Weird Queries

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See more images by timbeckenham at flickr.

Despite my situation of a foreigner living and working in a country where I speak the common tongue extremely poorly, it appears that most of the time I spend discussing the topic of language and learning, almost all of this is spent explaining English & its uses to my work colleagues. I work in *very* big company, world-wide, and English is the language of this business. We also recruit locally as preference, so almost all of my colleagues have learnt English as their second or third (or fourth) language. I'm constantly amazed how quickly my work-mates have adapted to this environment. Not by osmosis, but by sitting down on weekends and thumbing through Chinese-English dictionaries and using various computer translation tools to sort out some of the complicated English terms (business, science, corporate wankwords) that is sent their way. I have enough problems learning the corporate wankwords and filtering their meaning, but in a second language? I'm super impressed.

So, during the day I field a lot of queries about 'which word is most appropriate', 'what does this mean', etc. etc. Its part of my 'duty' in the group to help out in this area. But everynow and then, you really get a weird query, like this text message I receive a few nights ago...

"Do you know what is the meaning of rhombus?"

My life is never dull, but geeky. And not surprisingly, I knew the answer...

Wondering about the photo? Nothing to do with this entry, but its cool. Its from our mountain trip to Huangshan over the CNY holidays. I'll eventually get around to writing more about this soon. Check out more of these photos on my flickr set page.

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