Foul mouth day

In class today, my upper level phonics students were learning the many wonderous sounds of the letters "CH" as in "Chef" and "Chandelier" and "Chemist". Considering that the sounds are learned through memorization and not logic, their were quite a few mispronunced words.

One of the girls slaughtered the word "Chef", which came out more like "Shit". I sort of balked, as the images of the books Chef preparing food and fecal matter not forming a nice image in my head. I told them not to say that word, as it was foul word in English. Of course they began to chant it louder until I called on them to read the next sentence.

The phrase "bushy moustache" was also mispronounced badly. The girl didn't correctly distinguish her "B" from a "P" sound, and didn't correctly blend the "sh" word. What she had said sounded exactly like a slang term for female genitalia. ( I'm trying to keep this PG-13 here! ). Instead, she was laughing because "Bush-ee" is how Korean's typically mispronounce the current President of the United State's name. The girls had another laugh at what they called the "King of America" name, and we moved on.

Ironically, someone badly mispronuncing "George" by incorrectly putting it into Konglish (using Korean characters to represent English words) could make a word similiar to the Korean word for female genitalia. No wonder the poor man has little chance of being taken seriously in this country from time to time.