My 2 youngest had their first ski day of the year last week.
Actually, they had their first 3 days of the year last week…
Oh, they love to complain about skiing.
I don’t want to go!
Nooooo!
I want to play with my friends!
AWESOME! YOU’RE GOING!
Is it just MY kids who complain about things and then have tons of fun when they do it, but then they complain again next time again?
On the last run my 7yr old said to my wife
Mom, I want some bumps and jumps on this run.
He had fun.
When we got to the bottom I asked
Who’s going to complain the next time we go skiing?
NOT ME!!!! they both said.
The “bumps and jumps” made me think of an email one of my VAs wrote me about a “Filipinism”:
——
If you regularly exchange business emails or talk to your Filipino virtual assistants, you may notice that there’s something odd about their English that you can’t quite put your finger on.
They have these phrases that sound right grammatically but don’t quite feel right.
If you’ve ever encountered that, you’ve just experienced a Filipinism.
It’s another idiosyncrasy of Filipinos when they use English. It usually happens when something is misheard or as a result of transliteration.
You may have encountered this with customer service. You know you’re talking to a Filipino when they’re asking you to hold, they’ll say, “For a while..”
Or when they ask you to repeat something, they might say, “Can you repeat that for me one more time?”
Or they ask you to “fill up” a form instead of filling out a form.
It’s one of the things they know they shouldn’t be doing. They learn about it in school. But when everybody talks and writes the same way, it’s a really hard habit to break.
——
My experience is that if you ask them to not say that thing any more (a gentile correction of their english) they’ll correct it and get better.
John