{"id":4199,"date":"2018-01-08T07:38:38","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T06:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=4199"},"modified":"2022-10-24T19:24:34","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T17:24:34","slug":"occupational-hazard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=4199","title":{"rendered":"Occupational Hazard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The week before Christmas I was teaching my Tuesday evening class, when I saw that there was snow coming down outside. I was dewy-eyed with Christmas mirth. The students were engaged in a task, Vince Guaraldi\u2019s Charlie Brown Christmas twanged from the computer box, and I was looking forward to the university holiday party, at which I would ingest my bonus in the form of Moravian wine and smoked meats. I went to the window.<\/p>\n

In the front lot, written in the snow by someone’s foot was the term: I Love Dick. I assumed that one of the pupils at the secondary school downstairs was either freeing their burdened souls in a yuletide inspired proclamation or making an immature joke.<\/p>\n

Sure, it was crude and a bit off-putting, but I had to be impressed with the language. It was a really good collocation. Not to throw all of my linguistic eggs in one thematic basket, but I was also impressed the week before when one of my students said to another: \u201cDude, you\u2019re such a dick.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not into language this might not seem too special, but it\u2019s a perfectly crafted collocation so natural that it could have been heard on a subway car in Long Island. Sans subsequent gunfire, of course.<\/p>\n

This tendency to be impressed with language that should appall me is all part of the occupational hazard of being a language teacher. It happens to a lot of people. If you\u2019re a police officer, you might spend an evening at a pub eyeing up possible transgressors. If you\u2019re a dentist, you might not be able to not<\/em> notice a waitress\u2019s dental plaque. Or if you\u2019re a Republican lawmaker you might spend your free evenings trying to crush the hopes and dreams of the other customers at your local Chick-fil-A. And we language workers and teachers often can\u2019t turn off their langdar.<\/p>\n

This does get in the way sometimes. While I might find myself impressed when I should be upset, I also find myself hyperaware of linguistic miscues or unnatural use. Watching a sitcom can be strenuous because the language can be too geared to set up the next joke. In an episode of Frasier <\/em>I watched last week, Frasier and Niles were talking about getting a ticket to a play when the following interaction ensued:<\/p>\n

Frasier: <\/strong>Please, just calm down. I’ve made a few well placed calls,<\/p>\n

I haven’t heard back from a couple of people. Someone will<\/p>\n

call.<\/p>\n

Niles: <\/strong>Well, someone better call. Because everyone who’s anyone<\/p>\n

is seeing this play. And you know who you are if you’re<\/p>\n

not anyone? You’re NO ONE. And I’ve been someone much too<\/p>\n

long to start being no one now.<\/p>\n

Martin comes in from the bedrooms.<\/em><\/p>\n

Martin: <\/strong>Oh, hey, I thought no one was here. [Niles begins to throw <\/em><\/p>\n

         another fit<\/em>]<\/p>\n

It was a joke whose punch line relied on the word no one<\/em> and it delivered. However, I thought it would be more natural to say: I didn\u2019t think anyone was here. Obviously the two are synonymous phrases and I wasn\u2019t trying to nitpick, but if it sounds unnatural, it sounds unnatural.<\/p>\n

Before you roll your eyes and mentally scold me, this is different from grammatical Nazism. Why? First, I typically keep my observations to myself. Second, I don\u2019t correct people or raise the issue unless I am being paid to do so. Third, I am far more over analytical about my own language use than about the language of others. This means that a text message that might take another person ten seconds to write, takes me ten minutes as I tweak, cut, add, trim, and focus. My boss recently told me that to this day I am the only person she knows to use a semicolon in a text message.<\/p>\n

The extent of this hazard has peaked on two occasions, both involving other language teachers and linguists. The first occasion came when a colleague and I were preparing to go to Istanbul to teach abroad for a week and we had to read emails from our contact person and then respond.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t help things that while I am American, he is British. This means that while I read her email as relatively straight forward, he read a Beowulf of subtext and inference into her three sentence email. After charting out her possible entendres, implications, and subterfuge, we crafted a two sentence response over the course of ninety minutes. Sitcoms had been written is less time.<\/p>\n

The second time was while I was at a linguistics conference in Poland and visited a museum with some of my colleagues, all language experts. When we came across a wall of text, we naturally read along. After a moment we began realizing that the translation wasn\u2019t the strongest and we summarily coursed out a smoother edited translation of the text. I wrote it out on my brochure, which I physically had to restrain myself from giving to the curator.<\/p>\n

We are all slaves to our occupations in our own little ways. I suppose it\u2019s part of the fun. Just to be clear, there were no dicks involved with this museum.<\/p>\n

Have you noticed an occupational hazard in yourself? <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The week before Christmas I was teaching my Tuesday evening class, when I saw that there was snow coming down outside. I was dewy-eyed with Christmas mirth. The students were engaged in a task, Vince Guaraldi\u2019s Charlie Brown Christmas twanged from the computer box, and I was looking forward to the university holiday party, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4200,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/damiengaleone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/squirrel.jpg?fit=714%2C800&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-15J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5665,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions\/5665"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}