vilgessuola's Open Salon Blog

Πας μη Έλλην Βάρβαρος

Tue, 4 Jan 2011 05:01:15 -0500

*'Pas mi Ellin varvaros' = 'Every non-Greek is a barbarian'. This is to be understood as uncivilised, inarticulate and unreasoning. Charmed, I'm sure.

I have to listen a lot to Greeks bigging up the Greek language at the expense of other tongues. Here are some of the received ideas you get used to reading and hearing if you live in Greece for any length of time - fifteen years in my case, with many return visits since I came back to the UK in 2005.

‘Greek is the basis of ALL the world’s languages.’ You mean like Chinese, Japanese, Lardil, Kivunjo…?

‘It is the oldest language in the world.’ Sorry, no. You can only say when a language is first attested in written form, and this is not the same as saying it's the oldest. Sumerian and Egyptian developed writing systems first, both appearing about 3200 BC and predating written Greek by some fifteen hundred years. Looking for the 'oldest language' is a waste of time anyway. This is linguist Larry Trask in an interview in The Guardian, June 26th, 2003: "There are no dividing lines. The speakers in every generation can understand their own parents and their own children without difficulty. In fact, the speakers in every generation could understand the speech of quite a few generations back, and quite a few generations forward, if they could hear it. You are separated from Chaucer's Middle English, and from King Alfred's Old English, by a series of generations all of whom could understand earlier and later speech. Once the time gap becomes suitably large, of course, comprehension becomes increasingly difficult, and it eventually declines to just about zero. But there are no breaks, no discontinuities. Those boundaries, like the 1500 dividing line between Middle English and Early Modern English, are arbitrary. There was never a moment when people stopped talking Middle English."

‘It is the most complicated language in the world.’ Why don't you have a shot at learning Inuktitut, and get back to me? Bear in mind that even if you find Inuktitut grammar fiendishly complicated, any Inuit toddler finds it easy as breathing. Complication is in the eye of the outsider.

‘The Greek alphabet, recited, is an encrypted prayer to the sun.’ Yeah, yeah.

‘You can say things in Greek that cannot be said in English.’ That is only because you don’t know enough English.

‘Learning Ancient Greek will make you a better, more generous and humane person.’ This is the view of one Panagiotis Zachariou, an irrepressible proponent of the superiority of Greek over other languages in the pages of Greek ELT News. Reflection on the content of what you read in any language has the potential to improve the mind and sweeten the soul, but the language in itself could never do that. You can be a classicist and an asshole, just as you can be unlettered and have a heart of gold.

*****

A few years ago at dinner in Plaka I was arguing with member of the company whom I’ll call Kostas about daft folk etymologies, which abound in Greece. He had just given me in all seriousness a megillah about the derivation of the noun θαλασσα (thalassa), Modern Greek for ‘sea’. It went as follows:

1. The sea is forever changing
2. The sea is salty
3. Salt changes (the flavour of) things
4. Salt is αλατι (alati) αλας (alas) in Katharevousa
5. 'To change' is αλλαζω (allazo)
6. The future iterative form ‘I shall change’ is ‘θα αλλαζω’ (tha allazo)
7. This sounds a bit like θαλασσα (thalassa) if you stretch and pull the pronunciation a tad.
8. So there.

I thought this was bollocks and said so. (Retsina can make you very outspoken) For one thing, the ancients in Athens didn’t say ‘θαλασσα’ but ‘θαλαττα’ (thalatta) and the modal particle θα, (tha) translated above as ‘shall’, is not found in Greek until the Middle Ages. It’s a telescoping of θελω να (thelo na) = ‘I want to’, a pattern seen also in neighbouring Albanian where ‘do të’ also means ‘I want to’ and is used in same way as the Greek θα. Moreover, words are not coined by committees, musing over this and that pretty conceit before exclaiming ‘OK, done! Let’s call it that, then!’ Imagine it, a group of sages sitting in an olive grove, gravely debating and weighing the possible labels for all things:

‘What term, αραγε, were most meet for the liquid element, that big blue sloshy affair that starts where the sand ends?’

‘If a man dip his finger therein, shall his finger not as a consequence taste of salt?’

‘It is undoubtedly so’

‘May we not say, therefore, that it is the virtue of this liquid to bring about a marked change in the taste of whatsoever be dipped therein?’

‘Most assuredly’

‘And is it not the nature of this liquid to rise and to fall, and ever of itself to be changing, even as it changes that which might be dipped in it? Were not then ‘thalassa’ the only correct term?

