Sunday, August 4, 2013

On Having a "Clean Neck"

I've been taking UCLA Extension courses to get an TESL certificate. More about that later. It's all online classes, which I find less than satisfying intellectually, more on that later too.

A Korean classmate in my linguistics class posted about difficulty in understanding when someone uses American idiomatic expressions like "read between the lines" and taking them literally. I posted this in response:


I had a colleague who was hired by a law firm to assist in meetings between one of that firm's lawyers and a group of of managers from a Japanese firm which which they were doing business.  The Japanese managers all were perfectly conversant in English and had studied at American universities, so he was not not there to translate into Japanese. The lawyer constantly talked in cliches, metaphors, and slang (like you were mentioning like "hand-in-hand" or "mother-hen" this idea, or "slicker than snot,"  or "snootful of coke" and lots of profanity) so his job was to translate the lawyer's English into regular English. He said it was one of the funniest tasks he was ever paid to do.

It made me very wary of expressions that I naturally use that are only understood to native speakers.

By way of cultural exchange, my colleague said one of the managers one time quipped back to the lawyer at one of his recommendatons for action. The manager said "When I make that proposal I'd better have a clean neck." My colleague did not understand. The manager explained it was a Japanese expression that meant "Make sure you look presentable when your boss chops off your head for making such a preposterous suggestion ..."

Sorry, I'm not sure this adds much to the conversation, but I thought it was fun story.

Pops

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Be truthful and frank, but be polite. If you use excessive profanity, I'll assume you have some kind of character flaw like Dr. Wong. Tks!