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. 🙂
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.