By Elaine Viets
When I taught English as a second language, one of my favorite students was a young man I’ll call Sam. Sam was 18, from South Korea. Smart and hard-working, Sam was brushing up on his English that summer before he went to college in the US. Sam had applied to several universities, many of them distinctly second-rate.
“Why didn’t you apply to any Ivy League schools?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said. “I couldn’t get in. I spent my senior year in high school screwing.”
“What??” Sam didn’t talk like that. “What do you mean?”
“I didn’t work hard and I got bad grades.”
“That means you spent your senior year screwing AROUND,” I said, and gave him a quick course in American idioms.
I hope my students learned from me, but I definitely learned from them. English is a complex, expressive and extremely difficult language, fraught with pitfalls. Consider the South American banker who told me, “My wife and I fled our country naked.”
“Naked?” I asked. “You weren’t wearing clothes?”
“Of course we were,” he said. “But we couldn’t take anything with us.”
Turned out he was using an idiom from his country. “Right. In the US, we’d say, ‘You left with nothing but the clothes on your backs.’”
In the words of Bill Bryson, “Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.” (If you haven’t read Bryson’s Mother Tongue, you’re missing a linguistic treat.)
Teaching articles, those pesky three words, “a,” “an” and “the,” is another misery. Try explaining that these two sentences mean basically the same thing:
There is little traffic at 4 a.m.
There is a little traffic at 4 a.m.
And don’t forget regionalisms (why is a carbonated drink “pop” in parts of the country and “soda” in others?), and accents.
A Japanese businessman said he was worried about going to South Carolina. He told me, “I can’t understand what the people there are saying.”
“That’s OK,” I told him. “None of us can.”
But before you get too smug, native speakers, tell me which of these ten words is misspelled:
mahagony
embarassed
sherriff
fourty-four
supercede
graffitti
rhythum
syrep
abdomenal
concensus
Answer: They all are.
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I’ve heard the English language is the hardest language to learn, especially when you consider how many words that sound the same are spelled differently. I’ll be checking out Bryson’s Mother Tongue…and I got all the missed spellings. 🙂
Good work on the misspellings, Patricia.
I volunteered for the Adult Literacy League in Orlando years ago. One of my students was from Korea, and boy, did we have fun dealing with idioms. Some of them were due to her pronunciation … someone was “in a rut” and she asked if that meant he had a ‘rotten’ life, because she pronounced rut as rot.
Most of our idioms make no sense at all, Terry.
There are even differences WITHIN states. On the eastern shore of Maryland, people say “idea”. When you talk to people on the western shore, they say “ideer”.
Part of the variety of life. 😎
in the western part of my home state, BK, it’s pronounced, Missour-ah. In the eastern part, it’s Missour-ee.
My mother was from Missour-ah, and pronounced it that way. Thanks, Elaines for this wonderful little lesson!
Our house’s great unlearning. In St. Louis, Hoosier is not complimentary. Redneck would be a good substitute. Dumb redneck at that. It is not nice.
The oldest child went to college in Lexington, KY. This meant several trips through Indiana every year. In Indiana, a Hoosier is a resident of Indiana. They say it with pride. The U of Indiana teams are the Hoosiers.
Now if I think you are back woods, I will say redneck.
Yep. Another St. Louisan here. The first time I heard someone from Indiana say, “I’m a Hoosier” and sound proud of that, I was floored.
Where I live.
Depending on where you are in Missouri, to pronunciation of Missouri changes. In St. Louis and for about 30 miles out from the Arch, it is Missouriee. Kansas City metro also calls it Missouriee. In rest of Missouri, it is pronounced Missourah. Good politicians can switch on the fly. Governor Kehoe pronounces it Ohio.
When I was a reporter in St. Louis, we used to enjoy listening to campaigning politicians shamelessly switch their pronunciations.
Fun post, Elaine. I’ve always called “soda” “tonic.” ‘Course, we eat subs, not heroes or any of the other terms.
Thanks, Sue. Consider me a sub eater.
Does that mean you eat under the table?
🙂 🙂
If it’s my cooking, I’m a substandard eater.
What fun, Elaine. I love the English language—so much opportunity for mangling the meaning of something. 🙂
When we lived in Wisconsin, we had to decode some of the language. What I call a “water fountain” (that fixture in schools and office buildings that spouts water you can drink), Wisconsonians called a “bubbler.” They considered a water fountain to be that pretty spray of water in the middle of a park.
“bubbler” is a new one, Kay. Do you say “frying pan” or “skillet”?
I once taught English to French-educated Vietnamese nuns in Saigon. They had trouble with the TH sound, so I drew a cow with an udder on the blackboard. They were unfamiliar with cows and thought I was trying to indicate a woman, causing many titters and blushes.
I’m from Washington.
I will never understand why some folks insist on saying “Warshington”…
Some Missourians say waRsh, Deb. And what about nuCU-lar?
My father was born in Spokane, Warshington and he always pronounced the “R”. Warsh the car, hogwarsh.
What about Kansas and Arkansas???
Please tell me what’s wrong with “supercede”?? It’s in the dictionary as a spelling variant 🤷🏻♀️..
Great article! My daughter-in-law is Japanese and has learned English very quickly over the last five years, but there are still slang words and phrases that are difficult for her. Learning Northeastern US English has bee tough enough, we haven’t even ventured into regional variations!
Hats off to your daughter-in-law.