Language Games in the World of Today
I have a vivid memory of an argument that broke out during geography class when I was fifteen years old. It was good-natured for the most part, but it always stuck with me for some reason. It was one of those classes where little in the way of meaningful work was ever done; beginning as it always did with the teacher setting us a task and leaving us to our own devices. And so the room divided itself into cliques, whose boisterous post-lunchbreak conversations were made all the more restless from the mid-afternoon sun creeping in through the windows. The teacher seemed to preside over this contained chaos in an invisible, sound-proof bubble at his desk as he sat there with the look of a man contemplating the feasibility of faking his own death and legging it to Tijuana. But then he’d straighten his tie and carry on marking papers.
Right at the back of the class I sat with two guys, and in the row in front of us was a mirror group of three girls. The girls would turn their chairs around and we’d have animated conversations that marched in perfect step to the drumbeat of adolescence. One of the girls was Scottish, and my friend tried to tease her by saying “Scotland’s not even a real country!”
What started out as just another cheap attempt to wind her up turned into a straight-faced, sober debate. Ironically, our usual bid to escape geography class had…
