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My neighbourhood in downtown Dalian has a new little teashop that has jauntily named itself “Jocund Hut”. That’s a pretty funky name and I guess the owner got that obscure and odd adjective from an electronic dictionary, and I also wonder how many native speakers - even - know what it means.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone actually utter the word, but I know it well coz Wordsworth used it in “Daffodils”, one of the most famous poems in the English language. When speaking of the gleeful dancing daffydillies he emoted

A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company

which couples, so to speak, an archaic usage of “gay” with our equally archaic “word for today.”

And I also half-remembered Conrad using it in “Heart of Darkness” for a grimly humoured description of some skulls on poles, but when I checked the quote I found

a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.

so it was jocose, not jocund. And who the hell uses “jocose” these days? it must be even more obscure than “jocund.” I guess that’s why it’s not a “Jocose Hut” round the corner from where I live.

And then I also remembered that English was Conrad’s third language and that he was wont to use it somewhat eccentrically from time to time; a habit that led to literary critic FR Leavis’ catty comment that “Conrad’s sea smells of Roget’s Thesaurus”.

Anyways, maybe Chinese and Japanese electronic dictionaries are going to resurrect a few long dormant and/or incredibly obscure words and blazon them on the shopfronts and T-shirts of the Pacific rim. And then we English teachers over here will have to find out what they mean.

Have a jocund day!

K.

The Spanish men’s basketball team recently provoked a storm in a teapot over an advertising photo showing them pulling the sides of their eyes…because they were off to China! Geddit? Hilarious!

And someone recently dredged up another photo from the Spanish women tennis team’s website showing some of the same high jinks:

In the fuss that has followed some interesting issues arose. The US media pondered aloud as to what the Spanish team thought they were up to by publicly insulting their hosts. And NBA superstar Jason Kidd opined that had the US team done the same they would have been thrown out of the Olympics and not been allowed back in the NBA. The Spanish retorted by calling it “an affectionate gesture” and pointing out that the Chinese themselves hadn’t seemed to have taken offence at all, insofar as to date there have been no comments by the Chinese media on the incident. Fair point!
But then the US and UK (evil Anglo-Saxons) insisted on placing the “affectionate gesture” in a context of other “Spanish gestures”, including “the monkey chants that greeted England’s black footballers in a friendly game in Spain and the blacking up of some local fans when Lewis Hamilton was competing in the Spanish grand prix.”

My take on it all is that who cares if a bunch of greasy spics take the piss out of the chinks? I’m like so totally, yeah…whatever.

Not really! Just my little joke. Geddit?

Actually, I have a fond memory from about 15 years ago when I was living in Hungary. I was studying in a rather sleepy provincial town called Debrecen and one afternoon I witnessed a visiting schoolboy choir from Korea getting off their bus in front of the concert hall. The local lads had probably never seen real live asians before and so the Koreans created quite a crowd of little gawkers. Then one of the wee rascals thought it would be funny to pull his eyes into slitty position and this soon spread until you had a crowd of laughing Magyar boys pulling slanty eyes and pointing at their Korean guests. Hilarious!

But what made it memorable for me was the Koreans’ response. After about a minute of being taunted like that, they responded by making big round goggly eyes with their fingers and pointing back at the local kids and laughing. I loved them for that. It made me proud to have a Korean name.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the Chinese national basketball had a photo done pulling big goggly eyes next time they go off to play Spain? Not particularly, it would be childish. But that’s kind of what the Spanish athletes are guilty of, being childish…but surely not malicious or racist.

When folks ask me where I’m from, I just tell them it’s a small cloudy country. But while Britain is certainly cloudy, Chinese still tell me that London is a foggy city, even though it hasn’t been so since the sixties. It seems a fair few people’s perceptions of other countries are 50 years out-of-whack.  read more »

is a line from a famous and provocative poem by Psychopoet Sylvia Plath. The poem’s name is “Daddy” and it equates her daddy, her husband, and male authority figures in general with Nazis and with vampires who suck the life force out of their female victims. Sylvia Plath committed suicide three months after she [...]  read more »

