English

I used to think I had a pretty big vocabulary. For a guy my age, anyway. Considering I spent a lot more time video-gaming and TV-watching than the more typical bookworm, it's a wonder my "verbiage veers most verbose" as it does (credit to "V for Vendetta").

Of course, now I teach ESL.

No better sense of the contrast between the guarded, slow, low-vocab way of speaking necessary for my students' understanding and my other life can be given then the day last week when I went downtown with my maiden faire to see an open-air Shakespeare performance. I used to drink in the bard on first reading. I've never read or seen Twelfth Night, and so maybe that was part of the problem, but it took me until the second act before I was properly following the dialogue. Oy vey. By the second act, it's hard to follow the play because you've missed the setup for the story. Thankfully, one of the older actors, playing Sir Toby, spoke appallingly slowly and unnaturally so I had brain-time, in some of his longer speeches, to background-process what I'd seen before.

Of course, the next morning I was now restraining not only the usual three-syllable words that usually flow quite pleasingly off the tongue, but also a host of shan'ts, doths, wherefores and dosts.

I think however, the art of speaking at an understandable hearing level is much like the art of speaking with an accent that is not your own. Start with a caricature and work with it until it becomes more natural. It makes the transition sharper, and thus easier to delineate. So today I've started *much* slower and simpler. I say everything two or three times. It's a price I'm willing to pay so that I can come home and read Asimov. Or watch the news. Anderson Cooper or Piers Morgan; watching Fox would be like being back at work.

Ultimately, however, I'm confronted daily with the inevitable conclusion that this language we speak is exceedingly silly. It follows none of its own rules, its subtleties of implication are almost impossible to spot in the naked grammar, and there are just so many more words in it than we ought to need. I know it must seem rich, coming from me, but English is too darned complicated. It's a real shame that the language of international business and government isn't something more straightforward like Spanish or Japanese.

The thing I think has affected me the most so far is an odd sense of humbling. These kids have come/been sent from all over the world, literally. They're here to learn my language. The main thing that makes me capable of teaching them is the accident of history that I was born in a place that speaks it. Something over which I've had little control. Certainly, I didn't have to be well-spoken or literate if I hadn't worked at it. I didn't have to be a qualified teacher except that I pursued it and had opportunity to go to school. But why my language? Why didn't I go to Mexico or Korea to learn from them? I know there are a number of sensible, logical reasons, but I don't think it's a sensible problem. Or question, anyway. I'm not losing sleep over it.

Lunchbreak is just about over, so the post is too. Time enough now to readjust and speak with care and great tact. Enjoy the words, I suppose they're the ones we've got