Former hockey teammates from the proudest male University hall get together for a meal every New Year. Thirty years after graduation, they all have reached their fifties, the age of “male menopause” and liked to complain about any stuff they don't like around them. There were three engineers, a doctor, an investment consultant, a barrister, an architect and a professor at the table.

 

During a random conversation, engineer A suddenly asked the professor, “What are you teaching?”

 

“English.” the professor replied.

 

“Really? Students still need to learn English at university?” He then looked more confused.

 

“Wait. Were you studying languages back then?”  

 

The professor shook his head and was surprised that his “brother” didn't even know what his major was after all these years.

 

When he was about to explain. The Barrister interrupted and said, “My goodness, university students’ English is horrible these days. They call Shakespeare “Sharkspear”! Can you believe that? They even say “tofu” instead of “dove” now, thanks to that misleading shampoo commercial.” He continues, “But after all, English is their mother tongue, it shouldn't be that bad.”

Engineer B gives a wry smile and then looks disappointed, “That's not true. University students today are not far from being illiterate.”

 

“Yeah! Right!” They all agreed. These middle-aged men began to give examples one after another to justify their views on how miserable is the language ability of the new generation and not giving any chance for the professor to response. After twenty minutes of exciting discussion, the architect kindly turned back to the professor and asked, “What exactly is the English you are teaching?”

 

“I teach common mistakes in spelling, antonyms, sentence structures and idioms…” The professor was gently explaining to them after taking a sip of English tea. Not waiting for him to finish, those mad professionals had gone wild again.

 

“What?” the doctor raised his voice. “Are you kidding me? Aren’t these primary school level?”

 

“Seems our English is not bad at all. At least we had worked hard for the primary school exam. It certainly won’t be a problem for us,” the engineers said with confidence. Everyone was fired up and babbling something about how their brain was able to be crammed up with thousands of words and how many classic literature books they had read. They were strongly convinced that there is no way their children’s English proficiency can be ever comparable to theirs.

 

“They shouldn't be the one to be blamed. You see, all of our kids went to international schools. It’s not easy to strike a balance.” Abruptly, they had sympathy for their children for not speaking well in their mother tongue because they are trained to be multilingual in their schools.

 

“Bad English is acceptable if other languages are good enough,” was their real thought.

 

Instead of stroking his beard with his fingertip this time, the professor gave his gold wire glasses a little push. “Why not try out a few of my students’ exercises?” The professor chuckled and spoke in a tone with a wee bit of naughtiness. After three seconds of silence, everyone began to work up an incredible excitement. “Let’s see!” Eyebrows raised, eyes popped, engineer C dramatically jumped out of his seat and volunteered to accept the challenge. He had his whole body leant towards the professor that his salivary face was merely hanging on his half-bald head. Engineers A and B had C’s back. “That’s right! The brats are in no way better than us!” Meanwhile the doctor, the architect and the investment consultant grouped themselves in a team to battle against the “engine dudes”. The barrister held his head high and smirked. He had full confidence in his one-man team.

 

From the pocket of his trousers, the professor took out a piece of small white paper. He was smiling, yet not a single word slipped out of his mouth. Slowly he took a one-dollar ballpoint pen out of his shirt’s pocket and elegantly wrote down the word “Edinburgh”. “First, let’s test your pronunciation,” said the professor, holding up the piece of paper, pointing to the most arrogant engineer C. “You go first!” For some reasons, engineer C hesitated and burst into laughter. “I always pronounce it as ‘Edin-burk’! No way that could be wrong, is… isn’t it?” At the same moment as he managed to finish his utterance, engineer C turned to engineer A for help, “Well,  I never said I was good at English. You go!” Engineer A gave a little shrug, trying to get himself out of this mess. The investment consultant broke his long silence and said, “That’s so wrong. It’s not “Edin-burk”. It’s ‘Edin-burch’!” He was determined to win because he always had that confidence in himself. After all, his job was to advise people to make investments. Unlike to what he expected, only the lawyer seemed to agree with his answer. Half of the group cunningly said that both pronunciations were correct while the other stood by engineer C. It was such a chaos that the waiters thought something big had happened and called the restaurant manager to have a look. While the group was busy at the seemingly endless discussion, the professor took his time to sip the tea and taste the fried scallops, waved to the waiters to ask for more tea, and left the brutal discussion go on.

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After seven or eight minutes, they started to become quieter. The queue broke, everyone just tried randomly. At the end, all of them gave up and turned their eyes to the professor. The professor raised the paper, “You guys are all wrong, 0 marks.” As he said this, everyone screamed in disbelieve. Everyone expected him to reveal the correct pronunciation for the word “Edinburgh”, instead he wrote another eight words on the paper: air, ayre, aire, are, ere, err, eyre, heir. The professionals followed the stroke and read it one by one: “air”, “ayre”, “aire” ... Soon they pronounced every word as “aire”, and became less smoother and smoother as it progressed until there was not enough air to breathe. Their confidence had more or less dropped from 100 to 0. The professor slowly placed the paper on the table. Everyone persisted in asking how those words should be pronounced. However, the professor didn’t answer, only picked up the teapot and filled up all the teacups with water. “Hey! Don’t leave us hanging! Say it. How to read them?” A commotion begun, some of them stood up, some of them simply walked to his back to “find” the answer. The professor raised the teacup and move it in a circle from left to right, just like paying tribute to something, then gulped down a whole cup of water then spoke aloud, “Cheers! To our generation and the excellent language skills!”

