Now Hear this.

Tag: literacy

  • And stuff like that

    I was walking home from the supermarket, and he was walking towards me on the same side of the street. He was alone. He was wearing a backpack, and he was holding it by the straps. It was early in the day, so he was going to work. He was talking, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was on a call.

    As he came closer to me, I heard a snatch of what he was saying. This is what he said: “The people paint their houses beautiful colours and stuff like that.”

    Because I’m a language teacher, I started to think about his words. I only heard a little bit of his conversation, but I knew he was talking about a holiday overseas.

    He said the people. If he was talking about this country, I think he would just say people. And when he said the, I think he meant everybody, not just some people, so there are many colourful houses.

    You can find pictures of lots of colourful houses in other countries on the internet, but I haven’t seen anything like that in Auckland. Yet.

    But back to the language. I found the man’s last few words interesting: “… and stuff like that”. 

    Stuff  is a general word that can mean many things. In this case, the man knew the person he was talking to. He knew that the other person understood him, so he didn’t have to give any more details.

    And stuff like that is a useful phrase that is similar to you know what I mean or etc. or I don’t need to give you any more details.

  • A Tale of Two Cars

    Let’s start with something easy.

    Question one: What’s yellow, blue and white, and has four wheels?

    Answer:

    Question two: The guy in the orange vest in the picture below is kneeling at the side of the road. What has he got in his hands? The picture isn’t clear, but the thing begins with a “c”, ends with an “a”, and has six letters in total. If you still can’t guess, read on.

    One morning, I was walking down the road to the supermarket. On the other side of the road, I saw a policeman standing in the road beside a black car, talking to the driver. His police car was parked a short distance behind the stopped car.

    I took a photo with my phone, and stopped to look. I couldn’t hear anything, but I thought the driver of the black car had done something wrong, like driving too fast, for example. This happened outside a primary school, so there are speed restrictions around schools. Well, that was my first thought, but sometimes you can get the wrong end of the stick.

    Anyway, I did my shopping, and on the way back home, I saw a young man on the other side of the road, walking up and down, and talking on his phone. He was dressed the same as the driver of the black car, and in fact, it was the same guy. I went over and talked to him, and I told him I had taken a picture of the incident. I showed it to him, and I asked his permission to use the photo for this post. He agreed.

    I walked on, and then I heard somebody running up behind me. When I looked round to see who it was, it was the driver. He said to me, “I don’t suppose I could get a copy of that picture, could I?”, so I did what he asked.

    But that’s not the full story. Here’s the order that things happened. As he was driving, the young man’s fan belt broke, and his car wouldn’t move.

    A police car was passing, saw the problem and helped. The policeman got out and pushed the broken-down car to where it’s sitting in the picture.

    In the police car, there was a cameraman who was taking films for a TV police show, and he’s recording the policeman talking to and helping the driver.

    But that’s not the last word; there’s more! The driver didn’t have just one piece of bad luck; he had two!

    He was on his way to a friend’s graduation ceremony at the University, and when his car broke down, he missed it. Maybe he wanted a copy of my photo as proof for his friend of why he missed the capping ceremony.