three that made me smile. The first two I can understand, but I took these notes so long ago that now I can't remember what that third one was supposed to be.

Who nose?

He is wearing boring grobe.

He has just panching.

---

Two weeks ago on Friday my first class started to turn into a horror movie. I gave the students a little test first – something I frequently do at beginning of class to encourage punctuality (and alertness). Right after the test, one of the best students, who was looking very pale, excused himself to go to the toilet.

Twenty minutes later he had still not come back, and I was starting to worry. I knew he had planned to come back, as his bag was on his chair and in any case if he had to leave he is the sort of person who would have informed me.

When half an hour had passed and the pale student had still not come back, I asked his friend to go and check that he was all right. His friend tried to phone him first, but although he got a ringing tone there was no answer. This worried me even more. Usually when students disappear to the 'toilet' for long periods it's because they want to chat with someone on their phone. (I have a student in my last class on Fridays I have nicknamed (but not to her face) Toilet Girl because she used to 'go to the toilet' for thirty minutes every week, during class. She stopped doing this when she realized that I was noticing and adjusting her class points accordingly, but the nickname has stuck.)

The pale student's friend went down the corridor to see what was going on.

Ten minutes later he hadn't come back, either.

I wondered what to do. I poked my head out the door and peered down the corridor. It was empty. I turned back to the class, which had fallen silent. The students were looking as spooked as I was feeling.

We all stared at each other, frowning worriedly.

"Well," I said, finally. "That's two gone. Who wants to be number three?"

Nobody volunteered. We resumed the class, somewhat subdued.

A couple of minutes later the pale student's friend came back.

"Is he all right?" I asked, anxiously.

"Yes," said the student. "Er, no. He drank too much last night."

That was a relief. I picked up the pale student's name card, and on the back, where I usually write their absences and test grades and things like that, I wrote the date and the word, "Hungover."

He is a good student, and I am impressed that he managed to turn up for a nine o'clock class if he was feeling that bad. He scored well on the test, too, but I guess that was all he could manage before his stomach rebelled. He is a quick learner, and I expect he learned something quite valuable.

---

Student trying to figure out the past form of the verb 'check'.

"Chook?" he asks his friend, who looks doubtful.

---

There was a question in the text about sleeping habits. Out of sixteen students, only three got more than five hours sleep a night. When I asked them why, it turned out they were mostly watching TV or talking on the phone with friends. One or two were working at their part-time jobs.

I suspect them of napping frequently during the day. In fact I know they nap frequently. They are napping when I walk into the classroom and inconsiderately wake them up.

We have talked about this in the teachers' room. None of us can remember ever falling asleep during class at university, or even wanting to, no matter how sleep-deprived we were, and none of us could remember wanting to nap during the day, anyway. Even as ratbag students we felt that the whole purpose of being in class was to learn something, and it never occurred to us to go to a class and then sleep through it.

But here it is normal behaviour, especially during lectures. (Less so in our classes because we annoying English language teachers always insist on our students doing stuff.)

---

The hungover student returned yesterday, looking much better. When I handed out the name cards he took his and went back to his seat near the back. He looked on the back of the card and saw what I'd written.

"Hungover?" I heard him say. "What does that mean?"

His friend looked at the card, and shrugged. "Look it up," he suggested.

I continued calling names and handing out cards, feeling happy. That class is lovely. There is one teeth-grindingly horrible student but he comes so infrequently it doesn't matter.

It took the two guys a little research to find out what 'hungover' meant ('hungover' is not in the dictionary, but eventually they hit on 'hangover'). I had forgotten all about it when I heard the hoots and shouts of laughter from the back of the room.

I always start that class with conversations, and heard the word 'hangover' being used a LOT yesterday. There was a lot of teasing.

New vocabulary is always remembered better in context.

Most baffling toilet sign EVER

Economic stimulus

Today I met some friends for breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton. It was expensive, but lovely. One of my friends in NZ emailed, when I told him where I was going,

"Don't you know there's a recession on?"

I did not dignify him with an answer. Yes, I know there is a recession on. Does he think I can't read the newspapers? My friends and I are trying to kick-start the economy. I don't know how Japan would manage without us.