 

Nobody was convinced as they failed the first task. Then, they completed each other’s sentences to insult the professor. “Cheers? No Kidding! You are just giving us a hard time with difficult questions. No one could ever pronounce those words!” Though the professor seemed to be surrounded by enemies, he held his view against the majority. “Difficult? Really? All of my student can pronounce them correctly now! In fact, pronunciation can be checked in dictionaries. It cannot sufficiently prove that our English is bad.” The barrister was good at rebuttal, “Your speech makes sense, counselor Weasley. Cannot pronounce a few words, or even write some wrong words may not necessarily be representing poor English proficiency. However, it is you guys charging the undergraduates nowadays are less competitive in terms of language proficiency, which I haven’t drawn any conclusion yet. ” The professor chuckled.

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No sooner had the doctor witnessed what happened, he helped the lawyer out. “He’s got a point. These days, the kids’ English is bad. They don’t know how to use appropriate words at times, how to write grammatically correct, and the meaning of words,” said the doctor. The professor gave him a thumbs-up and a compliment, “What an insightful comment! Now, let’s talk about the use of common words.” Being halfway through dinner, the engineers inevitably showed their white feathers and pointed at the architect, “It’s his turn. He has never answered any question.” The professor told the architect, “Well, please tell me the differences between ‘also’, ‘too’ and ‘as well’ in usage.” Afterwards, he turned to the doctor, “You tell me the difference between ‘need to’ and ‘have to’.”

 

In the next 30 seconds, all of them were gazing at each other helplessly, and no one could answer the question. After a while, the investment consultant tried to smooth things out and said, “This is like buying a stock fund. You are free to mix and match. I once heard people say ‘I also love it too’.” Having heard this, others started giving suggestions like ‘I also love it as well’, ‘I love it too as well’ and ‘I love it as well too’ saying they were also acceptable. They were just babbling, though, as no one could tell the differences between these three adverbs. The professor left them talk and picked up the fattest chicken leg, then sliced it, ate it and let them continue to struggle. Finally, the architect summed up, “They are all the same!” Loud cheers spread out to show their approval. “Yes! Right! There is no difference! You are making fun of us!” They all yelled. The professor sighed and said, “Exactly the same!” Everyone was over the moon and whooped, “Yeah! Finally got it correct!” At this moment, the professor shook his head saying, “No, I mean, you and the students made the same mistake.”

 

The group of experts was disappointed and as deflating balloons, the air leaked out, and they fell to their seats. All of a sudden, one of the balloons rose again right before it deflated once more. It was the doctor who clenched his fist, and shouted, “Idioms! I must be more familiar with idioms than your students! Challenge me!” Everyone saw him sweating, worrying that he might suffer a stroke. Subsequently, they helped him down back to his seat. The professor found himself going over the top, so he stood up with a big smile on his face to make the doctor feel better. “Why so serious? Let’s end this game.”

 

Meanwhile, the waiters were sneakily stretching their necks to see what would happen. Unexpectedly, the doctor banged on the table. “I got 7As and 1C in the public examination, though my English was C,” the doctor bellowed.

 

After realizing that he had heated up the conversation, the professor had no choice but to cool it down by saying, “We all are the elites of our society. There’s no way for kids to defeat us. I admit that those questions are very hard, so you don’t have to take it seriously.”

 

The doctor did not listen to him and commanded indignantly, “shut up and take out your idioms exercises!”

 

In fact, he had already grabbed the professor’s briefcase before he could say Jack Robinson. Meanwhile, all their heads had turned to the briefcase at once and gathered together. Quickly, the lawyer took out the Freshman English Practice with only his fingertips and said, “I’ll go first!”

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While he was speaking, he opened a page at random. “Do a De..dev.. Lo...What? What does that even mean? I can’t believe I cannot pronounce two words in a four-word idiom!” he said.

 

The investment consultant assisted him right away. “An idiom like this is way too difficult, isn’t it? How on earth can we as professionals not understand that? Unless it is too hard.”

 

The doctor had been sweating all over the body. With his face flushed, he went to the bathroom angrily. No one knew that he was punching the bathroom’s wall with his fist and struggling to suppress his sobs, but tears had been turned to snots later.

 

The professor gasped with disdain. He spun the teacups and chuckled, “do a Devon Loch, means someone suddenly fail when they are very close to winning. You should’ve seen it if you’d spent time studying.”

 

Do a Devon Loch? What was he talking about? Everybody was frowning speechless. They all quieted down. Later, engineer A suggested they talk about something else. Few subjects had been changed before engineer B went back to the original topic.

 

Engineer C asked again, “So you’re really teaching common mistakes in spelling, idioms and sentence structures, huh? As I’ve told you, these things should’ve been learnt in primary school. How unreasonable is that college students do not know all that?”

 

“Yeah, right!” The engineers went along with it.

 

The architect, the lawyer, the investment consultant and the barrister gave many examples to support their own arguments as usual, drawing no conclusions that night.

 

The professor folded his paper, put it back in his pocket, and covered his ballpoint pen with a cap. After zipping up his briefcase, he picked up the teacup and continued to keep his mouth shut.