‘It is most marvellous! That’s that one thrashed out. OK, then, moving on. What about those white fluffy-looking things floating in the other blue thing we decided we’d call ‘ouranos’ the other week?’

They’d be at it yet, most things still unnamed.

This mockery did not please Kostas, as no foreigner who is not, as he put it, ‘steeped in the language’ gets to voice a contrary opinion without provoking a sulk. I was not wholly sure about the non-appearance of θα before the Middle Ages – but Kostas couldn’t prove me wrong and was pissed off that my reaction to his explanation was one of scorn rather than dumbstruck admiration.

*****

Another one is the debate over the origin of ‘OK’, which many Greeks are certain derives from Ολα Καλα (Ola Kala) meaning ‘all’s well’. There are dozens of theories on this matter and I couldn’t care less which is true. I would just like the supporters of a Greek derivation to explain how it could come about that people in early 19th century Boston began to use the initial letters of a Greek phrase to mean everything was under control. They never do. You don’t need to explain what you know in your blood, you see.

*****

I cannot put accent marks on the Greek words without their coming out like this: θÎ¬λασσα, so apologies for that.

'Daddy, daddy, you bastard...'

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:07:30 -0400

Leila approached me yesterday at lunchtime to inform me that she was worried about her report from the last course. She is by far the most conscientious and linguistically talented of all the students I teach, and has won golden opinions from teachers for her talent and from fellow students for being a kind and considerate colleague. As my report was a glittering encomium that was no more than her due, I was puzzled. She had ignored every glowing comment in praise of her manifold scholarly virtues, and was exercised chiefly over the fact that she was down as having only 98% attendance, and two lates. Since she was the last in a queue of students querying this and that minute detail of their reports and attempting to bargain with me to whack up their grades, I felt mildly peeved that she was ignoring that thoroughly deserved praise. The Libyan embassy, in so far as it is capable of formulating a coherent policy, requires only 80% attendance of its sponsored students, which seems to me to allow a perfectly reasonable amount of wiggle room. I pointed this out.

‘No, no,’ Leila said. ‘You don’t understand. If my father saw this, he’d kill me.’ There was no flicker of a smile to indicate that she was using the cliché with its usual hyperbole. I’m not suggesting that it was a genuine fear, of course, but she did look very worried. If she were fifteen I might not have been surprised, but she is slightly more than twice that age. Why should her father even get to see her report, let alone comment on it?

This is naïf of me, of course. A month or two ago, another Libyan lady told me that her father and brothers have refused to speak to her since she decided to come to England to study for a PhD without first seeking their permission, thereby bringing disgrace on them. She lives alone in a foreign country, does she not, with no man to protect her honour, so the conclusion one must inevitably draw is that she’s a rampant nympho who bangs like a shit-house door and has escaped to England to indulge her lust with the kuffar. Stands to reason, man, innit, yeah? Leila’s father probably requires documentary evidence that she isn’t whoring around in this sink of iniquity, at least during the hours of daylight, so instead of suggesting she tell him plainly where he gets off, I went to the office and had the offending figures altered. They were probably in error anyway, as Leila was always in class before me on the days I taught the group, sitting there looking serious and slightly anxious. That’s often how you recognise the conscientious students – they wear worried frowns.

Lena is a friend from Cyprus who lived from the age of seven to twenty-odd with her parents in Sydney. One evening she went alone to listen to a talk organized by the university there. In her absence, her father did a bit of research and ascertained that the building where the talk was held was opposite a brothel. He blew a gasket. On her return, he subjected her to an interrogation about the layout and appointments of the university building; whose portrait hung at the top of the staircase, did one turn left or right at the top of the stairs to get to the ladies, that sort of thing, because otherwise he could not be entirely satisfied that she hadn’t been out to earn a bit of pocket money by turning a few tricks. Later, she lived in Athens with a man to whom she was not married, and preparing for her father’s visits from Cyprus - announced last minute, presumably in an attempt to catch her out - would entail chucking her boyfriend out of the flat and hiding every item of male clothing.

‘Why the hell do you do it?’ I’d ask. ‘Why don’t you tell him you’re thirty-four and who you live with is none of his bloody business?’

‘You don’t understand. It wouldn’t make any difference if I was seventy-four,’ she explained patiently. ‘If I was unmarried and living with a man, he’d have a fit if he knew.’

