Lost in translation.

I may have gone a bit overboard with today's title. I wasn't really lost in any translation. Heck, I'm studying in Ireland and these people speak english... yknow, English as in the international lingua franca. And I can speak English too. Surely two people speaking the same language won't have any problems communicating eh??

WRONG!

Way back when, i always thought that I was linguistically competent enough in English to be understood by native speakers and vice versa. This unfortunately, is just wishful thinking on my part cos the fact of the matter is, I can't even hold an intelligent conversation without having to ask the other person to repeat himself every 2 to 3 sentences. And they're definitely not making things any better for me by using all those weird jargons and slang. For example, I have this classmate who keeps asking me "How are you keeping?" and i keep meaning to tell him that i'm not keeping anything and that the use of 'How' instead of 'What' is grammatically incorrect. But trying to be polite, my typical response wud be to chuckle softly as if he'd been telling me a silly joke and walk away before he can say anything further. (He usually has a perplex look on his face afterwards). Anyway, i've only just realized that "How are you keeping" is a hip and trendy way to ask someone how they're doing. OOOOHhhhh, the humiliation. =____='

But putting that story aside, I've just had the worst communication breakdown today. And it's not because of some weird slang or trendy concoction of words. In fact, it's the total opposite. Today's language barrier occured in a more professional setting. YES, pathology tutorial! The topic was neoplasia so our pathology tutor was explaining all about neoplasia and tumour and malignancy and necrosis bla bla bla... Anyway, as she was explaining, she keeps saying "tumour inside you" and "carcinoma inside you" and this and that... And I thought it was pretty rude of her to suggest any of us having any sort of tumour or cancerous lesions inside of us. I even had a mind to tell her off just because she could seriously offend some people (myself included). I didn't do it in the end tho for the simple reason that i was too chicken to do it.

And you're probably laughing at me, but cowardice has its plus side.

Haaaa... i've got you sitting up now! Probably wondering what i mean by that, huh? Well, it seems that my cowardice helped to save me from total embarrassment and a life-long trauma to all-things-pathology. Believe it or not, but what i heard as "inside you" was actually "in-situ". Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like i haven't been doing my studying and have never come across that particular word, it's just that i've been pronouncing it differently. Being Malay, i read it like any typical Malay --> in-situ = in-see-two.

Oh well, i guess this is just one of the joys of studying abroad. What's there to living overseas if not for the occasional language barrier, eh?? Sigh~