When I was in my early 20s living in Helsinki trying to make a living teaching English as a second language, I had a British friend named Tom. He had been working in Amsterdam and was considerably more successful than me as a language teacher. He came to visit me in Helsinki for a few weeks while he was considering relocating there. One day he told me a story about a mishap in class. He'd been teaching some beginner students some very rudimentary English. One day he asked them, "What did you do this morning?" One of the students, a woman, raised her hand and answered, "This morning I had breast-fuck." He was, undoubtedly, shocked and blurted out, "What do you mean?!" And she said, "Breast-fuck. You know: toast, cereal, juice." And then he said, relieved, "Oh, you mean breakfast. That's something very different. Try not to confuse those words" Tom would later admit to me that this story hadn't actually happened to him, but actually happened to a friend of his who was teaching English in Japan. But Tom explained, "If you tell anyone that story, you have to pretend like it happened to you. It's makes a much better story if you pretend like it was you."
No comments:
Post a Comment