My students at Legacy are often confused and alternatively amused by the sort of language games that are particularly easy in English. In helping my students yesterday with their speeches (remarkably few students wanted help on their word use, grammar, and pronunciation, something that will be reflected on their grades for the speeches), I was amused how how puns and homonyms seemed to greatly interest and also confuse my students.

For example, there is a classic pun about the English language that became the title of a book. To illustrate the joke, I wrote two sentences on the board. The first was, “A panda eats shoots and leaves.” The second was, “A panda eats, shoots, and leaves.” The first sentence presents our panda as an herbivore who eats shoots and leaves in bamboo forests and generally minds its own business. The second sentence presents our panda as a cold-blooded and ruthless yakuza (Japanese gangster) killer, who commits murders so remorselessly that he is able to eat without problems before killing and leaving. Clearly, the punning capabilities of English are immense.

I also showed the students some homonyms. For example, I showed them new, knew, and gnu, all of which are pronounced the same way in English. A gnu is a type of deer [1], also known as the wildebeest. New is a word that describes something that is recent, or not old. Ironically enough, it describes a lot of cities (like Chiang Mai—mai is the Thai word for new) that are pretty old. Knew is the past tense of know, to suggest something that was known in the past. For example, I knew my students would have trouble with homonyms because of the state of Thai education, which does not encourage conceptual understanding but rather rote memorization.

I hope the lesson (I am not an English teacher but in speech some puns and tonguetwisters and English questions are generally present) was as amusing to my students as it was to me. As someone whose dry sense of humor depends a great deal on wit and wordplay, word games are something that I have practiced for a long time. It is my hope that my students will be able to reoognize wordplay and word games and be able to counteract their malicious use, even if they are not inclined to pun or engage in duels of with themselves. At least that way if a yakuza panda meets them in a bar for a verbal shootout they won’t be unarmed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildebeest

I had a late friend who was particularly fond of making jokes about stupid wildebeests, but he never called them gnus. GNU is also an acronym (a word my students have a hard time understanding) for a unix-compatible operating system.