Sunday, January 21, 2007

What does it mean?!?!?

This posting is one of reminiscence. It took place when I was 14, a Form 2 student in St. Michael's Institution in Ipoh. We had a change of class teacher midway through the year and among the subjects she taught was English. In a government school it isn't difficult to be a star student in English given the ridiculously low standard of the subject taught.

Well, our new teacher, Mrs. Samuel was still early in her tenure as a SMI teacher and like most new teachers would have liked to learn that the class she had was a good class and not full of trouble makers. She was having us for English one fine day and I killed two birds with one stone while appearing completely innocent.

We were doing words ending with 'graphy' and already on the board were words like geography and photography. I could have been a smartass and given her 'cinematography' but felt like being quiet that day. Enter Lum Kai Hoong, my classmate, eager beaver to make a good impression on our new teacher. He asked me for a word and I gave him one. He shot his hand into the air and waited expectantly. Mrs Samuel turned a happy (class had been going well) benevolent eye on him and asked him what his word was. He shot to his feet gave her a winning smile and almost shouted out "pornography!!!". Of course being Malaysian, he pronounced it "Porno-Grafee".

That's when Mrs Samuel's smile became fixed.

Once he'd noticed, his smile became rather fixed as well. In the stunned (and also puzzled) silence of the class I had great difficulty smothering what was a quiet chuckle threatening to turn into loud gaffaws.

Still wearing the fixed smile Mrs Samuel turned away and asked if anyone else had a word ending in 'graphy'. Kai Hoong sat slowly down, his face a picture and was silent for about 2 seconds. Naturally he noticed 'his' word wasn't added to the words already written on the blackboard. After the 2 seconds had lasped, he turned on me in complete panic demanding to know what the word meant.

It was 19 years ago.

I still laugh about it every few years or so. I'm sharing it with you now.

2 comments:

pinksterz said...

tsk tsk
bad hui sen!
lol
so what r ur fren doing now?

Sen said...

Last I saw him, he was an aircraft maintenance engineer.