Time & Space

Time:

Pun with non-native English speakers: Yesterday, my family and I decided to update the family portrait that's been hanging on our walls for the past 11 years. We had more than 2 hours to kill before our appointment (because we're not the kind of family that makes appointments before going into the studio...and also, the updating of the family portrait was kind of a spur-of-the-moment idea), and so my cool dad decided that it was indecent for girls that graduated from Penn to go around without watches (yeah, now you see where I inherited my amazingly rational brain). We spent such a long while browsing the Sears watches that I wondered if we'd missed our appointment, but Cool Dad assured me, "don't worry, we have plenty of time."

"Ho, ho, get it? We have lots of time?" I said, gesturing to the gazillion watches that surrounded us at the mo', and winking a couple times in case they didn't get it. Well, maybe I didn't wink enough times, because Cool Dad, after releasing a couple plosive 'ha's', said, "but you do know that shi-geh ('watch') is different from shi-gan ('time'), right?

I knew I should have winked a 3rd time. See, in the Theory of Joke-Telling, the winking, among other functions, serves to sway the audience from their inherent tendency to be so literal-minded, allowing individual words to cluster into groups of words that are similar enough to be deemed identical (we say the words are isomorphic) within the particular joke-world.

Thus, my winking should have dispelled the notion, for the moment, that "watch" and "time" were two distinct words. Unfortunately, I forgot the often-ignored corollary, that when the audience consists of either non-native English speakers or members of the Chung family- double whammy- than the jokester ought to consider throwing in a couple extra winks for good measure.

Space:

I discovered the true relative position of the sun to the Earth way back in the first grade- which in itself was kind of an embarrassing moment. See, we were doing a poetry unit, and Mrs. Bornander had each of us stand up in front of the whole class and read our poem aloud. I guess in my lame first-grade poem, I was describing the various objects found on planet Earth, like sky, grass, flowers (and rainbows and butterflies yay), and when I reached the part about the stars, moon, and sun, my classmates started snickering for some reason unbeknownst to First Grade Me. I stood there clutching the piece of paper with my poem written on it in one hand, and staring up at Mrs. B. as she tried to explain very nicely that the sun actually lived outside of the Earth. How traumatizing. No wonder I hate class presentations. I think that is the first time I ever considered that anything existed outside of our humble planet, past the blue sky.