Language: Pre-sequitur

Posted on December 6th, 2007 by Anna Zhan.
Categories: Blog, English.

When we started teaching in NYC, a number of my classmates and I joined the Urban Dictionary’s Word of the Day mailing list in hopes of being able to comprehend common phrases like “It’s mad brick like dead ass,” which translates as “It’s really very cold.”  As it turns out, I teach a bunch of Asian kids and never encounter this language, but it’s still interesting to get the daily words.

Today’s word was “pre-sequitur“:

Like a non-sequitur, a pre-sequitur doesn’t follow what immediately preceded it, but instead relates to something that came much earlier. It is a sudden or jarring break in the chronology, but it does follow… when you remember what it refers to.

Jen: Why did you leave Los Angeles?
Keith: Well… have you ever lived there?
Jen: I visited once, for a week.  I liked the street performers on the boardwalk…
Keith: Oh, the boardwalk is where I got this red scarf!
Jen: I was trying to knit a scarf just like that last year but I never finished.
Keith: Where do you get yarn around here?
Jen: There’s a good store just a few blocks from here, wanna come see?

 … ten minutes later …

Jen: Huh, do you smell Indian food?
Keith: Hmm, not really… but now I’m in the mood to get some Indian Food.
Jen: Sure, let’s!
Keith: It was the pollution, that’s why.
Jen: pollution?
Keith: Yeah, I wanted somewhere with real air, and LA wasn’t it!
Jen: Oh, why you left Los Angeles 

…finally, a word for how my brain works.  People always complain that I jump around from topic to topic with no explanation, expecting people to understand me.  Some have told me that it seems like I don’t care about what they have to say because I jump back to a previous topic.

The truth is that my brain keeps working on things even after the conversation has passed onto something new, and I add things in as they come to me…maybe ten minutes later, maybe an hour later, maybe a day later…and though it seems ridiculous, I don’t understand when people fail to follow my train of thought.  But if there’s a word for it now, I know I can’t be alone!

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Language: Schlep

Posted on July 28th, 2007 by Anna Zhan.
Categories: Blog, English, NYC.

“Schlep” is my new favorite word.  It’s a bit of local slang that I picked up when I moved to NYC.

What is “schlep”?  It’s a Yiddish word, Google tells me, that refers to a long, tough journey, such as taking the subway from the Bronx down to Brooklyn (which could take up to two hours…because the city is huge, and cause the trains suck…)

Wiki further clarifies that in Yiddish, “schlep” meant “to drag something”, whereas in its American English form, it refers to “dragging the self”.

Since I like to exaggerate and complain, I’ll talk about schlepping on down to the corner store to pick up a jug of milk.  While not a particularly arduous journey (being as I live on the corner, above the store…) but I’m usually exhausted from my summer program, and dragging my body down and back up the stairs to my apartment seems like quite the schlep.

Of course, I’m working at picking up other local slang and accents, such as “fuggeddaboudit”, “coeffee”, and “Manha’an”, but “schlep” is really the first word that I naturally acquired into my vocabulary here.  And I love it.

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