in the kitchen working with a pot of osmanthus oolong and some leftover carrot cake (chewy and full of pistachios) from last night. from where i am sitting i can hear the mother in the living room arguing Very Passionately on the phone with someone about the appropriate use of “贤伉俪” on wedding invitations (and how the common usage on modern invitations is linguistically and culturally incorrect.) mind you, i am completely on her side when it comes to Getting Things Right, but her tone of voice (every syllable rattling the windows with rising exasperation) is faintly comical and i have a fair inkling of what my classmates must think of me when i go into indignant rants about badly written law textbooks in school.last night we were exchanging documents with our negotiation opponents and one of the opposite solicitors was a classmate i knew rather well, so i thought i’d have a friendly word with him over fb chat, along the demotic lines of ‘yo, will you ask your team if they want to meet on monday to discuss the main points?’ to my astonishment, he wrote me a full paragraph in reply, in lengthy and excruciatingly stiff prose with scarcely a word under three syllables. perhaps he was getting into the part for the assessment.
me: um, you don’t have to be so formal with me. save it for the official correspondence!
classmate: sorry minz! it’s because i know you get very annoyed with people writing badly so i was very scared of writing to you and i made sure to write only in complete sentences.
me: !!! hiyoh! i’m not that censorious lah!(which is a classic example of people doing things entirely for les beaux yeux of their uncle peter, like lord st george.)
***
on the subject of archaic forms of chinese address, if you were to write in classical chinese to your 同窗 (classmate) you should could refer to yourself formally as 同砚弟. i loved that! that is, your classmate is someone with whom you share a 砚台, an inkstone. isn’t that a lovely image though? two students sharing a desk, bent busily over their work, and periodically dipping their brushes into the same inkstone.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird