I have to admit that most of these come from one student. His name was Tony (that was a nickname, which is standard; most Thai first names are 1-4 syllables and most last names are 4-6 syllables. My attendance sheet didn’t even list my students’ last names, only last initials, and on the first day of class everyone told me their nickname (some of them may have chosen new ones when they started college, but it wasn’t something done out of deference to a foreign teacher or something unusual). Some of my students were Nui, Anne, Earth, Shirt, Bow, Vava, Ping, Luck…)
Tony had the kind of gift of language that I think some poets have. At first I thought his brilliant compositions were a happy accident that sprung from using his electronic dictionary and getting a weird translation, one of those cases where the technical definition is correct but the connotation is totally off, but some of these are sentences he wrote during in-class paragraphs, where no pocket dics (that was, unfortunately, how we referred to them) were allowed. Even though this was the most entry-level English class, he had an ear for amazing juxtaposition even in a language completely unfamiliar to him. Some of my favorites from Tony:
In a journal entry about his girlfriend, Natty: “Natty be the whole, origin, super morale power of Tony!!”
(I think that’s the greatest compliment someone can give their love)
Once during in-class writing he wrote a ghost story (the double exclamation marks were his signature). The story was about twin sisters who got hit by a train and because ghosts: “One sister lay on rail, her body short by half!! The taxi driver be mentally abnormal–stroke and die this very minute!! This is true story!!”
And, from a poster he made for class (which I still have), regarding the powers of his imagined undersea robot submarine: “It can lay electricity when attacked!!”
In a subsequent class, I had a student whose nickname was A who thought of himself as a gangster. He put his name on all of his tests as: “Big A–Man of West Side.” He also wrote a memorable story about going to the mall and losing his girlfriend, upon which, “I got upset because I couldn’t founded my boo,” and later, “I started yelling because I was angry and hungry.” Reasonable!
**I want to note that I chose these particular quotes (which are anonymous, in the sense that nicknames aren’t official and this was 10 years ago), because of either unintentional hilarity or surprising brilliance (lay electricity–that’s a great metaphor), not to mock anyone in the beginning stages of learning a language (though some of the mistakes language learners make are, I think, universally funny; I know that when I make mistakes in Russian they’re occasionally accidentally hilarious). Sometimes there’s something magical in having only a few tools or pieces that you can put together, and combining them in unexpected and surprisingly apt ways.
Your mama
It’s a little like magnet poetry,