Day Thirty Seven
Any teacher of ESOL will confirm English is not an easy
language to learn.
It’s made up of so many other tongues: French,
Hindi, Chinese, Arabic and dozens more and they all have their own linguistic idiosyncrasies.
There’s a famous riddle about English pronunciation:
‘What does this say, “ghoti”?’
The answer, puzzling to most, even those who grew
up in Britain is ‘fish’.
The gh comes from the final sound of ‘enough’ or 'tough'
The o from the sound in ‘women’
The it as in the sound used in ‘nation’ or ‘motion’
For many interesting years, I was a teacher of
English, sometimes to people who spoke
it well but more usually my students were new immigrant or refugees for
whom English was very confusing indeed.
I once set my class a task - bring
in anything they had read which didn’t seem to make logical sense.
A lot of English doesn’t make logical sense as ‘ghoti’
proves but I wanted to explain idioms.
The following week, my first student asked as a preamble to
presenting his example, ‘Are there some English
foods women are not allowed to eat?’
I explained there were foods women might not want to eat but as far as I knew,
nothing actually forbade them to do so.
He insisted there was, in fact he knew of certain
food items marketed specifically for unmarried men.
At this point, I began to wonder if he was actually
talking about food at all, so not wanting any inadvertent embarrassment, moved quickly on.
The next student produced a clipping from the
cookery page of a local newspaper, ‘Eggs are the perfect fast food. Crack a couple
into a bowl, add seasoning, pour into a buttered pan and Bob’s your Uncle.’
The week before we’d talked about family relationships,
so words such as uncle, aunt, nephew and niece were familiar but this sentence
was totally baffling to her.
And me.
Even now I’m not sure and neither is anyone else apparently but a
popular explanation concerns British Prime Minister Robert Cecil (Lord
Salisbury) who appointed his inexperienced nephew to the prestigious post of
Chief Secretary for Ireland, an act of nepotism which shocked the nation. So ‘Bob’s your Uncle’ came to mean something accomplished with little effort.
I then had to explain that 'fast food' did not apply to foods one was allowed to eat during Ramamdan.
The next offering was a short article about
knitting in which the author stated that ‘making this hat is a piece of cake.’
Understandably it wasn’t understood.
It seems this phrase comes from American poet Ogden Nash's humorous
piece, Primrose Path, written in 1936:
"Her picture's in the papers now,
And life's
a piece of cake."
We had a short discussion about how this meant
something was easy, maybe as easy as eating cake.
It was nearly time to finish but the young man who had insisted certain food was
for unmarried men, rushed back into class, holding a tin of peas.
‘I have it!’
he cried with Archimedean triumph,
waving a can, ‘but now I ask another question. Why the centre of bone? For
flavour or strength of unmarried men?
And presented me with this tin.
The whole can is designed to confuse any language learner. This is a modern image by the way and not the one I saw 37 years ago, although the contents and wording are much the same.
The life of an ESOL teacher can often be rather complicated - but fun.
A little girl was sent out to tell her father, working on their car, that lunch was ready. When she came back in, her Mummy said, 'Did Daddy tell you what was wrong with the car?'
'Yes, there's some cake in the engine.'
When her husband came in, she queried this.
Her husband, through his laughter said.
"She asked me if the fault was serious and if I'd be able to fix it, I said, 'It's the engine but no worries, it's a piece of cake.''
