well, rats

I can't say much right now because it's 1:26 p.m. KST and I have work in thirty minutes. But I've been having a hard time lately. Somebody's karma ran over my dogma or something.

Long story short (pun intended), I'm five thousand words behind on my NaNoWriMo project. I have three tests left to grade and input. Miss H has gone home for two weeks to get some stuff done. The cat's acting crazy and I'm getting over a head cold. But hey, at least the weather's nice. It's cool and moist. There was a luscious thick fog at 5:00 this morning and it was so dense I couldn't even see the neon sign on the church a hundred yards away. (Yes, the churches here light up their crosses with red or blue neon lights, and usually have illuminated names, too.)

Excuse me, I'm going to go grade the hell out of those tests and then eat me some stir-fried squid over rice (ojingeo deopbap, for your edification). TGIF, people. TGIF.

From the correct side of the International Dateline, this is Postie. Over and out.

grammar time

Writing, they say, is more interesting when you shake up your sentence structure. You know, vary sentence length, and begin each sentence with a different type of word, if possible. You may not have noticed, but I've been attempting to do that for the past week. I've tried to commence every post with a different type of word. This post begins with the word "writing": a gerund, yes, but technically a noun. However, yesterday's last post (cocktail review no. 28) began with an article, "a." Before that, random travel destinations kicked off with a conjunction, and School of Hooch (the second round) commenced with a pronoun. Looks like I've avoided falling into a rut so far... Let's keep going back. The last installment of recommended reading starts with a verb, "hadn't." Cocktail review no. 27 starts out with a noun (a great favorite of mine, "humdinger"). Prior to that, in the Pima Air Museum begins with a noun, "I." The post before those (I sez "Chiricahua") starts with a verb, "can." S.A.S.S. and the city begins with a proper noun, "Dad." And the post before that one (across the river and into the cactus) begins with a contraction, "I'm"! Let's take a look at the post before that, champagne and cinnamon rolls. It begins with the word "like." Very versatile word, "like"; a word which can be used for all sorts of stuff. In this case, though, it's used as a preposition in a comparison (I think). Cocktail review no. 26 begins with an adverb! Huzzah! I was hoping one of those would make it in. It's pronounced "twenty-ten" begins with the word "so," which is another versatile word. Seeing as how it connects the title with the first sentence, however, thereby forming a compound sentence, the word "so" functions as a conjunction. Well, that's a bit of variety for you! So let's recap here: 1/5: conjunction 1/6: adverb 1/7 : preposition 1/8 : contraction 1/9 : proper noun 1/10: verb 1/11: noun 1/12: noun 1/13: verb 1/14 (1): pronoun 1/14 (2): conjunction 1/14 (3): article 1/17: gerund (okay, okay, noun; I just like the word "gerund") Except for that little slew of nouns and pronouns there, I'd say I'm doing pretty well. The reason I began keeping track of this, in fact, was because it seemed like most of my posts began with some form of the word "I." I didn't like that. I don't like it when every sentence starts out with the word "I." I think it makes it seem like it's all about me, doesn't it? I can't condone that. I think you might feel the same way. I feel that it might be pretty boring and tedious just sifting through a bunch of posts that start with the word "I," don't you? I wouldn't want to do that. I'd hate it. I'd hate every minute of it. I probably wouldn't ever come back to that blog again, ever. I wouldn't think the person in charge of writing that blog was a very good writer if he began every sentence with the word "I." I would tend to think he's a raging egomaniac. I would say he would've been better off being a modern artist or something fluffy like that. I'd tell him to go get his jollies out elsewhere and not bother the rest of us with his self-centered prattling. I would. I think you should be careful to avoid stumbling into that pitfall. I'd do that if I were you. Or would I?

it's pronounced "twenty-ten"

...so get it right already. Nobody ever says "one-thousand eight-hundred sixty-five" (1865) or "nineteen hundred and seventy-one" (1971). Not seriously, they don't. They say "eighteen sixty-five" and "nineteen seventy-one." So we're going to say "twenty-ten," not "two-thousand and ten." Otherwise we'll be stuck saying "two-thousand and whatever" for the next 90 years. And who wants that?

Anyway, on a related note, Happy 2010 to you all. I just got back from a four-day trip into the unexplored tracts of southeastern Arizona to visit my great aunt and uncle. Some crazy stuff happened on that trip. In the past few days I have...

