Chapter 2

The Stewardess, the Dragon, and the Upset Criminal

Now, this very well could end up as one of those, “you had to be there” kindof things, but I am going to try to depict these events as they happened. First off, you must know that in order to learn a new word, you need to use it. It’s like meeting someone and trying to remember their name. It helps solidify it in your brain if you can use their name in a sentence as soon as you learn it.

So, with that said, here are the words I learned the day before or earlier in class: atonement, instruments of reconciliation, fulfillment of prophecies, dragon, and the verb “to jump.” Now, also, you need to understand how I work. I hate bland sentences. The teacher will ask, “Give me a sentence using a verb in the future tense” or whatever. Now I’ve got two choices: I can use the normal everyday language and say, “He will sit in the chair,” and that way use the verb but never learn anything new, or I can try out one of the words I learned and say, “The dragon annihilated the village and will jump on the infidels heads.” Now, of course that sounds gross, but not all of my sentences have dragons in it. Plus, if everybody says the boring sentences then no one smiles in class and we are all bored to tears. So in my opinion silly sentences work better to a) make the class atmosphere better and b) bring in new words. Of course there are people in class that view me as a stupid American that refuses to work, because if I am going to do anything I want it to be fun, so …..some people embrace the silly sentences and use them with me and some view us of the first group as …..well… stupid.

Now on to the story:
We are doing the patterns. A sentence is given and it goes around the group and you have to change the verb or the subject or whatever. So the base sentence is, “Which girl recovered? The girl who has the suit with her recovered.” (see bland) We are expected to change what the girl has with her. So my turn comes around so I say, “The girl who has the angry green dragon with her recovered.” Dead silence…….nothing. A class room of glaring faces greets my eyes. I guess no body had had their coffee. Everybody apparently was not in the mood for my antics before 9am. Fine. No problem, I’ll save it till the next class, but the next pattern in our book had instructions that read:

“Converse using any of the words in chart B or with any reasonable word in the conversation.”

Yeah, slap in the face, but then here is the conversation.
Person 1: Did you know about the stewardess that went out?
Person 2: Which stewardess went out?
Person 1: The stewardess that had an injured hand went out.
Person 2: How was she injured?
Person 1: The criminal with the missing notebook hit her.

COME ON!!! That is retarded! Use any reasonable word in the conversation? You've got to be kidding me!

And thankfully the class agreed with me. So we decided to butcher the conversation. By the time all of us finish it came out something like this:

Person 1: Did you hear about the stewardess that jumped?
Person 2: Which stewardess jumped?
Person 1: The stewardess that has the ugly, injured face jumped.
Person 2: How was it injured?
Person 1: The crazy criminal with the missing brain hit her.

Well…..

Yeah, you’re right. I guess you had to be there. But it was funny, right? Ok, that was lame. Well, just remember we didn’t have enough words in our Arabic vocab to really mess it up. Cut us some slack.