dont hate, appreciate...
posted by Teo C @ 4:43am, Tuesday 9 February 2010.
dont hate, appreciate...the many ironies of this language which is in such high demand
'in such high demand' hmmm, isnt it strange then, how stressful and time consuming it is looking for work in this field?...still searching and 'nada'...
if life consisted of only ESL and language, the variety of so called simple pleasures available would be a very narrow hallway...however laying on my new couch pondering whether it would be better to go to bed or just keep staring at the mesmerizing late night low quality tv programs on the living room high quality flat lcd screen tv with the option of pg13 light porn, fanatic religious preaching or televised psychic readings, i let my mind wander and began to wonder about this, that and the other...simple pleasures of the English language can be entertaining in the right (or wrong) state of mind...
and just focussing on vocab for now, leaving all the fun stuff for another night...1 eg of strange vocab is..."building" continuous form of a verb but if the action of constructing a building is already finished, shouldnt we call them "builts"...
grammatical illogic...
sometimes when im up late writing, i slip into an alternate state of consciousness somewhere between awake, asleep and dreaming that im awake while im still asleep...here i would make a reference to the twilight zone but as vocab often evolves and changes/loses its meaning and transforms in and out of slang while occasionally being set aside until political correctness of a word or phrase is in sight again, the term "twilight" has 'devolved' becoming instantly synonymous with a "Sweet Valley High" perversion of vampiric romance and puppy love...dragging one of my favorite genres through the mud in the process...brilliant authors such as Bram Stoker and Anne Rice have done amazing things with this concept...even such a specific aspect of the vast topic of supernatural legend and folklore holds immense potential for talented writers who need minimal inspiration to produce literature of equivalent calliber as "Dracula" and "The Vampire Chronicles" which regardless of personal taste are undoubtably great works of literature...
just having realized now that i spaced out and rambled off track again, ill get back to my point of reference...twilight, a state that late sleepless nights put me into...like a magic preposition that places me in a certain strange unknown point in space and time...
i imagine its similar to how people were mentally at the momental lack of clarity, coherence and creativity that spawned these examples of how weird and random our vocabulary can be...
firstly something easy, "pineapple" - 50% pine and 50% apple?...maybe 60/40 or 70/30...theres none of either...
now, how lazy was the person who decided to call the tool carpenters use to check if something is level a "level"?...would a little more effort and imagination have hurt?...maybe that person shouldve stuck to flipping burgers...
looking at another aspect with problematic potential, "blue" / "blew" / "flew" / "flowed"
how boring life would be if everything were easy-
"dont hate, appreciate" the luck we had in having people all along the spectrum of creativity and irrationality to come up with the piles of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions and all the sub-categories and literary devices that we get to enjoy teaching to our students...
pessimistically holding a positive outlook for the future, goodnight...
-conscious dreamer.
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