Shameless self-promotion: http://drwhomarathon.wordpress.com
What happens when an American and an Englishman decide to watch as much Doctor Who from 1974 onwards as possible? Mostly snarkiness.
It’s a co-authored blog between me and my sweetheart. Unabashedly geeky. You love it.
It started off innocently enough. We were half a bottle of wine in on the train from London to Cornwall when we started reminiscing about childhood games and that closely related subject, childhood traumas.
“Dodgeball, I guess,” I began, “is the quintessential American game of childhood suffering. Any game where others are expressly given permission by the authorities to throw objects directly at you ‘for your own benefit’ was always destined to go down in the melodramatic memoirs as a source of trauma.” Of course, by the time I was in school, dodgeball had mostly been taken out of the physical education curriculum, as a result of two cultural influences: 1. the growing belief that every child is special and deserving of equal care; and 2. lack of funding towards said physical education curriculum.
“Still,” I said, “I always hated being ‘it’ in Tag. I wasn’t fast enough or daring enough to make Tag exciting for anyone.”
“I loved it. We called that game ‘dob’ in Nottingham, but when I moved to London the game was called ‘it’.” He grinned, knowing my linguistic radars had been turned on in interest. It doesn’t take much, to be honest; whether I’m reading the newspapers here, listening to the radio, or chatting idly with the supermarket checkout clerk, I’m always listening eagerly. But this linguistic tangent did pretty well end our game of Scrabble.
Dob persists as a verb, in both British and Australian English, meaning to inform on someone to the authorities. You can dob someone in or you can dob on someone, but either way, you’re probably cruisin’ for a bruisin’.
As an unreconstructed Britpop fan, I was very aware of Supergrass, but not of the origins of their name. To grass someone up also means to inform on them to the police, and the noun grass means an informer. Thus you get…
Grass was a well-enough established word in the 1980s to have spawned ’supergrass’, i.e. a republican sympathiser who later ‘turned Queen’s evidence’ and informed on the IRA, and which gave the Brit-pop band Supergrass their name in the 1990s. (Phrases.org.uk)
In the US, we just have nark and snitch, along with other words which are common to other dialects. Snitch to me always seemed somewhat childish, though I would feel remiss if I didn’t note that my university town back home is covered with graffiti that reads “snitches get stitches“, which goes to show you just how serious a word it is.
Hello from sunny England. I say “sunny” because right now it’s actually sunny; my housemate will come in any moment and say it’s “boiling” outside, which actually translates to “cardigan necessary”.
Today we received a really “good” pizza take-away menu from the local Planet Pizza, promising pizza that is “simply out of this world”, which features such items as:
I’ve witnessed Japanese pizza mania, but honestly? Is it a characteristic of island nations that I missed in World Civ? In my constant game of “Highlight the Deviations Between the British Isles and Japan” (snazzier name forthcoming), pizza toppings is definitely one area where there hasn’t been that much deviation. I cannot forgive corn on pizzas.
The menu also features an American Hot pizza, which, while not as stupid as other so-called American pizzas on offer in thousands of British pizza take-away joints, is ridiculous nonetheless. I learned last week via the always brilliant Separated by a Common Language the totally-missing-the-point logic that the naming of this pizza is based on, although to me “red hot” only signifies a cinnamon-flavored hard candy. Then again, Kentucky ain’t exactly the hot dog-eating homeland that other baseball-rich areas of the US are.
Back to the menu. In the section labeled “Tex-Mex Pizza, Chicken & Ribs”, which initially caused my Mexican-starved stomach to leap for joy, there are such authentic treats as:
A few points:
1. “Yakitori” is not that hard to spell.
2. Yakitori is not Tex-Mex. (Yakitari might be.)
3. Pizzas are not Tex-Mex.
4. Fajita toppings on a pizza are an affront to God, nature, and the sovereign nation of Mexico.
5. Burritos should never come with chips–either kind.
I may implore the Mexican embassy in London, via that ancient British tradition of the “strongly worded letter”, to attack on all fronts these insults to the proud culture of the Mexican peoples. A public service campaign about the disgusting amount of sugar found in the salsas available in this country wouldn’t be amiss, either. Failing that, firebombing.
