Anecdotes concerning misused English

1. I am at present exposing students to forming acceptable English words in the form of nouns, adverbs, adjectives and verbs. When I asked my Form 5 students, "What is the verb for the word ‘danger’?", one of them promptly replied ‘dange’.

2. When I asked the Upper Primary students what an apron was, a Year 4 student said, “Mother cooked the thing to wear.”

3. When referring to a photo, I asked a student about the children in the photo. "When was this photo taken? Was it taken when they were sick or after they had got better?" She promptly replied, ‘When they were sicking.”

4. My students are quite confused as to why a hen can lay an egg but a mother does not lay a baby.

5. Masterskills is a college of Nursing and Health in Malaysia. If pronounced wrongly, it somehow would not be a college I would recommend to anyone who wants to take up nursing. My student pronounced it as ‘Master Kills’.

6. This incident was told to me by my friend whose son recently sat for the SPM exam. He was supposed to write a letter to the local City Council. He confidently wrote his salutation, “Dear Mr and Mrs Council’.

The Fate of a Mango Tree

When I shifted into this single storey terrace house ten years ago, I assumed that the mango tree in front of my house was shared by me and the neighbour on my right because the tree stood in front of both our houses.

Over the years, the tree had borne abundant fruits which were plucked and enjoyed by most of the neighbours in the vicinity. Even passersby stopped to relish the taste of this fruit. Once even a teenaged passerby stopped her car in front of my gate and asked permission to have a few mangoes. Most neighbours were not so courteous. They carried their own sticks to pluck the mangoes whenever they wanted to eat it raw or make a pickle.

I, on the other hand, would wait for the fruits to grow big and ripen on the tree and then fall off on their own. This was when the flesh of the fruit would be juicy and sweet. As expected, I seldom had a chance to eat these ‘juicy golden nuggets’ as I termed them, as most of the fruits would have been plucked when they were still young and sour.

Annually, during the hot season, the tree would shed its leaves. I would sometimes sweep the leaves but my neighbour two doors away on the right took it upon himself to sweep the leaves regularly. Maybe he did so because he often parked his car under the shade of this tree. Maybe he did so because he had been staying in the area even before I shifted here and that is what he had been doing all along. In fact, he also took it upon himself to prune the tree when the leaves and branches were getting too massive.

The mango tree was actually planted by the mother of my immediate neighbour on the left. About sixteen years ago when the old lady shifted into the house next door, she had bought two different species of young mango plants. One plant which would eventually bear big eight-inch long mangoes she planted in front of her house. The other was this tree which bore ‘golden nuggets’. Her son cut their mango tree after she passed away about two years ago because he was fed up with people stealing the fruits.

Today the other tree which was planted outside my house met with the same fate. My immediate right neighbour whom I have never seen sweeping the leaves or plucking the fruit, decided that the tree should be felled. So he ordered his worker to cut the twigs, the branches and the trunk of the tree.

My one regret is that I did not take a photograph of the tree in its heyday, when it was full of leaves, when it was flowering and when it was laden with fruits!