Monday, April 18, 2011

There's Discourse for Ya'

The other day, I was at a local watering-hole with some co-workers and my Korean tutor. We were talking about the word "discourse"; its derivation, and how it has become the fancy new term that academics like to use (It means the same as "talkin".) My Korean tutor, who speaks quite good English, looked a little confused and said, "What is discourse? Is that to stop having sex?" I was a little confused myself until I realized that he thought discourse might be the opposite of intercourse. That made my day. For one, I could just picture  someone saying, "Ahhhh, I've got a cramp! Discourse honey! Discourse!" And two, it's nice to see that my tutor makes some of the same mistakes in English as I make in Korean. We're all learning.

2 comments:

Clint Gardner said...

From my experience, discourse does indeed cause one not to have sex.

Nathan Price said...

Pillow talk, now that's a discourse worth studying. I think that field is perfect for corpus linguistics.