I know nobody else cares, but Jesus Tapdancing Christ, it is my name. A lot of Koreans are quick to point out my mistakes in hangeul, but when it comes to written English they sure are careless about spelling, punctuation, and typography. Pick up any English book or newspaper printed in Korea, or visit any English-language website here, and chances are you'll find pretty random capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. I have to conclude it's due to complete indifference about the rules of this monkey language. They are exposed to the alphabet their whole lives . . . just look at your keyboard, for instance. But the complete inability around here for many to use the English alphabet is face-slappingly exasperating. I'm gonna bring it up at next week's teachers' workshop. This last one was so dull that I regret not talking about forcing my love shots on unsuspecting women.
Well, "Brain" is a pretty common mistake, and even though that doesn't make me feel any better, this mistake isn't as bad as the name that's on my Kim's Club card---Deotsch---or the one that appeared on my schedule last month--Brian Dueth.
6 comments:
My friend believes those kinds of bald-faced, stubbornly repeated mistakes are his Korean students' way of retaining their Uri-mal dignity, even in the face of being forced to learn the "international language" against their will -- say "pa-ee-buh" instead of "five," the same way my British friend refused to attempt a French accent in French class, but insisted on saying "bone-joor" instead of "bonjour."
Personally, even though I prefer "Rob" over "Robert," I'd even take "Robert" if only I were called THAT or "Mr. Ouwehand", instead of "Mr. Robot".
...or Deutschland.
If a German would read "Dueth" it would sound like a rural dialect or perhaps Tiroler german for 'dead'. Nice twitch huh?
It appears it's your fault for having a nebulous name, Brain...
Or just take it as a Freudian slip (never mind it's absurdity...) It's comforting to know you're known for something else other than your looks... hmmm?
I think that the Korean pronunciation of my name (Kell-shii for Kelsey) must mean something bad in Korean, because whenever I tell someone my name, they giggle uncontrollably. It's very, very irritating.
For anyone reading this well after the fact, you might be interested to know this was the blog entry that made my coteachers the most angry back when they were trying to fire me in the summer of 2008. Why? Two reasons:
1) Originally I had a screen capture of the page up, which had a few of their names. They didn't like that. Even though you can go to our school's webpage and see the same thing.
2) They thought I was being intolerant and thinking Koreans stupid. "They didn't try to misspell your name" they said. Yeah, I know, but is it that hard to get it right? I'd say my name is spelled "Brain" at least half the time by Koreans, maybe more.
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