Vocab traps

When I first got to college there was the usual mixture of people from all over Australia and different socio-economic backgrounds. Possibly due to these differences there was a noticeable effort from most people to blend in, which resulted, amoungst other things, in everyone picking up each others vocab. The most notable word that got both myself and a friend (Yes, Benjamin Waters was also bitten) was "dodgy". Dodgy is a great word, from where Benjamin and myself came from it was barely used and consequently had more of an impact when employed by us to make a point. It was also wonderfully ambiguous, I mean dodgy could imply that something was untrustworthy, or that you were skeptical of something, you could even manipulate it to indicate that something wasn't complete or it was just ill favoured. Whatever the reason I shortly found myself using dodgy in almost every sentence and equally alarming after a period of time it just started happening unconciously. I'd find myself having a perfectly interesting conversation but every single time there was a place that I could use "dodgy" I did, and those places were many. In a short space of time both Ben and myself found ourselves saying dodgy so much that it drove each of us mad and we broke each other of the habit shortly there after. Dodgy was a locallized college phenomenon, or so I thought.

Living in England there are a lot of idiosyncracies that I pick up as a foreigner that the Brits themselves don't even notice. Something that i at first put down to just an unusual expression was "To be honest with you...". It seems innocuous, used to possibly draw you into the trust of the person saying it, almost like you're being told something that others are not, but the implications are a little sinister. Obviously if the person is being honest with you when he / she says that it implies that they are NOT being honest with you the rest of the time. So initially it seemed a little odd to me but hey, it wasn't the only Brittish idiosyncracy that was strange. Recently though things have changed. More and more people from more and more different backgrounds (english speaking backgrounds) are starting to use the phrase. In fact it's gotten so bad that its at that endemic level that "dodgy" was for me at college. One of my work colleagues doesn't even notice when he says it anymore and when i started trying to break him of the habit by interupting with a "yeah, be honest with me" every time he said it, he initially freaked out at the frequency he used the phrase and now just subconciously filters out my response and keeps on using it. To be honest with you I expect that these kind of dodgy phrases are like fashion, they dodge in and out of popularity and in a few months time it will be something else, I'll let you know :)

I went to the farnborough airshow last weekend with Eachan. That was a very cool Sunday afternoon trip, though getting there, like travelling anywhere in England, was a serious pain despite the fact that Eachan only lived about 10km from it. It is easy to explain to someone how powerful a jet is in horsepower or some other means of measuring power, but that mental understanding / picture doesn't quite do it justice when it comes to the real thing. Imagine a tiny jet around 1km away on a runway with ~5k people on a field around me. Back another 1km or so is a carpark. Now the jet starts to taxi to the take off run way and the sound it emits is just incredible. People start to look at each other in alarm and begin to make motions about covering their ears. Now the jet finishes it taxi and starts to fire the engines up. Whereas before I was stunned by the sheer power and noise the jet was emitting now I'm just speechless as the seemingly impossibly large noise from before starts to climb up in truely mind numbing degrees. All the babies and children around me are now crying. The jet starts to move. Now all the adults are on their knees with hands clamped over their ears. The jet screams along the run way and takes off. Now every single car alarm in the carpark ~2km away from the jet simultaneously goes off. It's really hard to convey the kind of power that these jets have, your brain struggles to ascribe that much raw energy to the tiny little jet that is now kilometers up in the sky doing all kinds of acrobactic feats that seem to defy not only gravity but the nature of their own propulsion.

I'm not really into planes and the like but I really had an enjoyable day and it was very interesting to me to see that more and more these airshows are about UAVs. Looks like shortly wars will be faught by geeks like me controlling vehicles by computers rather then pilots actually in them. Working for the government would generally be a bad thing but with toys like that I must just be tempted one day :)