• climbed a mountain
• dressed up like a cowboy and shot a bunch of Old West guns
• driven a Hummer
• explored Apache country
• lived in a trailer
• fondled a few of my favorite airplanes
• walked down the mean streets of Tombstone
• eaten root beer fudge
• traveled 1,800 miles

All of this I shall most likely blog about. For the moment, however, I'm rather exhausted, distracted by my neighbor's dumb dogs barking...and still mustering my thoughts. So I'll get to it later. I need my vegetation fix. That having been said, good night to you all, hope you had a splendid New Year's, and here's to 2010 bringing you what you want. Buenos noches...

a zucchini by any other name

My English friend Adam and I used to have the most outrageous arguments over terminology—you know, typical Anglo-American clashes over the names of animals, foods and sports. The debates began shortly after we met.

Of course we had to get the big one out of the way first: "football" vs. "soccer." When I or any other American hears football, it's safe to assume that we think of first downs, and end zones, and touchdowns, and passes, and field goals, and running backs and quarterbacks and tight ends and wide receivers. When we hear soccer, we think of dribbling, and passing, and goal kicks, and the offside rule, and handballs, and throw-ins, and midfielders and defenders and goalies and forwards (or strikers or whatever).

Americans sometimes fail to realize that the United States is the only country in the world (except for maybe Armenia) that refers to "soccer" as "soccer." Almost everybody else in the English-speaking world—and the Spanish-speaking world, for that matter—refers to "soccer" as "football." What we know as "football," they know as "gridiron."

I fought Adam valiantly on this point, but was eventually forced to concede. "Football" is the correct term for "soccer." England did invent soccer—heh heh, I mean football—after all. The word soccer is actually abbreviated slang for "association football," which is what soccer—I mean football—was originally named. I lost that first pivotal battle. But there are some English-isms that I refuse to give ground on, which Adam and I have debated and still debate hotly.

By "debate hotly," I essentially mean that we get drunk and rag on each other. Any opportunity we can take to sneakily "correct" one another's diction—even though we both know that there's nothing wrong with the terms we're using, and it's what we were respectively raised with—we seize, with much immature giggling.

Take zucchini, for example.

Did you know that English folk—and, apparently, South Africans and New Zealanders—have a different word for zucchini than we North Americans do? Well, they do. They call it "courgette." From the French, you know. Odd, isn't it? It's hard to step back, think objectively, and realize that there is another name for zucchini than "zucchini." I lived the first 22 years of my life without hearing any other word for zucchini than "zucchini." It never occurred to me that other people in the world would have another name for zucchini than "zucchini." I like the word "zucchini." It seemed to pair very well with the thing itself—a tasteless, crunchy, cigar-shaped vegetable used for bludgeoning younger siblings. And now, suddenly, here was hard evidence that there was, indeed, another word for zucchini than "zucchini." And it wasn't a zucchini-ish word at all. I had to rearrange my worldview to encompass this new idea of contested zucchini primacy.

Of course, I didn't learn this right away. It took a while for me to find out. And in the meantime, things were mighty peculiar. You may well imagine the confusion that occurred when the three of us (Adam, his fiancée Elaine, and I) would meet up at the corner grocery store in Korea.

"Alreet mate?"

"Hey guys! What's up?"

"Oh, not much. Just stopping by to get some courgette."

"Ah! Okay. I'm just here to get some zucchini myself. See you 'round!"

And then we'd bump into each other again in the same corner of the produce section and wonder what we were doing there. It took us about a month or so to realize that we were all talking about the same vegetable. Even then, the revelation strained credulity.

"What do you call it?" they asked me, incredulously. They asked me that question.

"Zucchini, of course! What the heck do you guys call it?" I replied, in similar tones.

"Courgette...?" Elaine said, with a bemused smile on her face.

"What?!"

I found out later (under similar circumstances) that English people have a different name for eggplant, too. They call it aubergine (OH-buh-zheen). Oh, for crying out loud.

