Unit 5 Lifelong Education
Passage A Tongue-tied
Several weeks ago I was riding in a cab when the driver's eyes caught mine in the rear view mirror and he said, "Excu me, Miss? Can you help me?"
As any hard-bitten city dweller knows, the correct answer to a question like "Can you help me?" should always be some version of "It depends." I chirped, "Sure."
"Thank you," he said. He pasd a slip of yellow paper into the back at.
I stared at the paper, wondering. Was this a joke? A threat? Hand-printed on the paper in tiny block letters was this:
proverb
peculiar
idiomatic
"Plea," he said. "What is the meaning of the words?"
I stared at the words in the distresd way you might stare at party guests who faces you've en somewhere before but who names have escaped your mind. Proverb? Peculiar? Idiomatic? How on earth should I know? It's one thing to u a word, it's another to explain it. I resorted to shifting the topic.
"Where did you get the words?"
The driver explained that he was Pakistani. He listened to the radio as he drove and often jotted down unfamiliar, fascinating words who meanings and spellings he then sought from his pasngers.
"Peculiar," he said. "What does this mean?"
I could manage that one. "Strange," I said. "Odd. Often with a hint of something suspicious."
"Thank you, Miss. And idiomatic?"
有关挫折的作文 I cleared my throat. "Um, it's a, well, um. It involves a peculiar u of the language."
I thought my u of peculiar was kind of clever. He looked confud, a reminder that clever's not clever if it doesn't communicate.
"Uh, let's e. 'Idiomatic' is related to the word 'idiom'. An idiom's something that's ud in, say, a particular part of the country or by a particular group of people. People who aren't part of that group aren't likely to u it and might not understand it."
Watching his puzzled look, I did what a person often does when at a loss for the right words: I went on talking, as if a thousand vague words would add up to one accurate definition.
"Can you give me an example?"
I racked my brains. "Gapers block," I said. A peculiarly Chicago phra.
But did it really qualify as idiomatic? I had no idea becau the longer I thought about idioms the less sure I was what they were. 宝咳宁颗粒
高尔基的童年读后感"And proverb?"
I should have told the poor man right then that I might be misleading him down the proverbial path, whatever that really means, but instead I said, "I think a proverb is kind of
like an aphorism. But not quite."
"A what?"
"Never mind. A proverb is a condend saying that teaches you a lesson."
"An example?"
The meter clicked off a full 20 cents while I arched madly through my mind. "Haste makes waste?" I finally whimpered.
But was that a proverb? Wait. Weren't proverbs actually stories, not just phras? While I was convincing mylf they were, he said, "Can an idiom be a proverb?"
I could answer that. Just not right now, now when it mattered, now when the fate of a curious, intelligent immigrant hung on the answers he assumed would fall from a native speaker's tongue as naturally as leaves from an October tree. So I retreated.
"Do most of your pasngers give you answers when you ask for definitions?"
"Oh, yes, Miss. Very interesting definitions."
夏朝都城 Until that moment, I'd been so inspired by the driver's determination to learn English, so enthralled by the chance to indulge my curiosity about words with another curious soul,
that I didn't fully grasp the potential for linguistic fraud committed in this man's cab. Now I could barely allow mylf to imagine what kind of deformed English he was being fed by cowards like me who couldn't simply say, "I don't really know my own language."
I can only trust that someone as curious as he is also owns a dictionary. And that he figures out that, no matter what his pasngers may say, haste doesn't always make waste at the gapers block.