My whole point was that I knew that, and I was suggesting that she simply allow him to have his fit – it wouldn’t hurt anybody but him, after all. But it doesn’t work that way. Where daddy plays the heavy-handed paterfamilias, his ego is to be massaged at all costs, and daughters are infantilised until he slips off the perch.

In 2002 I left Athens to live in a town in the Peloponnese which I had visited on business many times, and never particularly liked. I put my dislike down to the facts that every time I went it was never cooler than 40 C, and I had to live out of a suitcase, and I desperately missed my cat. I also felt obscurely uneasy wandering the sweltering streets at night. In sea-front cafés, large men in loud shirts sat at their complete ease with their beers, one big sandaled foot resting on the opposed knee. They swung worry beads around their index fingers. They exuded the smell of sweat and an air of masculine entitlement and seemed to challenge you to challenge them. They definitely weren’t men who would grieve if separated from their cats. In a sea-front bar one sundown, I fancied a Martini. I had counted on the generous measures you get everywhere in Greece if you order scotch or vodka, but the barman poured me a thimbleful of red Martini into the teensiest glassette of spun sugar delicacy, and handed it to me with a smirk. The men in the bar watched, expressionless, as I drank it. I was given some nuts, with the implication, perhaps, that I had none of my own. A foreign πουστης (fag) of course, he’s English, they are all πουστηδες. Ι really wished I had ordered a scotch, even though at that exact time I didn't want one.

Anyway, while I was down there flat-hunting, I had dinner with a good friend from Canada who has lived in Greece for many years. I mentioned my vague feeling of unease in this town.

‘Yeah,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s evil.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘You think I’m joking, huh?’ Obviously she wasn’t.

I couldn’t move into my new flat immediately on moving out of Athens, and so stayed a couple of nights with Ruth, a friend who is Greek but had spent a fair chunk of her life in Australia. She speaks fluent English with an Auzzie accent and has a large collection of put-downs and one-liners picked up from the gay blokes she used to share a house with. (Re. a local queen who thought himself discreet, ‘daaling, he is fuck'n tredgick!’) She was expecting a visitor, a woman unknown to her who was to act as go-between for Ruth and some forty-something bloke who had made a bit of money and now felt the time to wive it had arrived. I said I would make myself scarce while the initial appraisal by the go-between was conducted. I was about to make a facetious suggestion that I would hide my shaving foam and razor from the bathroom when Ruth said ‘if you want your shaving stuff, I’ve shoved it in the top cupboard.’

‘How did it go?’ I asked, after the go-between had introduced the two parties.

‘ΜαλÎ¬κας εÎ¯ναι,’ she said. He’s a wanker.

They had been introduced on the sea front. Your man had sat Ruth down and ordered for her coffee and fruit, and once she was ensconced, he had gone, chunky of muscle and hairy of back, into the sea, where he displayed great athleticism at great length. He had seemed to think she ought to be both impressed and grateful. He would probably be the type of man who, when out with his lady, would devote a few moments each time she sat down to positioning her limbs until the required degree of modesty was achieved.

‘Chroisd, wad a fucken idiot,’ she mused.

Why do you want this, I asked. Why do you want to fit into this system where men aver ‘my wife’s married, but I’m not’, and uphold their divine right to stick their knobs wherever they like? They can’t commit adultery unless they find a woman to do it with, and they’re intelligent enough to see that, but if it’s one of their own herd that gets covered, they’ll smack her about for it. The undercurrent I sensed on the sea front and around town is one of male violence, and the entitlement of men to rule by force.

Usual answer. You don’t understand; I live here, so I have to fit in. OK. You are right. I don’t understand why you want to fit in.

Another friend never had any doubts about anything, least of all her own views. ‘Men are in crisis!’ she told me one evening, in the same tone as she might have told me the train leaves at six, so don’t mess about. It’s too late now to introduce her to my Algerian student who was giving me his very grave opinions on western immorality as exampled in Leicester:

‘If a boy here look his sister in a bad place, (i.e., a pub where men outnumber women) he don’t will go in there and take her out!’

That seems to assume that the number of unaccompanied females abroad of an evening is evidence that their brothers are not sufficiently concerned with family honour to be patrolling the streets looking for them. Mohammed, if they did, they’d probably get their teeth smashed in - and in my view, deservedly.

