{"id":117,"date":"2013-07-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/07\/24\/post-110-its-in-nature-of-the-thing-or-a-coworkers-befuddling-verbosity\/"},"modified":"2013-07-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-24T00:00:00","slug":"post-110-its-in-nature-of-the-thing-or-a-coworkers-befuddling-verbosity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/07\/24\/post-110-its-in-nature-of-the-thing-or-a-coworkers-befuddling-verbosity\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-110: &#8220;It&#8217;s In the Nature of the Thing&#8221; (Or, a Coworker&#8217;s Befuddling Verbosity)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"paragraph\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n<strong><font size=\"3\"><font size=\"4\"><strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 C.R. <\/strong><\/font><\/font><\/strong><strong style=\"\"><strong style=\"\">[American] <\/strong><\/strong><strong><font size=\"3\"><font size=\"4\"><strong>: <\/strong><\/font>&#8220;&#8230;Yeah, but that seems sort of in the <em>nature <\/em>of the thing.&#8221;<br \/><font size=\"4\"><strong><span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 E. Kim <\/span><\/strong><\/font><\/font><\/strong><strong style=\"\"><strong style=\"\">[Korean] <\/strong><\/strong><strong><font size=\"3\"><font size=\"4\"><strong><span>: <\/span><\/strong><\/font>&#8220;Nature?&#8221;<\/font><\/strong><span><\/span>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"paragraph\" style=\"text-align:left;\">I overheard it in the teachers&#8217; room tonight. They were discussing an upcoming presentation contest. Why didn&#8217;t he just say &#8220;It&#8217;s always like that&#8221; or &#8220;That&#8217;s what they usually do&#8221;, or any number of simpler sentences?<\/p>\n<p><span><em>The Cast of Characters:<\/em><br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<strong>E.Kim<\/strong> is a Korean woman, around 30 years old, who is now &#8220;Elementary Team Leader&#8221; (\ucd08\ub4f1\ud300\uc7a5), and thus one of the <a title=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/yuletide5142.weebly.com\/1\/post\/2013\/05\/post-61-everyones-a-manager-except-you.html\">many, many &#8220;managers&#8221;<\/a> at this language-institute. (Elementary means 5th and 6th graders, in this case.) She has been at this language-institute since September 2010. She was one of the rare &#8220;Korean employees who is not a manager&#8221; when I arrived here, in September 2011. She was promoted sometime in 2012.\u00a0 She has always been friendly to me, unlike most other Korean teachers. She speaks loudly.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<strong>C.R.<\/strong> is a White-American male (born in December 1989) who, a lot of the time, seems like a walking stereotype of his native-region of San Francisco. His body has been here since mid-February 2013 (in Korea and at this job), but his mind has never quite made the full cross-over (I think he&#8217;d say). He has plans to go to Thailand or Cambodia when his year is up. His goal is to get Scuba instructor certification, he says. Philosophy major.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>C.R. is either unable or unwilling to change his register to &#8220;talk simple&#8221; with the Koreans. His use of difficult vocabulary\/phrases, complex sentences, and even <em>slang <\/em>when speaking with them is puzzling to me. None of them is truly native-level, which would be required to keep up. They don&#8217;t understand what the heck he&#8217;s talking about half the time. The above exchange was a good example. E.Kim herself is quite good at English, but she didn&#8217;t get the point at all. <em>&#8220;What&#8217;s he talking about &#8216;nature&#8217; for?&#8221;<\/em> &#8212; is what she probably thought at that moment. <\/p>\n<p><span>C.R. is also the one who used the phrase &#8220;I&#8217;m down for that&#8221;, which I wrote about in <a title=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/yuletide5142.weebly.com\/1\/post\/2013\/06\/post-87-up-for-that-down-for-that.html\">post-87<\/a>, and who disparaged me for using Yahoo Mail (<a title=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/yuletide5142.weebly.com\/1\/post\/2013\/03\/yahoo-mail-says-a-lot.html\">post-2<\/a>)<\/span>. \/ On the whole I like him, though, let it be known.<\/p>\n<p><span><\/span><br \/>I was correcting essays at the time, and my concentration was broken by C.R.&#8217;s and E.Kim&#8217;s loud conversation (conversations with E.Kim usually <em>are <\/em>loud), so instead I  jotted down that phrase from C.R., along with this one:<\/p>\n<p><span><\/span><font size=\"4\"><strong><span><em>\u00a0<font size=\"3\">\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 &#8220;&#8230;.but for the logistics, you might have other considerations, you know, in terms of&#8230;.&#8221;<\/font><\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n<p><span><\/span> &#8220;Logistics&#8221;! &#8220;Considerations&#8221;! &#8220;In terms of&#8221;! He also kept using words like &#8220;rehearse&#8221; instead of &#8220;practice&#8221;. (E.Kim stood there and nodded along.) All these are unnecessarily-complicated ways to speak, and might impress  native-speaker college professors but will cause confusion for  non-native-speakers, especially most of this institute&#8217;s teachers. <\/p>\n<p><span><\/span>It&#8217;s a skill requiring practice, I think, being totally clear (and vividly descriptive) while staying simple and understandable to non-native-speakers. I try. I&#8217;m not sure what C.R.&#8217;s &#8220;deal&#8221; is: Is he unable, or unwilling?\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"paragraph\" style=\"text-align:left;\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 C.R. [American] : &#8220;&#8230;Yeah, but that seems sort of in the nature of the thing.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 E. Kim [Korean] : &#8220;Nature?&#8221; I overheard it in the teachers&#8217; room tonight. They were discussing an upcoming presentation contest. Why didn&#8217;t he just say &#8220;It&#8217;s always like that&#8221; or &#8220;That&#8217;s what they usually do&#8221;, or any number of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}