And then there was the extreme confusion surrounding tic-tac-toe and "naughts and crosses," as Adam and Elaine called it. Turns out there is none. It's the same game. "Naught" (pronounced almost like "note" in Adam and Elaine's North-of-England accent) is another word for nothing, nada, zilch, zero. Crosses are just X's turned sideways. Hence, naughts and crosses: X's and O's (well, okay, technically O's and X's). I have to admit, naughts and crosses is a better name for the game than tic-tac-toe. Better by far.

But all the game-related conversations that we had up until the point of revelation were mystifying in the extreme. I couldn't figure out what the heck they were talking about. The feeling, I'm sure, was mutual. Jeff, a mutual Canadian friend of ours, often sides with me in these battles. Canada's heart may lie with England, but it can't escape its North American bailiwick. Jeff also refuses to think of zucchini in any other terms than "zucchini." He's also stymied by the oddity of "aubergine." He actually knows the rules for baseball and basketball, thank God.

But sometimes Jeff turns on me. He took Adam and Elaine's side in the "zee" versus "zed" debacle, leaving me outvoted by a three-quarters majority. I'm sorry; I refuse to budge on that one, either.

It's worth adding here that Jeff and I get into the most stupendous debates about the superiority of the metric system to the standard (American) system, too. It's fortunate that Adam and Elaine are Geordies (the slang term for folks from the Tyne River region of Northeastern England, on the coast of the North Sea in Northumbria—the ones who stayed loyal to King George even when Scotland was rebelling and invading). Geordies are commonsense, salt-of-the-earth people. They don't cotton to the high-flown verbal fancies of Southerners. Be it otherwise, Adam and I would probably be arguing about whether trucks are actually lorries, the difference between raincoats and Macintoshes, or, heaven forbid, the similarities between baseball and rounders.

I'm not outnumbered, but I'm outgunned. England's been around a lot longer than the States, and lent the States its language, which renders most of my etymological arguments null and void. I have to push the practicality of the American word in question, which can be a subjectively slippery business. Jeff and I are united in the belief that "zucchini" is a better word than "courgette" because, mainly, it's easier to say. (Same thing with eggplant...I mean, aubergine? Really?)

All facetiousness aside, I truly enjoy Geordie lingo. There are some words and phrases that are not only refreshingly direct, but downright charming, particularly given the cultural attitude they reveal. It also behooves me to mention that hearing these phrases delivered in a Geordie accent, reputed to be the coolest English accent of all time, is a real kick. Peruse these Geordie favorites, if you will:

• me head's battered - what you say when you're confused or unsure about something.
• proper lush - really good
• Bobby Dazzler - really, really good...awesome, in fact
• a good craic - a splendid party, get-together, festival, etc.; sounds like "a good crack"
• Alreet mate? - hello
• Alreet bonny lad? - hello (first meeting)

I have placed Newcastle-upon-Tyne (and its environs, including Elaine's home village) highest upon my list of places to see in England. I love Adam and Elaine to death (they're very nice and lovely people, full of fun and friendliness). The thought that there may be a whole town of people like that somewhere is intoxicating. (Plus, I'd just like to see the place. I've never been there; that's good enough for me.) I only hope Adam can teach my bumbling brain enough Geordie beforehand so I can impress the locals when I get there. But just what the heck is a "stoat," anyway?