Men are in crisis, are they, Alison? I don’t see much evidence of this outside the small circles where some men think they ought to be. I’ve had Leila worrying about paternal reaction to her end of course report at thirty-two. We have had endless requests from Saudi students for single-sex classes, and husbands pacing the street outside ground-floor classrooms to keep an eye on the proceedings, lest a nose or a hairline be revealed. Women resigned to mixed-sex classes often sit in a protective huddle, swathed in robes and veils, and almost have to be treated as a group within a group if they are not to be upstaged by men who seem to forget there are any women present.

‘Look,’ said one Saudi man to a colleague, ‘there’s two women walking on the road, one’s wearing a burqa, one’s wearing a short dress with no back, like they do here. Which one’s gonna get raped?’ He smiled, open hands outstretched, his logic irrefutable. Crisis? What crisis?

Beware the Babelfish

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 01:03:00 -0500

I was waiting at home for my sister and nephew who were coming to visit. The phone rang. I answered it, and a snooty female voice with jerky electronic intonation said ‘we-are-twenty-five-miles-from-Stamford-/-you-sweaty-shit-stabber’. Thus I realized belatedly that you can send an SMS to a landline, and that just as people think it a giggle to teach parrots and foreigners to cuss, so they may now delight friends and family by having school-mistressy robots relay toilet-mouthed messages. This is certainly more entertaining than running Greek names through an English spell-checker as we used to do in breaks, especially now that spell-checkers are less gullible than they used to be – you get ‘no suggestions’ now, instead of brave attempts, which is no fun at all. Nowadays I have a French dictionary on CD ROM, and if you type a French word or phrase into the display, a female voice will pronounce it for you. If you devote some thought to the spelling, you can get the lady to say all kinds of lascivious stuff in heavily accented English. (I must stress that I only do this occasionally, for ten minutes or so, OK?)

Babelfish can be quite comical too, unless you really want to know what something means, in which case the programme’s obliviousness of context, connotation and collocation often renders it pretty much useless. A message I Babel-fished from a Dutch website revealed that the writer liked ‘carved boys’, which sounds horrific, but of course meant ‘circumcised boys’. Not hard to deduce, that one, but here’s something I got from Babel-fishing a chunk of Chinese text:

‘Lives at home puts on make-up the entire audience shopping to add 1 Yuan to be possible resulting in to pick the beautiful wheat flour to paste the membrane or picks the pure fresh aloe to exempt washes the face pastes the membrane. adds 4 Yuan to be possible to obtain a following section commodity clothing clean (color stochastic) a sail woman with 15 piece of wet turbans (design stochastic) the happy companion.’

Got that? I have decided that ‘wet turbans’ are probably ‘shower caps’, and that pasting your membrane is in all likelihood applying some sort of cream to your face so that you don’t have to use soap – ‘to exempt washes the face’. The stochastic colour and design bit probably means that you get a choice in the colour and design of your wet turban. If you are thinking ‘who gives a stuff?’ I sympathise, but you probably don’t teach Chinese students, who often write like this without the intervention of Babelfish. I have to spend quite a lot of time deciphering this sort of thing.

You no doubt know that whole web-pages can be Babel-fished. (Clicking on the referring URL for a visitor to this blog the other day, I found my posts rendered into clunky, hit-and-miss German.) I was once startled to see this headline on a page of Yahoo News:

MORE FARTS BEING NAMED AFTER CELEBS, SAYS CHARITY

Reuters Thursday July 26, 12.44 PM

There it was, in black and white, and other colours. I read on:

LONDON (Reuters) – Ever more Britons are naming their farts after celebrities and soap stars, the animal welfare charity PDSA said one Thursday, with Elvis, Beyonce and Posh ’n’ Becks among the favourites.

Drank for the second year running, the signal fart name for all breeds is Max, the veterinary charity found.

It took me a few minutes to work out that the Babelfish programme was set to translate French to English, and so it had scanned the text for French words and replaced ‘pets’ with ‘farts’, ‘on’ with ‘one’ and ‘but’ with ‘drank’. O happy accident!

People place such faith in Babelfish, though... The linguistically innocent imagine that computers really can understand. Here is an excerpt from an essay I was given yesterday. The writer is discussing the speed with which information can be accessed online, ‘…unlike the book, which walks on his stomach, creeping movement gait slower than a tortoise!’ Books are written, then ‘received by the printing press, for lying to a period of not only known to God and the established players in the science that he was even become obsolete information.’

The lovely lady who wrote this told me today that her approach to essays was exactly what I suspected it was: 1) write what she wanted to say in her first language, 2) whack it through Babelfish, 3) print it out and 4) hand it in, no messing. That the results are often quite inscrutable did not occur to her, such was her faith in computers.

