Essay :: English as a Foreign Language

Broken Language
English and its misusage
Mle Davis
Sanaa, Yemen
November 8, 2007
“One of the perks of teaching abroad is getting to witness those serendipitous moments when another’s attempt at English yields something so ludicrous that it could never have been imagined by a native speaker. We go to work every day and we work very hard to teach people the language, but secretly we love when they fail miserably (just for a moment!) and say something totally ridiculous. Did he just say I am a pen? Did she just say that her family went out to Hwang’s Crap House? That his father wore a suitcase to work yesterday? We collect the stories of our students who, in desperation, write Dear Ruler Friend to get around the ban of copying the original text, Dear Pen Friend. But we excuse them as we giggle-after all, they’re just kids… [read the rest on WorldView Magazine]