lathophobic aphasia: Huh?

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

Huh?

Testing time again. Part of the test had questions on sports vocabulary. The students were given sentences such as the following:

Our school has just got a fantastic new football p...............

and invited to fill the gap. The expected answers here, of course, are pitch or player. I can't, off hand, think of any other words that would do, and certainly not ones that would be known to the group I teach. Therefore I am puzzled as to what Yasmina had in mind when she filled the gap thus:

Our school has just got a fantastic new football pispot.

Suggestions welcome.

8 comments:

Fionnchú said...: Great WTF logo. Some may not get the reference, but I love it. (Word verification: "muction"); 28 November 2009 at 00:46
vilges suola said...: Muction [n] Act of loudly hawking back the nasal mucus of the common cold during a lesson, frequent in cultures where blowing the nose is considered impolite.; 28 November 2009 at 07:55
Bo said...: I have absolutely no idea how pispot could have come about.; 28 November 2009 at 13:28
The TEFL Tradesman said...: Could be 'passport'. And remember, there's no /p/ in Arabic, so it could be ... 'baseball'?

The worst case of mangled pronunciation I ever encountered came from a sweet young girl of about 17, who calmly claimed that she had spent the weekend in London, because she was interested in the 'sex scene'.

My jaw dropped noticeably - and the rest of the class must have noticed too, judging by the stifled laughs. I asked her to repeat it, and it sounded much the same.

A second later, just as I was envisioning awkward miming motions to make sure I/we had understood correctly, it hit me - she meant 'sight-seeing'!!

Lawks a-mercy, guvnor!!; 28 November 2009 at 18:09
vilges suola said...: Baseball... I suppose that is a possibility. Hadn't thunk of that.

Nice pron story. I have mentioned this before but what the hell, I'll trot it out again, my favourite mispronunciation was from a Greek girl who described a bridegroom as wearing a carnation in his bottom hole.; 28 November 2009 at 18:55
The TEFL Tradesman said...: I bet that turned you on, flower!; 9 December 2009 at 17:28
vilges suola said...: Not really. I prefer gladioli.; 9 December 2009 at 19:47
Anonymous said...: Extreme lol !!!!!!!

I could turn that on it's head and describe to you my Greek colleagues problem yesterday with an English person who came from Northern England and had a very strange pronounciation of the simple word -bus..... bous, boos, boost, bust, etc etc....
She had to ask him 3 times what he meant........

lol

Mac.; 11 December 2009 at 20:18

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Quite.

''Oh, don't the days seem lank and long,
When all goes right and nothing goes wrong.
And isn't your life extremely flat,
With nothing whatever to grumble at.''

W. S. Gilbert

“The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”

Christopher Hitchens

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Brendan Behan

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”

Richard P. Feynman

''Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so.''

Jonathan Rauch

''One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen
down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.''

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

''The human species, Dinah sometimes thinks, is stark staring mad. People have no sooner got themselves born than they start to imagine the gods want them to flatten their heads, or perforate their genitals, or arrange themselves into hierarchies based on the colour of their skins. The gods require them to avoid eating hoofs, or to walk backwards in certain sacred presences, or to hang up cats in clay pots and light fires underneath them. The gods like them to slaughter birds and make incisions in their own skulls. The gods have put the banana on this earth so that the human species can apprehend that fruit as a miraculous revelation of the Holy Trinity. It has to do with their singular ability to think and dream in symbols. This is what makes the species so vicious. It's also what makes them great poets.''

Barbara Trapido 'Frankie and Stankie'.

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