Good title? I think so and I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which is a popular science work by the travel writer Bill Bryson. As the title suggests, it’s a book about life, the universe and everything…from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. As the man himself says, “This is a book [...]  read more »

“I love babies, but I couldn’t eat a whole one”, said someone once. Some grumpy old man I guess, but I couldn’t find out who, even on Godgle. In any case, it used to be my attitude more or less, and until very very recently I found it very hard to imagine myself [...]  read more »

July and August  read more »

The Japanese were in Dalian for a fair old time (1905-1945) and that, for me, is part of the place’s charm, especially when it comes to architecture. The Japanese built the tramway and some quaint old-style trams still run. Certain districts and certain buildings have an antique European (and dare I say “colonial”) charm [...]  read more »

I’ve been sitting on this little story for a while, but as it’s been more than a year now since the “unfortunate event” I feel ready to let it out. Well, I’ve been the perpetrator of some truly clownish mishaps in my life so far, but this one is perhaps the worst. Just to set the scene, I should tell you that the wedding ring on my finger is not the first. One day about a year ago when I was living with my sister in law’s family, well, how can I put it…

Instructions Concerning How to Flush your Wedding Ring down the Loo

1 Take a big dump in a small asian bog and then use too much loo paper, so you need to flush twice.

2 Flush once, then wash your hands with a good old fashioned bar of soap.

3 Get soap stuck under rim of wedding ring.

4 Take off wedding ring and run under tap, then get some loo paper and start wiping off remaining soap. Leave ring inside the paper for no good reason.

5 Finish off washing your hands. Space out.

6 Realise that loo is ready for second flush and flush it.

7 Turn back to the sink and see some toilet paper lying around which you then just have time to throw in the pan so the second flush takes it down.

8 Finish washing hands…dry hands and look for wedding ring. Look some more. Get puzzled. Get worried. Stop, calm down. Replay previous actions in mind. Reach step 7 then get sick feeling in pit of stomach.

9 Groan loudly in panic. Check pan to see if everything has gone down. It has.

10 Leave bathroom and explain to spouse and family that you have just flushed expensive and treasured symbol of love and conjugal attachment down the pan. Explain again slowly and put up with verbal remonstrations and shakings of head in disbelief.

And the moral of the story is? Well, as any Chinese will tell you, it is quite obviously…”never flush paper down the toilet!” Use the little bin nearby. I should say that all this happened when I was relatively new to China. I always use the bin these days.

And my wife is still my wife. She was wise enough not to take my blunder as a symbolic act..

We looked at Wilfred Owen’s well known WW1 poem Dulce Et Decorum Est in class today, and I tinkered around with things a bit to get the discussion going.

Before I explain my tinkerings, here’s the original poem:

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I didn’t show the students the full poem straight off. I chopped off the last 4 lines…the ones with the “message”…. which just left the graphic descriptions of the horrors of war.

I then asked students to decide whether it was, broadly speaking, an anti-war poem or whether it was designed to make readers feel pity for the poor English soldier and so hate the Germans/the enemy more, and thus, broadly speaking, a pro-war poem.

Most thought it was an anti-war poem, so then I surprised them by showing them these “last 4 lines”, baked earlier by me:

My friend, you would not then deny our cause is best
Or try to teach our children that humanity is one.
Here is the truth: Dulce et decorum est
To kill the Hun.

I had to explain that “the Hun” was a derogatory term for Germans during WW1, but after that they were all agreed that it was a patriotic poem aimed at stirring up raw passion against those who would gas “our boys”.

All of which is nonsense of course, and I admitted it and showed them the original ending and after some discussion we agreed that the original is more powerful/profound/humane etc. But the vastly different interpretations caused by the tweaked ending does indicate the ambivalence that can result from mere depictions of war.

And, yes, here comes the inevitable Chinese slant on this…I don’t watch CCTV that often, but when I browse through the channels here it’s pretty much odds on there’ll be one showing evil Japs doing despicable things to brave Chinese. I don’t watch these films/dramas so I can’t comment, but am I a cynic/pessimist for expecting that the “message”, the semantic tweak to depictions of war, is more along the lines of “Chinese are great and Japs are vicious scum” than “War is a disaster”?

Can anyone confirm/disprove my hunch?