shamelessly plagiarized English

All those who took a tip from my previous blogs and invested in airport stocks would have seen their values skyrocket.     Right now they charge you extra for extra pieces of baggage.  Last week Southwest was keeping tabs on gentlemen who preferred to join the lines late- just so that they could choose who they could sit next to.    Very soon this will be turned into a business opportunity too.  Next- they will be offering you incentives to leave certain body parts at home. 

 I am sure all of us are mentally tired as part of the longest soap opera in the world where each one of us armchair experts purports to know what is best for us (forgetting that every 4 years we did the exact same thing- and nothing much has changed anyway!).   The only people who seem to benefit out of this is all are the talking heads beaming into our living rooms.

I am presently studying to qualify to be a citizen of The US.   I am manfully struggling trying to remember historical nuggets like the name of the 13^th V.P. of The US and who was the first President to wear long pants (James Madison- and you thought that you knew the name of the President who took his pants off at work), or the one who could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other (Garfield).

For the uninitiated to the citizenship route- there is a free course in the English language that needs to be passed, which eligibility is usually determined at the time you go in to submit your application for naturalization.  I remember- standing in line at a run down office with hardly any air-conditioning.  The Homeland Security officer at the door was letting in the applicants at the rate of 40 per batch to a white table where another employee would do a weapon search (do people really carry weapons to a citizenship hearing?) and pass us through a pre-historic metal detector (which unfortunately recognizes any moving part as metal!). 

Finally we were then herded through another door- I remember looking up and seeing the ceiling fan struggling to rotate, putting paid to Ohms’ law of electric resistance.   At the door I was accosted by another uniformed lady- who bellows out  in very slow measured terms- “DO YOU KNOW ENGLISH?”.  I remember thinking to myself- well Lady, if I did not know English- I would not know much more- just because you asked me the same thing in a LOUD  s--l--o--w voice!  I smiled blankly at her- she took that for a “no”- and so I was sent to the back of another line.    Here I was made to register to take remedial English as a language.    

I started my classes this summer.   They comprised of 90 minute classes, 3 times a week.   I was really beginning to enjoy this.  During the first class we had 45 students in the class- who all classified me as the “dumb one”- because I could only smile and not respond  to them when they asked me stuff  in Spanish (I think it was!).   

We had this really nice smiling teacher who seemed to be smiling more as his personal pain increased.  We struggled through the alphabet- and I got an A+ when I managed to write 16 alphabets in our first test.  Obviously the bar was lowered as much as it could be!  We moved onto words- and vowels.  We learnt that a, e, I, o, u and sometimes “y” are vowels. 

 We made steady progress to the second month when we got a new teacher (the previous guy had taken medical leave claiming a bad stomach ulcer).  The new teacher was always in a hurry and I wondered if she had to teach us as part of a probation plan by the county. 

 Now we were moving at good speed.  Every Thursday we were made to watch an English movie.   This by itself was a fascinating experience.  We all admired the first lady who climbed atop the car to retrieve a piece of her husband’s scalp.    Like many of my classmates- I too was scared to close the shower curtain fully at any motel - since I wanted to keep an eye on the door, wondered if murderous birds would actually attack us, and, if a pair of binoculars could actually help solve a murder.  None of us had ever known a nun who could smile and run around mountains, and sing so beautifully. Everyone wondered where the Terminator was when many battles were being lost, and, felt sad that we actually lost the handsome Superman.   We cried when we saw those buildings fall down and admired the country that only grew stronger through such tragedy.

 I could see a sense of purpose among all my classmates.  We had slowly graduated into asking inane questions and laughing at the teacher.   We would ask why there was no pine in pineapple, and no ham in hamburger.  It was difficult for us to understand that we could recite at a play and play at a recital.  Also why was the guinea pig- neither a guinea nor a pig?  She laughed along with us knowing that any other emotion expressed by her would only invite more trouble.

 The first half of the 3^rd month we moved onto complex words and now we were being taught how to spell words like “conceive” and “receive”.  Our teacher sermonized about the “i” before “e” except after “c” rule.  This according to her was an established rule of English and applied to all English words and was representative of the ”beauty and all pervasive structure of the English language”.    I raised my hand.  “What about leisure and seizure?” 

 The classes are suspended until the new teacher is hired.