Mind your language

My English lessons often produce a wealth of unintentional mirth which I have to suppress a) because it would take too long to explain to a relative beginner why the mix-up of words was funny and b) Italians are easily embarrassed by their mistakes in English. Here are a few recent mistakes that cropped up in recent lessons:

One student informed me that loved cocaine and that he did it at least three times a week. His wife was clearly pleased with this hobby and he even suggested I come round and try some. I was about to thank him but turn him down politely explaining my nasal passages probably wouldn’t be able to withstand it when it emerged he was talking about cooking. I breathed a sigh of relief to hear this.

Often students, when asked to write a piece for homework, will just go to Google and do a dodgy online translation then hand it in claiming it is their own work. One student, trying to explain his sister has long hair wrote ‘she has a high bouffant’. He then wanted to explain the dialogue in a clothes shop where ‘these trousers are too tight’ but he wrote ‘my pants are constricting’. In a last flourish of creativity, he tried to explain this firming body cream that had been invented but it came out as ‘bottom botox’.

One student can’t pronounce the word ‘who’ and instead it comes out as ‘ooooo’. I of course tried to correct him and so the conversation went ‘whooooo’, ‘oooooo’, ‘whoooo’, ‘ooooo’, ‘whoooo’ etc etc. We sounded like a pair of courting owls.

The best one was when another student who tried to ask me about my grandmother’s appetite but the question came out ‘Is your grandmother on heat at lot?. Needless to say I was most annoyed to be asked such a question, not least because she’s been dead 20 years but it all became clear and we remain firm friends.