Yes- it’s true. I’m a romantic sucker for words and language. Serve me up a linguistic mouthful of chopped syllables sautéed in assonance on a nice bed of irony-strained description, and…, well…, I’m one happy chick.
But, if you REALLY want to get me peckin-at-the-bit excited…, just mix up a nice wordy stir-fry of completely arbitrary ingredients, seasoned with a most obscure range of spices, chase it with a shot of indescribable sludge (with no Latin equivalent), and I guarantee I’ll be cock-a-doodlin’ with the hens by daybreak!
Now, I know…, there are some people out there who disagree…
There are some naïve souls out there who believe that true happiness is to be found only in love, damn-good orgasms, in family, or in a well-executed Thai body massage…
But, let me set ye lost souls straight…:
It just don’t get better than- yes, I’ll say it: “linguistic muck”.
And, that’s why, though I’m over-worked and far-under-paid, I love my current job so much.
Where else could I go at 8am, still waiting for my coffee to kick in, listen to intriguingly fantastical linguistic muck, and get PAID for it?!
And, just to show you how great my current employment is, I’ll share the inspiring and tragic tale that I got paid to listen to this morning:
“When I was a junior highschool,”
(Yes- apparently a great number of Japanese university graduates were once educational facilities themselves!)
“my mother regret very much my experience… In bed I was bunking top,”
(Well, who DOESN’T, these days?!)
“and – how can I say? – fire spirit samarai ghost strangled me from neck down with the French carrousel animals spinning at ceiling.”
(Oh yeah, the old, romantic spinning, French merry-go-round line…)
“I was very scary. But, now my mother she is very kindly. And, I am happy because of study English.”
In my opinion, tales of such profound sorrow, sadness, reconciliation and unintentionally-moving poetry just don't come around every day!
So, this morning I decided two things:
1) that I will hold off on looking for alternative jobs for a while and
2) that, as of today, all of my students (so that they can check their grammar, of course) will be recorded on tape, explaining some of their most influential experiences.
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4 comments:
I love a good mangling of the language too and enjoy watching the listeners trying to decipher the carnage. You are correct, it is definitely a pure joy!
1) how'd you get the double dots over the 'i' in 'naive'?
2) I'm sorry but I beg to differ: love is (to me) a far greater satisfaction than reading or listening to muck.
Haha, -c, I always suspected you were a romantic sucker for "linguistic muck." ;)
That's one über-profound story your student told ... I think it's better with the grammar they way it is!
cap'n- yup. you found me out. I like words. Infact, I think I would marry a few, if only they weren't so difficult to understand sometimes.
I've never read Lolita, but I was priveledged to have Nabokov as a guest lecturer in a creative writing class I took at Oberlin. anyone with such a comedic take on the tragic is ok in my book. and a russian accent doesn't hurt either:)
frustrated- I knew I wasn't alone in my phonetic butchery fetish. Maybe we should start a recovery group for those who fall off the social wagon and start mashing verbal mush during smalltalk...
dunzo- 1)ah.. the umlaut... I find the word 'naive' with a double-dotted i a little pretentious. But, my word program insisted upon it:) and 2)I'm still heels-over-head, so I was just joking about love not making the linguistic cut.It definitely kicks all other joys' booties!
dingobear- yeah, it really would be a shame to mess with the grammar of such a beautiful story! Oh, the ethical dilemnas of being a teacher..
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