With students at Beihai Park.
“Mistah Hobison, what does this mean? I saw it in a movie.”
I looked up. Harvey was flipping me the bird.
He looked at me quizzically, middle finger proud. It was really up there. Some people couch theirs between bent index and ring knuckles, but his was the defiant fist-and-finger version.
“No, don’t,” I winced, waving him off. “That’s very bad. Don’t do that.”
“Really?” the others asked, interested. They scrutinized Harvey’s gesture. “What is so bad? What does it mean?” One by one their fingers fumbled until they got it. I was surrounded by sixteen students flicking me off.
“No!” I yelped. “Put them away, stop!” The incongruity between their enthused expressions and the hostility of their gestures was too much. Struck by my reaction, they regarded their middle fingers with curiosity.
This was English class; many of these students planned to study in America. Better they know than be caught off guard. “Don’t say this,” I warned, “this is very bad,” and on the whiteboard spelled out the F-U epithet. Of course they said it anyway, working carefully at the pronunciation. They also smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes, we hear this in the movies frequently.”
“Please don’t say it, ever. It’s the worst thing you can say in English.”
That really got their attention. “What does it mean?”
I sighed. “Well, the first word means sex.”
“Really?” They giggled.
“That sounds like it would be good,” Vincent ventured.
I grimaced. “No, it’s not. It’s bad sex.” From their expressions I could tell I wasn’t making sense.
I was saved when Harvey, who had finally ascertained the biological symbolism of The Finger, whispered something in Mandarin, making everyone laugh. Then Martha said something else in Mandarin, and a few gasped. All middle fingers disappeared; chuckles subsided, replaced by blushes.
Whatever she said, it was enough. “Okay, back to our lesson …”
February 6, 2008 at 9:52 am
When I was learning Croatian, we had a very important lesson about swearing. Our teacher taught us all the words we needed to know, so as to not embarrass ourselves, or, as the case may be, sound like a native. It was a very useful lesson.
February 6, 2008 at 12:13 pm
This post would have especially benefitted from a photo of the occasion!
February 7, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Yeah, why didn’t you take a picture of this class meeting?
February 8, 2008 at 8:10 am
I grew up three years in Puerto Rico. I attended an English-speaking school on a military base, but from my Puerto Rican classmates I very quickly picked up hallway Spanish — which was basically a lot of cuss words.