Post-colonialism makes ESL humour problematic, and if Foucault was right about knowledge and power then most teachers are stooges anyway, but goddamn, non-native speakers of English say some funny things. For example...CZECH GIRL IN CLUB: I know you like me.
MY FRIEND ROBIN: How can you tell?
GIRL: I can feel your pee against my leg.
or...
MAREK (Czech): "If I can't drive, I'll have to hedgehog" (hitchike).
SALAMA (Libyan): "The Muslims [sic] fanatics are dangerous, but Christmas fanatics can be just as bad."
SAD (Libyan, or maybe Sudanese): "Every morning I get up and then I get up my wife."
My all time favorite, however, isn't an anecdotal knee slapper, but an unassuming workhorse that always gets in under the radar, and has probably shown up in 60-80 different stories, papers, and journal entries that I've corrected over the years:
"Nice to meat you!"
Never fails to make me chuckle.
RATING: Anglo-saxon mongrel horde overruns the world%
(Image from eslfunland.com.)
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11 comments:
is that one dude sad b/c he doensnt now english
That's pretty good stuff. And Foucault is right. And I really dig the new R3 look.
I don't know. I guess I'm partial to white on black, which no one else seems to like. It makes the colours in the images stand out more vividly, and doesn't need to rely on a bunch of ruled lines to keep everything separate.
You're so racist!
Salama the Libyan's remark about "Christmas fanatics" has a lot of truth to it.
We changed the logo where I work recently, because the old logo was 100% hideous and had been around for years, and everyone had a cow and a heart attack and a freakout and hated it and said that it looked ridiculous. And now everyone loves it. People feel threatened by any kind of change, even HTML color-code R3 change.
I just think any R3 colour scheme and format has to be more than sober and functional--it has to have attitude, without being tacky or overbearing. The ones we've been experimenting with today have looked variously like a virtual potpourri shop and the Delta Airlines homepage.
Sometimes people just complain because something's new--all the haters on facebook, for example. But R3 is different. It's art, in its own way, and it needs to be fucking cool.
Hey, Christmas fanatics are fucking terrifying. What about the "put Christ back in Christmas" people who don't understand that writing "Xmas" is not an evil satanic plot to suck the Jesus out of everything because they don't know that X = Chi?
(Some of these people are my relatives.)
Nah, every time I write Xmas it's totally Satanic.
Every time I write or read "Xmas" I think of Futurama's homicidal Santa robot.
And Satan.
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