the Pretentious Vaunter

Over the course of the last few years, I've gradually come to suspect something unpleasant about myself that I can't wholly dismiss. I'm a great deal less intelligent than I like to think. Want an example? I recently got into a grammar-quiz competition with a college friend. The rules are simple. She sends me, either by e-mail or text message, a word picked at random from a dictionary. If I know the word, I send back the definition. If I don't, I take my best guess. The original purpose of the game, as stated by my friend, is twofold: she gets to be dazzled by my reputedly impressive vocabulary, and she also learns the meaning of a few words herself. The score currently stands at 1-3. I knew the meaning of one word ("descry") while the definitions of the remaining three words ("foofaraw," "titivate," and "convivial") abjectly defeated me. As such, this pastime has served a second purpose, likewise twofold: it has simultaneously shown me that I (a) don't have nearly as many words in my vocabulary as I have loudly and proudly proclaimed in the past; and (b) that, while I understand the connotation of many uncommon English words, I am increasingly unable to articulate their literal denotation. There once was a time, back during my homeschooling days, when I could rattle off word definitions like I'd swallowed Merriam and Webster. Now, either because my reading and writing habits have gone into a decline in recent years, or because I have allowed myself to become mentally lazy, or because I drink too much—those days are gone. I forget words I used to know (and cherish) and find it difficult to properly and eloquently verbalize the meanings of others. In short, I'm a pretender. A fake. A phony. A fraud. A charlatan. I claim to be a wordsmith, a grammarian knowledgeable of bizarre and unusual diction, and yet I'm not. Heck, I only vaguely know the meaning of most of the words I routinely use in conversation or print; I certainly don't understand many of their roots, proper usage, or (as previously mentioned) even their literal definition. I have forgotten most of what I learned in ground school in the spring of 2008, and with my flight physical (and therefore, my first flying lesson in over 16 months) drawing nearer, I am frantically paging back through all of my pilot's textbooks to try and rebuild the dike. Most of what I read I remember, but had wholly forgotten in the meantime. Another, more painful example is my recent dismissal from the newspaper I worked at. I simply wasn't intelligent enough to get my mind in gear, learn lessons the first time, quit making stupid and obvious blunders, and write the way I was supposed to write. This is neither the first example of such bumbling idiocy which I have exhibited, nor will it be the last. This worries me deeply. If my vaunted literary prowess—hell, my mental prowess in general—is crumbling now, what kind of state will it be in when I'm forty? Fifty? Eighty? I don't want to wind up one of those cranky, senile old buggers who harangues everything in sight, can't remember the names of his grandchildren and is a burden to his friends and family. I'd sooner be shot dead, or ground up into fish food. Even more terrifying is the prospect of Alzheimer's disease, the only form of dementia I truly fear, which will rob me of my precious memories and my formerly reputable vocabulary. That is, I'm sad to admit, the main reason I'm going to such trouble to write in this blog and keep up a daily journal, so when the Alzheimer's hits, I can thumb or click back through the pages and remember all the cool stuff I've seen and done. Call it a fatuous superstition. I may not even remember that I kept a journal when I have Alzheimer's, for all I know. But just in case... The suspicion that I am gradually turning stupid—or have always been stupid—has been gnawing at me for some time, and is beginning to prey upon my mind and heart. To someone who values intelligence higher than almost anything else in this world or the rest, this new mental trend is anathema—agonizing torment. I've built my reputation and my life on learning, on knowing things nobody else does, on having a tremendous vocabulary, on retaining vital information that will serve me later. And now, it seems, a plug has been pulled somewhere in my brain, and all that which I have mentally striven for is leaking slowly away...or worse, might never have been there in the first place. I am ashamed at my lack of cerebral rectitude, and deathly afraid that my friends and family might find out just what a jumped-up, pretentious nobody I really am—as has already begun to happen with this grammar-quiz game between my friend and me. I almost wrote "between me and my friend." I'm doing it again.

there's no such thing as "dinosauce"

eofdreams.com

Now, I'll be the first to admit that English is a tricky language. Many native speakers can't even do it properly: just look at every single hip-hop "artist" in America, for example. I myself, who modestly claim to be able to write well and be in possession of a prodigious vocabulary, don't know all there is to know about the mother tongue. Why, just the other day Joseph Conrad and H.L. Mencken taught me the words "crepuscular," "adamantine," "rectitude," and "bagnio."

But still, there are some things my students just can't get straight, no matter how much I rant, rave, plead, entreat, yell, scream, harangue, declaim, pontificate or prognosticate.

There is no true r sound in Korean. It comes close a couple times, but in truth it's somewhere in between l and r. Therefore, whenever my students (mostly my young students; the older ones have hurdled this obstacle) say the word "are" they sound like they're saying "all." You would not believe how difficult it is to for them to tell the difference between the indubitably subtle respective pronunciations of the words "flame" and "frame." Half of them still spelled it wrong during a dictation test even though I'd beaten it into their little heads for nigh on three weeks.

I've got one student, Jack, in one of my mid-level classes who keeps pronouncing "dinosaurs" like "dinosauce." He thereby dissolves the entire class, myself included, into helpless gales of laughter. You know how infectious laughter is. It happens nearly every time. He'll say it wrong, we'll all crack up, I'll gently (or not so gently) correct him, he'll resume reading, and then within the next sentence he'll encounter the blasted word again, mispronounce it for the umpteenth time and crack us all up again harder than ever.