Later in the morning, feeling rather full after our strenuous efforts at economic stimulus, the group broke up and three of us went to the Hilton Plaza, where there is a branch of the Junkudo bookstore. This branch has been holding an English book sale for a couple of months now. We had all been to it before and were fairly sure they wouldn't have any new books in the sale, but felt compelled to check. We thought the books they had were all from their main Osaka branch – old and remaindered books they were getting rid of – or books they'd somehow acquired from bookstores that had gone out of business. There was a bit of a shakeup in the English book world in Japan last year, when Yohan went bankrupt. We didn't really think there would be anything new.

We were wrong. They had some new books in, and we all spent some money. More stimulus for the Japanese economy! (Not much, though, as the books were all 70% off.)

It was warm in there, and we were wearing coats, so after that we decided to have a rest and a drink in the coffee shop down in the lobby. It is an expensive coffee shop, but we hadn't finished stimulating the Japanese economy yet.

As it turned out, we were about to receive a little stimulus ourselves. When we approached the coffee shop the waitress came to meet us, and addressed me in impeccable English. She said, politely,

"Good afternoon. May I smoke?"

To which I hesitated, then replied, "Um, er ... yes?" because what DO you say when a waitress asks you if she can smoke?

I don't think she noticed that she had her question ever so slightly wrong, and I probably should have corrected her, but I was too taken aback by her unexpected question. Besides, I rather enjoy the idea of visitors to Japan having an equally confusing time. Depriving them of the opportunity to have a moment like that one would be cruel.

With the economic climate the way it is, we all need a little stimulating.

Google sometimes lies

The other day my friend, Mrs Malaprop, told me that she had been reading a really interesting article about the problem of tintinitis. She told me some more about the article, which was interesting, and then she used the word again.

"Tintinitis," she said.

I stopped her.

"Don't you mean tinnitis?" I asked.

"What did I say?" she asked.

"You said tintinitis," I said.

"Did I?" she laughed. "Maybe that's the problem where your hair goes into a little curl..."

A couple of days later I met another two friends, and I told them about this.

"Mrs Malaprop told me she'd been reading an article about tintinitis," I said.

They stared at me, waiting for the rest of the story.

"Um ... TINTINITIS," I said.

"Yes?" they said.

"It's TINNITUS," I said. "Tintin is that little guy with the hair."

"But isn't it either?" said one of my friends. "I'm sure I've heard tintinitis, too."

"No," I said, suddenly feeling a little uncertain. "It's tinnitus."

When I got home I looked it up, just to make sure. In all the dictionaries I checked, there was no tintinitus, tinntinitus or tintinitis, but there was tinnitus. Whew!

When I Googled it, however, I discovered that half the world seems to be calling it tintinitus - until I went to the last page of results, where I discovered that it was actually only a few hundred people.

Yes, that's right. Google LIES! Try it and you'll see. A search on tintinitus tells you there are 5,190,000 results (and suggests the correct spelling of tinnitus), but if you click through to the last page of the search (page 34), suddenly you are told that this is the last of 331 results.

So ... what were the other 5,189,669 results, then?

How strange.

Knights of passion

I was marking tests today. A lot of the test was dictation, and I was not too fussy about spelling as long as it was close, as the point of the dictations I did during semester was to develop listening skills rather than writing. One misspelling pulled me up short, though, mostly because of the image that popped into my head. It was a dialogue that came from the unit in the textbook about booking a hotel, and my student had written this:

I'd like a room for two knights.



(I wanted to illustrate this blog post, but I'll need a lot more practice before I can draw a knight.)

Pardon?

This sentence (from a book review in the New York Times) puzzled me enormously at first.

To see how arousal alters sexual attitudes, for example, Ariely and his colleagues asked young men to answer a questionnaire — then asked them to answer it again, only this time while indulging in Internet pornography on a laptop wrapped in Saran Wrap.

I stopped reading to think about this. Just how tightly were these young men wrapped? How could they breathe? Wouldn't the Saran Wrap defeat the purpose of the experiment? Or was this some sort of exciting sexual thing that everybody knew about except me? How bizarre.

The mental picture I got was also rather disturbing. I imagined a room full of young men dressed in nothing but Saran Wrap, with laptop computers (on their laps?) and scientists with white coats and clipboards standing behind them.

Then I decided I must have missed something important, and went back to the beginning and read it again.

Is it just me, or does that sentence need some rewriting?

(It seems like an interesting book, though.)

Codeine

Yesterday was my last working Friday of the year, and I was testing students all day again. Speaking tests are always a little difficult, for reasons I have gone into before. These reasons were multiplied this time because I have a cold and was taking cold medicine, which made me sleepy.

