Before class this morning the Jedi asked what the english for muushiatsui was, now this I know, it’s humid says I. Aha lets teach it to the kids when we talk about weather today. Ok fair enough. So I wrote humid on the blackboard and asked if anyone knew it. The Jedi encouraged them to look in their dictionaries…of course it wasn’t actually in their dictionaries but we didn’t find out until we asked them to look!
This later got the response from the jedi, ‘can you tell them the proper word?’ Humid is the proper word. It’s damp when its wet and cold and humid when it’s wet and hot. Perhaps there is a more official word, humid is slang isn’t it?
Nope it’s not slang.
Then ping pong lady got involved. I have no idea what was said, it was Japanese and it was fast. But the upshot was that the Jedi asked me to only tell the children real english words and no dialect words. For ten minutes I felt really depressed. Ping Pong Lady used to make me feel totally useless when I taught with her (the tape recorder incident for one) and now it seemed like she had unfurled her depressing influence into my current job.
But huzzah for my habit (as of last month) of keeping the OED on my desk! It
