Today during what is supposed to be a study hall but can't
really be called a study hall because study halls are illegal now, some of the
students were starting to get on each other's nerves (well after they had
already gotten on mine). One of the
girls finally had it up to her ear lobes and starting calling one of the boys
some bad names. None was particularly
alarming. It's hard to get mad at
someone who insults others by calling them various kinds of residential and
domestic structures. (Barn?
Did you just call him … a barn? A
barn. I mean, seriously … a … barn … No,
really. Really?)
Then she brought out the big guns, an insult to end all
insults that she had heard recently. She
was armed; she was ready. Her forked
tongue moved back and forth between her lips, and she prepared the insult with
a huge spew of venomous bile. She stood
up, stamped her feet, balled her little fists, and called the rambunctious
young man a diphthong. That's correct. Diphthong. And she was spitting mad when she yelled it:
"You, sir, are a DIPHTHONG!"
I lost it. Totally
and completely lost it. I tried to
control myself, I truly did. I tried to
act all, "Oh, that's a baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad word, so you'd better not …
you'd … I say, never ever utter that word …. That … word … never … HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
YOU SAID DIPHTHONG!"
Another English teacher walking down the hallway heard the
commotion and popped her head in. She
didn't even have time to ask a question before I burst out, "She called
that kid … a DIPHTHONG." Then both
of us were laughing. Where had she heard it, we asked
her. What's
the cultural reference?
Ever since Family
Guy hit the scene, my vast knowledge of useless pop trivia has come in
ridiculously handy. That's a Rocky and Bullwinkle reference. That's a Deliverance reference.
Etc., etc., etc. So where in
the heck had this girl ever heard the word diphthong,
let along knew enough to hurl it as a noun?
Apparently, she heard it on a TV show. She and the kids around her all thought it
had something to do with female underwear, hence the strategic emphasis on thong rather than dip(h). So I did what any
English teacher with thirty dictionaries would do -- I made them look up the
word.
You see, a diphthong is a grammatical term that has to do
with the pronunciation of gliding vowels in words (two adjacent vowel sounds
occurring within the same syllable -- as in mouse
and cow and eye and boy and fire).
I know this from being a language geek, as does the other English
teacher.
After the kids looked up the word diphthong, they moved on to Mad Libs, using some form of the words barn and diphthong in each one they completed, giggling madly at their
stories (then stapling them into a booklet and taking them home - go figure).
Who says kids today aren't having fun in school? Must be
a bunch of barn diphthongs.
