Countdown Day 6: Funny English

When faced with a pile of essays or exams to grade, the prospect of finding unintentionally humorous sentences lightens the load a bit.

For example, the final exam for 2nd-year English asked students to use this phrase in a sentence in order to show its meaning: "no one under 21 should be allowed to." Most students wrote something like, "No one under 21 should be allowed to get married" or "No one under 21 should be allowed to drink wine". One student, however, offered this bit of wisdom, complete with quotation marks indicating spoken language:

"No one under 21 should be allowed to go into the Porn bar," my father told me.

I had to restrain myself from writing "Good advice!" in the margin.

Chinese students are, by and large, pretty naive about sex, and whenever anything even remotely related to sex comes up in class, they giggle and blush. So, the sexual content of their writing is usually the result of an unintended double meaning. Take this sentence, for instance, which my office mate found in a student's essay about feelings [in particular, about helping cheer friends up when they are sad]:

You should give your friend a hand when he is feeling hard.

We both got a puerile laugh out of that one.

Most of the time, teachers can figure out what their students intend to say. But sometimes our students' writing falls into the "WTF" category. D encountered a good example of this in a student project, which was a student-designed survey on the topic of perfume use. One of the questions on the survey asked respondents where they put perfume, and offered several options (A, B, C, D). One of the choices was "Cervix." Ouch.