If your education has focused only on your answers to questions rather than on the thought processes whereby you arrived at them, Babelfish must seem like the perfect way to get top marks. Just goes to show how wrong you can be. Your own home-grown errors are far more valuable to you as a learner. I can say 'is this what you mean?' and you can say, yes, or no, or partly. We can negotiate it, and I can tell you how I think the idea might best be expressed. If you could present me with a perfect essay after a term on a beginners' course you wouldn't need to (bloody) be here, (for Christ's sake) would you? Yeah?

Teaching Jerks

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:02:49 -0500

'My text this morning, gentlemen, is culled from English File upper-intermediate, unit two, section A. Its theme, much beloved of course-books for grown-ups, is national stereotypes. Flogged to death, if you ask me. Maybe you can help me see the issue in a new light, although I doubt that very much.'

I draw a cartoon of a City gent in bowler hat and pin-stripes on the board, and after eliciting or teaching what he is wearing and what newspaper he carries rolled up under his arm, I ask for adjectives to describe the English.

‘Hypocritical’ says Hassan, straight away.

‘OK.’ I write the word on the board and mark the stress pattern: ooOoo. ‘Any more?’ I ask, brightly.

‘Arrogant.’ Hassan again.

‘Right!’ Stress pattern: Ooo. Notice I am not rising to the bait.

‘Snob.’ Hassan offers.

‘Snobbish,’ I correct, sharply. I asked for fucking adjectives, didn’t I, you little shit? ‘Any others?'

‘Lazy.’ It’s Hassan.

‘Right’ I say, cheerfully.

‘Racist. Rude.’

‘Anything positive?’ I smile, to mask the fight going on in my brain between exitatory and inhibitory neurones, the yobs that would have me bawl him out and the middle-class timidities that think I'd probably better not, really.

‘Positive? No.’ he says, decisively. He’s miffed because I haven’t lost my rag.

I realise I am allowing one bumptious little twerp of thirty-five going on fifteen to dominate the group and to colour my entire perception of the group dynamics, so I had better get them working in pairs so that at the very least he can annoy somebody else for five minutes. I ask them to come up with a list of stereotypical profiles for the Irish, the Scots and the Americans.

‘I like the Scots,’ says Hassan, who has been in the UK for four months and is thus uniquely placed to offer analyses of the national character of our island’s peoples. Perhaps he suspects, mistakenly, that as an Englishman I don’t like the Scots, and that his championing of them will get on my wick.

‘Good. Tell Faisal why,’ I say sweetly.

When we come reporting back, there’s an argument about whether ‘nationalistic’ is a positive or negative trait. Hassan would have it a virtue, and I say it’s a vice. I offer the old definition: a patriot loves his country whereas a nationalist hates everyone else’s. I attempt to explain that connotation is often a personal matter.

‘Well, you know more about it than I do,’ Hassan says dismissively, his tone suggesting he doesn’t believe that for a moment.

Some time ago I bought a book called ‘Dealing with People you Can’t Stand’, because for me there are quite a lot of people who come into that category. It’s an American publication intended to sell a simplistic system of personality types and their characteristic behaviour to managers, thus improving their ‘people skills’, for there’s nothing like putting people into categories to make them feel appreciated. People are seen as falling into distinct types, each represented by anecdotes along these lines:

Todd sure was getting on Nancy’s nerves with his constant carping about her work on RSS interlink cascade-feeding max-out strands! But when Nancy took time out to engage dynamically with Todd’s whole behavioural matrix, hey, it turned out he was a Second Level Ass-hat, who likely was carrying an undischarged Dickwad in his Empathetics Quadrant - so what else could she expect! From there on in, Nancy felt empowered to respond creatively to Todd’s dysfunctional socio-relational coping strategies.

Had it not been for the insights offered in this book, would I ever have succeeded in placing Hassan in the correct category, that of ‘Know It All’? I reckon I might.

The Know It All controls people and events by dominating the conversation with lengthy imperious arguments, and eliminates opposition by finding flaws and weaknesses to discredit other people’s points of view. Because the Know It All is actually knowledgeable and competent, most people are quickly worn down by their strategy, and finally just give up.’

