In my continuing efforts at international relations here in Switzerland I have been teaching the members of the lab aspects of the English language that you don’t necessarily pick up at school. This, I feel, is the least I can do to prepare them for moving abroad and to avoid the numerous pitfalls I have experienced since moving here. I’m all heart!
Obviously first up was swear words. This was the easy one and soon they were f-ing and blinding like the best of them. What they hadn’t considered was combining swear words in different combinations to get their feelings across. Soon they were stringing four to five words together in the middle of a sentence. They even came up with a few I had never even considered. I was very proud.
After, that we went through slang in various situations, we tried jive-talking (inspired by the brilliant scene in Airplane via YouTube), touched briefly on cockney slang (Lock, Stock and two Smoking Barrels, again via YouTube) and had a long listen to the dialect from my home county of Monaghan. Worth a listen:
Next up is surfer/hippy-ese. Not an area I’m that familiar with but I have been, like, totally doing my research on words like “radical”, “bodacious”, “awesome” and “totally”. Soon they’ll be cursing in a strange blend of surfer lingo and Monaghan-ese!
The Swiss Job 