Me talk Pretty one day.

(In case you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. It’s very witty, easy to read and funny. I generally love Sedaris’ work.)

I was trying to read something (I’ll get back to that later) recently with no much of success and a story from when I first came to London came back to me. It was the very first week of classes and I was still trying to adapt to a very new and different environment. We had theoretical classes in the morning and practical classes in the afternoon at the computer rooms. The class was small. We were around 15 people overall, most of which were foreigners. I believe there were around 5 – 6 British people and everybody else came from a different country.

During one of these practical classes near the end of the first week, we were quietly working in the lab. After the first hour, a girl called ‘Elise’ stood up and started packing her stuff. I was a bit amazed that she was leaving so early since we had so much stuff to go through that I asked her about it surprised:

-Elise, are you leaving?

She started laughing her heart out loudly and she replied for everybody to hear:

-Yes, I’m still alive. It’s not like I’m dead yet!

That took me by surprise. Having a deep Greek accent of course my ‘leaving’ came out as ‘living’! I felt very embarrassed since I wanted to make a good impression to my new colleagues and now some of them were laughing at me. It was like a slap in the face. However, after feeling embarrassed I felt very angry at her behaving so childish. We were doing the same course and she found it difficult when it was at her own native language (bitch). Show me some respect! It took me a while however to give a presentation in the classroom without feeling extremely nervous about my English.

This story always comes back when I’m linguistically challenged.

Since I am a very serious book worm, I was reading the personal ads at the end of the GT magazine. Don’t ask me why exactly, but some of them are extremely hilarious like the one written by a wealthy 70 year old guy looking for a 18 – 25 male for friendship! Lol… Really? Because you’d have so much in common to share…

Anyway, have you read these ads recently? There are so many abbreviations that they are truly unreadable! OK, I can understand stuff like the ‘XL U’ (extra-large uncut), the LTR (long term relationship) or the ‘yo’ (years old) but what does these mean?

-CD (Compulsive disorder?)

-WE (well educated?)

-VWE (very well educated?)

-GSOH (gosh misspelled?)

-WLTM (white loving trash male?)

and last but not least:

-Convincing TV (what the f is that?)