God, how many of this sort have I met since 1978 when I went to Cambridge? Possibly hundreds, along with a related type, the Think They Know It All. They are usually, though not tautologically, male. (The biggest Know It All I have ever met is actually a woman.) It is my experience that the countries around the Mediterranean are the most fertile breeding grounds for the male of both types, but I’m open to contradiction here. My book is full of advice for dealing with Know It Alls, but I can’t be arsed to read it. Nothing riles a Know It All more than simply being ignored.

I must point out that 90% of my present students are delightful, and make Hassan seem all the more disagreeable

As she is spoke

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:02:36 -0500

Larbi has a home-grown English grammar book that he brought with him from Libya. I had a look through it today while the class was occupied with some writing. In those countries where ‘traditional’ grammar teaching is still the norm, books like this one sell. Does anyone remember the old, the really old ‘Teach Yourself’ books? Well, this is the sort of thing we are talking about here. I had a ‘Teach Yourself German’ when I was about twelve. It dated from the nineteen-forties and studying it involved translating dozens of sentences about the interactions of apples, gentlemen, boys and bakers:

The baker’s boys have sent the gentlemen the apples.
The gentlemen receive apples from the baker’s boy.
Have the gentlemen sent apples to the baker’s boys?

And so on. It went on in this vein for a long time, which explains why I ditched it, and possibly why I've never really got on with German. Teach yourself books presented sentences contrived to exemplify grammatical structures rather than real human speech for many years. More famous examples of the genre are ‘the philosopher pulled the lower jaw of the hen’, ‘my sons have bought the mirrors of the Dukes’ and the old chestnut ‘la plume de ma tante’. Not that there is anything wrong with teachers making up sentences to exemplify grammatical structures; we do it all the time. These days we do attempt some approximation to real life, though. Non-native speakers and less linguistically tuned-in native speakers often make a bit of a hash of this. Creating natural-sounding phrases on the spot that exemplify language as real people speak it is not at all easy to do, nor is it given to all to do it well. It’s easy to mock - so here goes.

Professor Al Whatsit, the author of Larbi's book, gives us: ‘that fellow was silly enough to make me leave the room. In case of coming, I shall forgive him.’ This is supposed to exemplify conditionals, I think. I reckon the professor wanted to teach us ‘if he comes back’ or more formally, 'should he come back, I’ll forgive him’. A further example strengthens this impression: ‘in case of going to the hospital, she would recover’. Now, this is probably unfair, but from the choice of examples I began to develop a mental picture of the bloke who wrote this stuff. I imagined a gentleman in portly, well-nourished middle age, immensely satisfied with himself, accustomed to deference and serenely assured that he cannot be wrong about anything. (I lived in a country well stocked with such types for fifteen years.) I mean, he obviously saw no reason to submit his manuscript to a native speaker for proof-reading. ‘She says that Sami will not come tomorrow, but I say that he shall.’ It shall be as you wish, sir.

The writer’s purpose was not, it seems, to teach the everyday language of the common folk. ‘Cover our food, lest flies should spoil it’ is a magisterial phrase in the section on subordinating conjunctions. Nothing wrong with that grammatically, but our man gives us no indication of style here. Good job it isn’t actually a phrase book, or we might get students asking waiters to tether their horses, and calling for capons and a pottle of sherris sack. No, scrub the sack, we are Muslims here, I was forgetting. There is some chilling military jihaddery: ‘they will have been holding their meeting when we attack them’ and ‘we are ready to give our blood as well as our money’. The grammar freak’s favourite negative adverb with inversion construction is exemplified here with ‘hardly had he opened the door when they shot him’. Try getting Oxford University Press to include this sort of thing in their next bland-as-pineapple-yogurt international adult coursebook. No fucking chance. It'll be the usual bland whities doing the usual bland whitey things, burbling blandly about cell phones, sports and on-line dating.

Other little phrases struck me with their sound good sense: ‘a broken cup is useless’ . No arguing with that. ‘The earth is round in its total shape like an egg, but the earth seems flat’. Indeed it is, and indeed it does. Other phrases were mysterious: ‘green clouds were seen’ is given to exemplify the passive, and I am unable to explain this. Why green clouds? Is it an Arabic idiom? Am I missing some Libyan cultural reference? Or am I just being too literal? After all, there is little to motivate most of the other phrases the writer includes, of which the most puzzling was ‘the box is so narrow that his mother could not sleep inside it’. As I understand it, Muslims do not use coffins, so mum can’t be practising for her own funeral. Maybe it’s just a translation error, further evidence that our author thought proof-reading quite unnecessary.

I have some marking to do now, as the phrase ‘they blame him because he neglects his duties’ reminds me.