So you may imagine my dismay at trying to teach the kids the f, z and v sounds, for which there is no semblance of a counterpart in the Korean tongue. They can't even pronounce the names of the letters themselves precisely, first of all. From their lips, f sounds like ep-pu, z sounds like ji and v sounds like bwee. P, j and b are, phonetically, the nearest Korean consonants to f, z and v, so naturally the young kids pronounce them like that. That's understandable; they learned to say them according to what they already knew. But just you try to train it out of them. It doesn't work. "Frame" becomes plame, "stove" becomes stobe, and "zebra" becomes jeebra.

My initial amusement with this state of affairs rapidly mutated into absolute exasperation; now, under the weight of superior numbers, it is on the verge of collapsing into resigned defeatism. I hardly bother to correct them anymore. You couldn't blame me if you were in my shoes. You try spending ten months trying to teach hundreds of children, in groups of ten, how to pronounce English letters. Just how do you explain to somebody who doesn't speak your language how to say z (especially when you've got a couple of English coworkers and a Canuck friend who all insist on saying zed, for Pete's sake)?

First I tried just demonstrating a prolonged sound for them: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. In reply, I received ten prepubescent voices chorusing jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. Then I tried a different tack. I hissed out a prolonged ssssssssssssssssssss. The reply was favorably accurate. Then I hummed a bit at the back of my throat: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Once again I was favored with a suitably similar repetition. Then I tried to explain that you must combine those two sounds, the sustained note from your vocal chords coupled with the tenuous connection of the upper and lower front teeth necessary to induce the singular z sound. I demonstrated: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

Ten months of this have begun to take their toll on my customarily relentless sense of optimism and self-confidence.

Nearly as infuriating and mentally exhausting as the Mystery of the Interchangeable R and L is the Trial of the Vanishing F. I mentioned before that "frame" turns into plame. Likewise, "freeze" turns into preeji, "fly" switches to ply and "price" becomes pliseu. F is nowhere to be found. It just disappears. Ask a Korean student how they're doing and, if they're on the young side, it's an egg to an egg sandwich they'll reply "I'm pine."

The rest of the common grammatical errors are understandable. Korean children tend to polarize into two camps: the "no articles" camp and the "too many articles" camp. Let me give you a hypothetical example. I wrote both of these myself, so I'm not stealing or plagiarizing or violating any contractual privacy. I also omitted most of the customary errors children make concerning past and present tense and subject-verb agreement.

Okay, here's a potential excerpt from the "no articles" camp:

On vacation I go to Seoul. I saw show at hotel. Then I went room and sleep. Next day I go to park. I ride roller coaster, Ferris wheel, Tilt-A-Whirl. After that, we went home. I went to PC room with Jang-Ho and Tae-Eun.

And now check out that same excerpt from the "too many articles" camp:

On the vacation I go to the Seoul. I saw the show at the hotel. Then I went to the room and the sleep. The next day I go to the park. I ride the roller coaster, the Ferris wheel, the Tilt-A-Whirl. After that, we went to the home. I went to the PC room with the Jang-Ho and the Tae-Eun.

See what I mean? Either way it means a lot of work when the time comes to grade diary entries or book reports. I'm either constantly adding in articles or crossing them out. When you factor in those aforementioned tense and S/V agreement errors...well, let's just say I'm not so much correcting as rewriting.

In all seriousness, however, I am not complaining. I still love this job. I think it's the best in the world and I'd recommend it to anybody. (Speaking of which, Reading Town's on the lookout for somebody to replace me...any footloose and fancy-free English speakers, male or female, should apply at once. Check out CareerBuilder.com; that's where I found Reading Town's posting.)

It's fun and fulfilling. Just this afternoon the elementary school students used me for a jungle gym again. I've gotten them hooked on assisted jumps (we hold hands, count to three, they jump and I lift them high in the air). We have lots of fun in class. I was trying to explain what the word "summons" meant to my upper-level students a while back and James raised his hand and said, hesitantly: "Summons talking?"

Say it fast and you'll get the pun.

While we're at it, try to say the words "double bulgogi burger" six times fast. Betcha can't do it.

I suppose I just didn't realize that something you and I as English speakers can do without thinking would be so tricky for Korean children. And so hilariously exasperating.