View Single Post
  #111  
Old February 25th 07, 10:29 AM posted to rec.crafts.textiles.quilting
Jessamy
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 653
Default OT:Bad English teachers (was OT Grammar Book New Log Cabin Quilt)

that needed a spew warning.. now my computer screen is covered in coffee!

--
Jessamy
Queen of Chocolate Squishies (and Occasional Liquorice Ones)
In The Netherlands
Take out: _I love the colour_ to reply.
www.geocities.com/jessamy_thompson
http://uk.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/jes...pson/my_photos
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When I was about 10 I had a rather naive, not very bright, and very
Christian teacher called Miss Jones (probably the first person I met
who had a Welsh accent to match the name). For whatever reason, she
brought in a record of Tom Lehrer songs. And played the whole thing.
Including "The Masochism Tango".

- Miss Jones, what's "masochism"?

- I'm not sure, let's look it up in the dictionary, shall we?...
[flip flip flip] "A sexual perversion characterized by..."
ooh, I didn't think it was *that* strong!


The one good thing to come from the incident is that I will never
forget the meaning or spelling of philology. *evil grin*


The one I remember was "phthisis" A bit after the above episode we
had a sort of competitive test to see how good our pronunuciation was.
We had to read out a list of words of ever-increasing difficulty and
obscurity. I was way ahead of the rest of the class, and made it all
through the list until that one, which was the very last item. The
frustrating thing was that I knew *how* to pronounce it, and what the
word meant; I just couldn't physically do it, thanks to having a cleft
palate and at that point no denture to articulate that consonant
cluster on. (I've since acquired a fascination for languages like
Georgian that have gigantic pile-ups of consonants - I can roll off
placenames like "Mtskheta" with no problem at all).

============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk
==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660
4760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554
975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739
557


Ads