While I was doing these tests in another room, I had to have the students who were not being tested doing something else back in the classroom as they waited their turn. Because of this cold (at least that's my excuse) I was not thinking clearly and for some reason got the idea that I had already prepared something last week.

Ten minutes before class, I discovered that what I had prepared last week was a large, red message to myself in my notebook which said,

Prepare something for next week!!!!!!!

Why did I not open my notebook earlier? And why didn't I care more, when I finally did? How much codeine is in that cold medicine the doctor gave me?

Anyway, I did not panic. Instead, I asked around the teachers' room and someone came up with a Christmas puzzle, which I was able to copy. I used that.

At the end of the puzzle was a sentence the students had to finish. This was the only 'creative' part of the handout, and I found the answers immensely amusing, all day. I thought you might enjoy some of them, too. (If you don't, take some codeine and try again.)

The sentence they had to finish was this:

This Christmas I want . . .

Here are some of the things my second year students wrote. Some of them were evidently feeling tired:

This Christmas I want to rest.
This Christmas I want to sleep well.

Some were tired AND hungry:

This Christmas I want to sleep all day and to eat cakes.

And one was only hungry. Very, very hungry.

This Christmas I want to eat many chickens.

Others had different things on their minds:

This Christmas I want girlfriends.
This Christmas I want to kiss a girl.
This Christmas I want a girlfriend. And I want to play with her.
This Christmas I want to get money. And I want to play with boy.

(These were all written by guys. I had to remind myself that 'play' in Japanese (asobu) is used QUITE differently from the way it is used in English. Direct translations can be disastrous.)

A few students were touchingly optimistic.

This Christmas I want to meet Santa.
This Christmas I want world peace.

And one student had a very specific want:

This Christmas I want a collapsible bicycle.

There was one lout. Why is there always a lout? And why does he have to be the one who is the most likely to get what he wants for Christmas?

This Christmas I want to drink too much.

The speaking tests went well, or at least I think they went well. I do not remember much about them. That does not matter, as I was grading them as they happened. (Probably far too high.) I didn't really expect speaking tests to go well with cold medicine, but they did.

In fact, that was so much less stressful than usual I might try it again next semester.

Fair dinkum

Today as I was just about to leave work, one of the Japanese English teachers stopped me to ask a question I found myself completely unable to answer. I hate it when they do that. Sometimes I wonder if they're doing it on purpose.

Today's awkward question was this:

"What is a dinkum, and why is it fair?"

To which my answer was, intelligently,

"Er. Um."

I felt less stupid after coming home and looking it up. Apparently I am not the only one without a clue.

In other news, the weather has become cooler, and the leaves have started to turn.

Yawn

Yesterday I said to The Man,

"Stop yawning me!"

And then I corrected myself.

"I mean, stop making me yawn!"

But actually, it seems to me that yawn SHOULD be a transitive verb. After all, yawns are transitive, aren't they?

Yonder!

We are leaving Penang tomorrow, after a week of rain. It is AMAZINGLY wet, and especially today. Today the rain alternated between heavy, very heavy, and torrential. Penang is usually hot. We were unprepared for feeling slightly chilly most of the time. How strange.

Today we went to Little India again, for breakfast (while the rain was merely just getting started), and although I kept an eye out, I did not spot Grandma again. We took several books with us to sell at one of the second-hand bookstores on our way back, but accidentally popped into a different (new) bookstore as well, and ended up buying more than we sold.

One of the books I bought is called "Learn Tamil in 30 days." I am fascinated by the written language, which looks totally impossible and also somehow manages to look like how it sounds. Buying this book does not mean that I will actually study Tamil, you understand. It just means that if I suddenly get an irresistible urge to do so, I will already have a book. One should always be prepared for these things.

The book was written in 1967. Unfortunately the pronunciation guide is almost useless (why don't these books ever use the phonetic alphabet?) offering such hints as. . . well, I don't have the book with me right now, but an example would be something like an explanation telling you that one 'a' sound sounds like the 'a' in 'father' and another like the 'a' in 'about.' To make things even more confusing, there are (if I remember correctly) 12 vowels and 18 consonants, but 247 letters.

I decided I will need a better pronunciation guide if I ever want to learn the sounds of Tamil, but never mind. The phrases and words in the book might be useful one day. You never know when I might need to say, for example,

"Yonder! I see an elephant standing!"