无言以对
几周前我乘坐出租车，司机通过后视镜看着我说：“对不起，小姐，能帮个忙吗？手机cpu是什么”
精明老练的城里人都知道，对诸如“能帮个忙吗？”这样的问题，回答永远应该是“那要看是什么忙了。”而我却高声地说：“当然可以。”
孤独反义词“谢谢！”他说，并向后排座递过来一张黄纸条。
我盯着纸条，疑心顿起：难道他在开玩笑？抑或是威胁？纸条上是手写的工工整整几个小字：proverb，peculiar，idiomatic。
“请问，这几个字是什么意思？”
我沮丧地看着纸条上的字，就好像在晚会上你盯着几个以前曾经见过的面孔，却怎么也想不起他们的名字。Proverb？Peculiar？Idiomatic？我怎么会知道？会用一个词是一回事儿，会解释可是另外一回事儿。于是我故意转移话题。
“这些字是哪儿来的？”
司机解释说他是巴基斯坦人，开车时喜欢听收音机，经常把不熟悉的、精彩的词随手记下来，然后向乘客询问他们的意思和拼法。
“Peculiar，这个词什么意思？”他问。
这个我知道。“指奇特、古怪，经常带点儿怀疑的意味，”我说。
“谢谢您，小姐。那么，idiomatic呢？”
bothered
我清清嗓子，说：“嗯，它是指，嗯，它是语言的一种独特运用。”
我自以为“独特”一词用得很妙，他却一脸的迷惑。这是在提示我，如果对方没有明白，这词儿就不能算用得妙。
“啊，这么说吧，idiomatic和idiom有关，而idiom是指一个国家的某一特定地区或一个民族的某一特定人群使用的词，该地区以外的人，不属于这个群体的人一般不用或不明白它的用法。”
看着他迷惑不解的样子，我不知用什么恰当的词才好，只好继续解释下去，似乎一千个模糊的词加起来可以等于一个准确的定义。
“你能举个例子吗？”
我绞尽脑汁地想：“围观塞车，”这是个独特的芝加哥惯用语。
可这算得上名副其实的惯用语吗？我不得而知。我越想惯用语，就越没有把握说清楚惯用语到底是什么？
“那么proverb呢？”
我本该当时就告诉这个可怜的人，我的解释也许会误导他对谚语真正含义的理解，但我却说：“我觉得谚语就是一种警语，但又不完全是。”朦胧的意思是什么
“一种什么？”
“算了，别管它，谚语是给人们以警示的短小精悍的句子。”
“比如说……”
当我在脑海里拼命地搜索时，记价器上的数字又跳了20美分。最后我低声说：“欲速则不达？”
但它算是谚语吗？且慢，谚语是否应该是些小故事而并非短语呢？我还在掂量谚语可能就是小故事时，他又问：“那惯用语是谚语吗？”
这我可以回答，但不是在此时。因为此时这一回答至关重要，一个好奇聪明的外国移民以为他所期待的答案会从一个本国人的口中自然而然地脱口而出，就好像十月的树叶会自然地落下来一样。因此我退却了。
“你请乘客给你解释词意的时候，他们大多都会给你答案吗？”
“会的，小姐，很有意思的解释。”
直到那时，我一直在为这位司机学习英语的执著而感动，陶醉于能有机会与一个充满好奇心的人一起来满足自己对语言词语的好奇心，却未能充分意识到在这辆出租车上可能犯下的语言欺诈错误。我几乎不敢想象这位司机听到的是什么样的蹩脚英语，因为像我这样的懦夫不敢坦白地承认：“我对自己的母语并不懂。”
我只能希望像他这样好奇的人会有一本字典，希望他能明白，不论乘客如何解释，发生围观塞车时，欲速则未必不达。
Passage B Returning to College
If I thought I'd live to be a hundred, I'd go back to college next fall. I was drafted into the Army at the end of my junior year and, after four years in the rvice, had no inclination to return to finish. By then, it emed, I knew everything.
Well, as it turns out, I don't know everything, and I'm ready to spend some time learni
ng. I wouldn't want to pick up where I left off. I'd like to start all over again as a freshman. You e, it isn't just the education that appeals to me. I've visited a dozen colleges in the last two years, and college life looks extraordinarily pleasant.
The young people on campus are all gung ho to get out and get at life. They don't em to understand they're having one of its best parts. Here they are with no responsibility to anyone but themlves, a hundred or a thousand ready-made friends, teachers trying to help them, families at home waiting for them to return for Christmas to tell all about their triumphs, three meals a day - so it isn't gourmet food - but you can't have everything.
Too many students don't really have much patience with the process of being educated. They think half the teachers are idiots, and I wouldn't deny this. They think the system stinks sometimes. I wouldn't deny that. They think there aren't any nice girls/boys around. I'd deny that. They just won't know what an idyllic time of life college can be until it's over.