One final note: while perusing a 1970s era British cookbook last weekend, I found a recipe for chili con carne which was respectable, except for the tip given at the bottom of the page. “If you cannot find tinned kidney beans,” it said, “a tin of baked beans makes a suitable substitution!” Insert not-all-that-spurious English stereotype here.
59. Started learning Welsh.
I mean, let’s run through my personal checklist of reasons to start learning a language:
* Ridiculous-looking orthography — check
* Has no real impact on my daily life — check
* Good pop music – check
* Can conceivably be used as a secret language – check
Other wonderful things about Welsh:
* It was created by faeries (Wikipedia doesn’t confirm this but you can’t trust the Internet)
* It is called Cymraeg, which is pronounced [kəmˈrɑːɨg], which is beautiful
And yet I just can’t manage to produce the sounds as well as I’d like. I think my brain goes “foreign language -> Japanese” and my tongue follows suit, insisting on shoehorning vowels in after everything. It’s a bit like when I started learning Spanish. When I began producing sentences extemporaneously, they’d come out wrong. Not incorrect, but wrong. I’m better now, and I no longer do silly things like forget that “casa” means house, not umbrella (”kasa”).
Furthermore, and here’s the crucial bit, no-one I know speaks Welsh, thus losing its potential as a secret language. That’s just not on. Internet, learn to speak Welsh with me. We can write notes back and forth and decode them for fun.
Here, I’ll start:
Rydw i’n dy hoffi di! Allwn bod ceraint?
I get a lot of e-mails from international students, professors, and their families at my university asking for help with their English conversation or their pronunciation. And sometimes, these e-mails are just so spectacularly wonderful that I have to share them with you. Or else I would go mad and continue living the life of quiet desperation of a part-time, totally unqualified English tutor.
For starters, here’s one from a LOLcat who works here, apparently:
Hi, Do you have willing to teach during office hours or weekend?
Yes I has willing! You has a bucket?
Sometimes the praise is unbearable yet endearing:
Hi, I am native Korean and graduate student. My wife and I want to learn English and we are available on Tuesdays,Thursdays, and weekends. I hope you will be our great English teacher. Thank you in advance.
I hope I’ll be your great English teacher, too, but unfortunately you get what you pay for, and I’m just a mediocre undergrad who understands how the human mouth works and has a grasp on the grammar of my own language.
And then, the very best kind. I don’t receive this kind of e-mail very often, but let’s say they come often enough for me to have noticed a pattern. It seems there is a certain kind of student, one who I suspect has used hip-hop music as a study tool until their Rapperese is pitch perfect, but they’ve slowly come to realize that “gat” isn’t found in textbooks and you can’t find “North Crackalacka” on a map (or South, for that matter).
Yo what up its S— Kim from South Korea.
I am lookin for an English tutor who teach me speaking pronunciation.
What times are you prefer? I will looking for your answer.
Thanks yo!! Peace out!!
If you were wondering, this is the kind of student I always take on.
Lower the Standard: That’s My Motto
by Karl Shapiro
Lower the standard: that’s my motto. Somebody is always putting the food out of reach. We’re tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can’t paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards. Let’s all play poetry. Down with ideals, flags, convention buttons, morals, the scrambled eggs on the admiral’s hat. I’m talking sense. Lower the standards. Sabotage the stylistic approach. Let weeds grow in the subdivision. Putty up the incisions in the library façade, those names that frighten grade-school teachers, those names whose U’s are cut like V’s. Burn the Syntopicon and The Harvard Classics. Lower the standards on classics, battleships, Russian ballet, national anthems (but they’re low enough). Break through to the bottom. Be natural as an American abroad who knows no language, not even American. Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs. Renovate the Abbey of cold-storage dreamers. Get off the Culture Wagon. Learn how to walk the way you want. Slump your shoulders, stick your belly out, arms all over the table. How many generations will this take? Don’t think about it, just make a start. (You have made a start.) Don’t break anything you can step around, but don’t pick it up. The law of gravity is the law of art. You first, poetry second, the good, the beautiful, the true come last. As the lad said: We must love one another or die.
