Recently, I was reminded of an incident from my yesteryears, a time when I was a young and naive 6th-classer running around the Hyderabad Public School in really short shorts and chasing girls in vain. (Sigh…some things never change. I still wear short shorts.) I had always felt that the English language was a little haphazard thanks to a number of its idiosyncrasies but mainly due to the frequent departures from phonetic spelling. As I was mildly amusing myself reminiscing about what had happened, I realized that this was one of the incidents (if not the first) that made me very wary of English.
One of the class participation exercises that my 6th class English teacher incorporated in her style was to get each kid to stand in front, facing the whole class and read aloud some paragraphs from the lesson being taught. I suppose the point was to hit many birds with one stone, the birds being public speaking confidence, fluency and pronunciation. On one of those days, it was my turn and I happily went ahead and started giving it my all (and by all I mean reading out really loud in my short shorts). I don’t remember what the story that I was reading from was but one of the lines had the word ‘food’ in it. Oblivious to the utter humiliation that was about to be heaped on me I read the sentence as “the man needed to eat some fudd before going to work” (the word fudd rhymes with stood, but with an emphasis on the d). My teacher’s sudden “what?” prompted me to stop reading amidst the background of some of my classmates giggling. I hesitantly re-read the line the same way. In what can be considered one of the cruelest acts in the history of mankind, my teacher burst of laughing right in front of everyone and after telling me the right way to pronounce the word ‘food’ asked me to go on. (If you are a gult like me, I am hoping you can empathize why I had mispronounced the word as such. When using the word in everyday gult (telugu) conversation one always seems to pronounce it as ‘fudd’, as in “fudd kottava?” which in essence means “did you have food?” and never with the elongated sound that the two ‘o’s make in ‘fooood’).
At this point, I simply wanted to stop, go back to my chair and hide my face in my bag. Unfortunately for me, my teacher did not share my feelings and simply kept looking at me as if to say “Go on Rohit. I do not see why making fun of your pronunciation in front of your entire class of human-piranhas should affect you in any way”. I had no choice but to go on clinging to the hope that it wouldn’t get worse. That ended up being one of the most inaccurate thoughts in the history of mankind. All was going well with my recitation for a few minutes until I came across the sentence “the man’s sweater was made of wool”. By the time, I started reading the sentence I had already seen the word ‘wool’ a little ahead and was trying to think as quickly as I could about the right pronunciation. Sadly, I could not be sure and I halted when I reached the word. My mind went “let’s see, both food and wool have two ‘o’s and food is supposed to be ‘foood’ and therefore wool has to be “woool”. A Vulcan would have been proud of me. Sadly, my teacher was an inferior human specimen and as soon as I said “woooooool” she snapped and corrected me. This happened a long time ago but I distinctly remember the giggling of the class at my devastating shame and all I wanted to do was run away and hide in one of the numerous hillocks that bounded the back side of our school (the ‘backfields’ we called them). Once again she gave me the ‘I-don’t-see-why-you-don’t-want-to-keep-reading’ look and I acquiesced to her instructions and my turn ended without any more blaze of glory crashes.
Needless to say my friends ripped on me for a few days (probably something along the lines of ‘Rohit is wearing his woooooooollen sweater today and is going to eat some fudd’) and then forgot about it as soon as they found something else to bother me with. Of course all was good ultimately and I learnt an important life-lesson about never to make assumptions about the mighty English language!
If you find some grammatical or spelling error in my post and say things like “Haha…looks like you weren’t wary enough of English” deduct 5 points for lack of originality! You are always welcome to rip on me for anything else!
One of the class participation exercises that my 6th class English teacher incorporated in her style was to get each kid to stand in front, facing the whole class and read aloud some paragraphs from the lesson being taught. I suppose the point was to hit many birds with one stone, the birds being public speaking confidence, fluency and pronunciation. On one of those days, it was my turn and I happily went ahead and started giving it my all (and by all I mean reading out really loud in my short shorts). I don’t remember what the story that I was reading from was but one of the lines had the word ‘food’ in it. Oblivious to the utter humiliation that was about to be heaped on me I read the sentence as “the man needed to eat some fudd before going to work” (the word fudd rhymes with stood, but with an emphasis on the d). My teacher’s sudden “what?” prompted me to stop reading amidst the background of some of my classmates giggling. I hesitantly re-read the line the same way. In what can be considered one of the cruelest acts in the history of mankind, my teacher burst of laughing right in front of everyone and after telling me the right way to pronounce the word ‘food’ asked me to go on. (If you are a gult like me, I am hoping you can empathize why I had mispronounced the word as such. When using the word in everyday gult (telugu) conversation one always seems to pronounce it as ‘fudd’, as in “fudd kottava?” which in essence means “did you have food?” and never with the elongated sound that the two ‘o’s make in ‘fooood’).
At this point, I simply wanted to stop, go back to my chair and hide my face in my bag. Unfortunately for me, my teacher did not share my feelings and simply kept looking at me as if to say “Go on Rohit. I do not see why making fun of your pronunciation in front of your entire class of human-piranhas should affect you in any way”. I had no choice but to go on clinging to the hope that it wouldn’t get worse. That ended up being one of the most inaccurate thoughts in the history of mankind. All was going well with my recitation for a few minutes until I came across the sentence “the man’s sweater was made of wool”. By the time, I started reading the sentence I had already seen the word ‘wool’ a little ahead and was trying to think as quickly as I could about the right pronunciation. Sadly, I could not be sure and I halted when I reached the word. My mind went “let’s see, both food and wool have two ‘o’s and food is supposed to be ‘foood’ and therefore wool has to be “woool”. A Vulcan would have been proud of me. Sadly, my teacher was an inferior human specimen and as soon as I said “woooooool” she snapped and corrected me. This happened a long time ago but I distinctly remember the giggling of the class at my devastating shame and all I wanted to do was run away and hide in one of the numerous hillocks that bounded the back side of our school (the ‘backfields’ we called them). Once again she gave me the ‘I-don’t-see-why-you-don’t-want-to-keep-reading’ look and I acquiesced to her instructions and my turn ended without any more blaze of glory crashes.
Needless to say my friends ripped on me for a few days (probably something along the lines of ‘Rohit is wearing his woooooooollen sweater today and is going to eat some fudd’) and then forgot about it as soon as they found something else to bother me with. Of course all was good ultimately and I learnt an important life-lesson about never to make assumptions about the mighty English language!
If you find some grammatical or spelling error in my post and say things like “Haha…looks like you weren’t wary enough of English” deduct 5 points for lack of originality! You are always welcome to rip on me for anything else!
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