![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
variations in the Anglosphere
Dec. 12th, 2024 12:02 pmThe ninja girl has been teaching English in Japanese public schools for ten years now. She's got an American mother (me) and an English father (Wakanomori), and she's lived in both places, though primarily in the United States. It means she's familiar with words and songs and games from both England and the United States... but native English-speaking English teachers in the Japanese schools come from other parts of the Anglosphere as well, and it can make for interesting conversations when they get together, as when a teacher from Jamaica was talking about a playground game called, in Jamaica, "Chinese skip." A teacher from South Africa recognized the game, but said they called it "Chinese elastic."
"I didn't know what they were talking about," said the ninja girl.
"I think I do," I said. "We had a game we used to play with a large loop of elasticized cord. Two people would stand inside the loop, about three or four feet apart so the loop was pulled taut at their ankles, making a little elastic rectangle. Then a third person would stand in between them and do a jumping pattern, landing inside, outside, and on the elastic. We called it 'Chinese jump-rope.'"1
But neither in her years of school in Massachusetts, nor in her year at a school in Dorset had the ninja girl encountered the game. Maybe it fell out of fashion in the United States and was never a thing in England? Or maybe it's just chance of where she happened to live?
On the other hand, both the Jamaican English teacher and the ninja girl knew the song "I'm a Little Teapot," but the South African English teacher didn't.
All of them--including a Filipino English teacher--knew "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," but they had different hand motions to go with it.
1 We both acknowledged how all these names are examples of that naming convention where you stick some faraway/other/foreign group-name on a thing to show that it's different from another, common, this-is-how-WE-do-it version of it, or something like it.
"I didn't know what they were talking about," said the ninja girl.
"I think I do," I said. "We had a game we used to play with a large loop of elasticized cord. Two people would stand inside the loop, about three or four feet apart so the loop was pulled taut at their ankles, making a little elastic rectangle. Then a third person would stand in between them and do a jumping pattern, landing inside, outside, and on the elastic. We called it 'Chinese jump-rope.'"1
But neither in her years of school in Massachusetts, nor in her year at a school in Dorset had the ninja girl encountered the game. Maybe it fell out of fashion in the United States and was never a thing in England? Or maybe it's just chance of where she happened to live?
On the other hand, both the Jamaican English teacher and the ninja girl knew the song "I'm a Little Teapot," but the South African English teacher didn't.
All of them--including a Filipino English teacher--knew "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," but they had different hand motions to go with it.
1 We both acknowledged how all these names are examples of that naming convention where you stick some faraway/other/foreign group-name on a thing to show that it's different from another, common, this-is-how-WE-do-it version of it, or something like it.