In fact, inspired by this book, I am thinking of incorporating the word 'yonder' into my daily vocabulary. So even if I do not learn any Tamil, at least my English will have been enhanced.

And now it is time to wade back to our hotel.

Words

The other day I met two friends, both American, and learned something new. Two things, in fact.

The first thing was when I was telling them about a recent meeting I had with Mrs Malaprop, another friend, who occasionally comes out with the most fabulously mixed metaphors. I liked her latest one and was telling my American friends about it.

"She said she had to pay through the teeth for something," I said, and laughed and laughed.

My friends didn't. They stared at me.

"What's wrong with that?" one asked.

"Well, you pay through the NOSE," I said, "and you LIE through your teeth."

"'Pay through the teeth' is used, too," she said.

"Maybe it's not RIGHT, but it's become common usage," added the other. "It doesn't sound strange to me."

REALLY?

I came home and did a search on Google. Pay through the teeth got 1830 hits. Pay through the nose got 221,000.

I think that just proves is that 1830 people got it wrong, and there are more Mrs Malaprops out there than I imagined.

The other thing I learned was when I was telling a story about something. I can't even remember the story now, except that it was not a funny story, so I was surprised when I got to the bit where I said that someone had lost her rag and my two American friends choked on their wine.

I could not understand why they were laughing. "What? What?" I said. "What did I say?"

After they calmed down they told me they had understood from context what I meant by lost her rag, but had never heard it before and wanted to know where it came from.

I didn't know. To me it was just one of those idioms that you use but never think about. It had never occurred to me to wonder about its origin, or to think that it might be funny. Also, I'd thought it was a fairly common expression.

I looked that up when I got home, too.

It turns out that 'rag' is old slang for 'tongue,' at least according to the entry here. (Check under 'chew the rag.') I guess it must not be used in America.

It was a fun evening, even if it was a little disconcertingly educational.

Oops

Good grief!

What's so good about grief, anyway?

Fire!

On Sunday morning, before The Man had woken up, there was a phone call from his mother. As usual, she was talking rapidly before I had even got the phone to my ear and figured out who it was. I caught something about her going to the supermarket, her house, and a fire. After a while she stopped and announced herself, and wanted to know who I was.

I told her.

"How are you?" she asked. "Are you well?"

"I'm fine," I replied, somewhat confused.

"Is The Man there?" she asked.

"Yes," I squeaked. My head was still spinning. "What did you say about a fire?"

I had a vision of her house burning while she asked after my health.

"It's gone! I can't get into the house!" she said.

I thought about this, and the vision in my head shifted slightly. Now the house was on fire and front door was buckled so she couldn't open it. But what was 'gone'? And why was she trying to get into a burning house? Nothing made sense.

"I'll get The Man," I said. I was pretty sure this was an emergency.

I started to run upstairs. Halfway up something in my head clicked, and I slowed down.

"Oh! I get it!" I said. "You lost your key!"

"Yes!" she said.

I am always mixing up kagi (key) and kaji (fire). If I think about it I am not confused, but when Okaasan is involved it is hard to think clearly.

I woke up The Man.

"It's your mum," I said. "She lost her key and can't get into the house."

"Eh?" he said, groggily, and took the phone. "Moshi moshi," he said, and after a pause, "MOSHI MOSHI!"

But Okaasan had gone.

Eventually she phoned back (she is a little confused by public phones) and we ended up having to visit her, taking The Man's key and getting another two cut along the way. Now she has an everyday key and a hidden spare. It was a relief to see the house. A part of me was still anxious about the non-existent fire.

Okaasan was so pleased to see us that she gave me her first ever spontaneous hug. Usually I hug her, not the other way around. I have been training her to hug for years. The first time I hugged her it was like hugging a small, rigid mannequin. Yesterday she collapsed into my arms, all soft and relieved, and it was lovely.

But as we left I found myself wishing that the hair salon Okaasan patronizes would burn down. I knew her hair was a weird purple colour but I hadn't seen it in daylight before, and it gave me a bit of a fright.

Acronyms

I've come across this three times recently, so it's obviously not a rare mistake. But how many of you are going to admit that you think (thought) that LOL meant "love you lots"?

And if LOL was 'love you lots,' then what would ROFLOL mean?

Added later:

Hebron wants to know how the Y became an O. The answer is, it didn't. What I meant to type was 'lots of love.'