Every Monday at noon, my company employs an English teacher to come and teach our coworkers visiting from China about English vocabulary and culture. I sat in on today's lesson, which was on dining experiences at a casual vs formal restaurant, as well as a fun lesson on the American bar scene. Despite having English fluency, I still learned something new, like what "sous-vide" and "getting 86'ed" means.
I started Kindergarten not speaking a word of English, and I remember the day I officially "graduated" from ESL classes to the regular English curriculum a few years into school. Students were tested on their vocabulary by being shown picture flash cards and asked to name the object, and the item that got me out was "eggbeater."
The English language is full of borrowed vocabulary from different roots; sometimes the rules of pronunciation makes no sense. I could've excelled at something like math, nestling in the constancy and reliability of numbers. But it was English that I fell in love with, the subject on which I base my current hobby (creative writing) and trade (technical writing). All because I knew what an eggbeater was.
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