差し色 (さしいろ, sashi-iro) — “accent color”
Superman is Jesus. But I would find the Bible a lot more interesting if Jesus were Hawkman.
It’s common in the Kansai area (and beyond now, I believe) to eat giant uncut rolls of sushi for Setsubun while looking in the lucky direction of the year. [Happily, this led to an OHP sheet full of photos like this being shown.]
Bonus: This is the best photograph that shows up when you GIS “sashi-iro”. I’m not sure what the accent color in all that is supposed to be, but damn those are some pro nails.
Ironically for a generally anti-law enforcement leftist of some description, there is no ongoing television show I love more in this world than Law and Order. Every possible spin-off. Every episode. Somehow, Law and Order is the one thing that’s never disappointed me, and happily, I live in America, the land of opportunity, propaganda, and endless reruns, where it’s possible to watch nothing but Law and Order for 24 hours straight when armed with only a basic number of television channels and a couple mugs of hot chocolate.
Well, for 12 hours at least. Allow me to confess the sad state of my life at the moment: I awoke this morning at seven, made myself go back to sleep until ten-thirty, when I restlessly flicked on the evil screen. You see, too much academia has fried both my brain and my eyes and it’s a miracle that I’m writing this at all, without the ability to actually, you know, see the words I’m typing. The television’s just far enough away that I can see it, while as of yet there’s no way for me to read endless screens of PDF articles about masculinity during the Cold War from a distance of six feet away.
Let’s be honest, I never used to watch much television before I came to university (in fact, I probably would have described myself as being ‘anti-television’, whatever that may mean), but I’ve begun to understand the need to drown one’s brain’s sorrows in something utterly mindless after a long day at the machines/textbooks. And, dear readers, let me remove the suspense right now: I was blessed to find an all day marathon of L&O upon awaking.
And beyond the nightly news, there’s naught more comfortingly predictable than Law and Order: the bad guys always come to justice and the cops are on the right side every time, even when they blatantly flaunt those ‘inalienable rights’ the show so celebrates. The cops in L&O are flawed human beings defending the public as well as they can, and sometimes they get a little carried away in pursuit of that justice. We love and accept them, even their “anger management” issues, which often translate to what’s more commonly called “police brutality”–but come on, they’re just SO PASSIONATE about their jobs. And anyway, the perp deserved it. Really.
I’ve also recently become a fan of watching the Prime Minister’s Questions on late-night C-SPAN. Someone says something, everybody stands up and goes “RRRMMMRRRR OI OI RRRRRMMMWWW”, and then the Prime Minister responds calmly and respectfully to the gentleman’s question about the future of, say, Nottingham’s pavements.
Gosh, I need new eyes.
I can’t stop watching these horrific Learning Channel documentary shows about ghastly physical deformities and rare congenital disorders. The last one was about primordial dwarfs (probably the world’s cutest, most vaguely doomed human beings), while this one is about a woman with leg lymphodema, which has to be one of the most terrifying afflictions I’ve ever seen, short of that one where people grow horns out of their skin. And the worst part? These specials will be on until three this morning. The next one is called “Half Man, Half Tree” and it might just be the horn-growing deformity.
I may never sleep again.
Top Five Things to Do When Unable to Sleep
(in no particular order)
5. Wander around an all-night grocery store
4. Make new and exciting friends in opposite time zones
3. Watch videos of baby sloths on Youtube
2. Happen upon a Twilight Zone rerun (it’s always the Holocaust one, isn’t it)
1. Learn Spanish via Mexican chat shows with subjects like “My 14 year old son had sex… in my own house!”
Today’s lucky YouTube find: the entirety of Hibari no komoriuta, the Japanese Parent Trap, starring none other than a young Misora Hibari as the twins, Hibari and Sumire. Get prepared for some good ol’ fashioned standing-by-your-man, an effeminate candy store owner that I’m still not sure about, and all the scheming you’d expect, with homemade English subtitles. And singing. Did I mention Misora Hibari’s in it?
Hibari no komoriuta (Hibari’s Lullaby, 1951)
