From Hilary: Hi, everyone! Mabel and I celebrated the last day of school for the term this past Friday with the kids. The language lessons are still continuing…. from Mabel I've learned that "yunks and yunks" means years and years (for example, "I've lived in this house for yunks and yunks"), and that "She's a real gaig" means that someone is very funny. I've gotten used to the kids telling me that their stomachs hurt by saying, "My stomach's paining me," but it took me a while to figure out that my reminders to put a period at the end of each sentence weren't very effective because the kids refer to a period as a "full stop" (in addition, capital letters are officially known as big letters). Learning the form of English spoken by people from the United Kingdom like Mabel has been helpful for me; Zambia was a British colony (Northern Rhodesia) for some period of time, so I think Mabel's version of English is perhaps a little more familiar to the children. I didn't realize "quite" had so many variations of meaning until I saw the phrase "quite good" on the children's report cards and asked Mabel about it. I was trying to figure out the difference between good, quite good, very good, and excellent; I was mostly puzzled by the two phrases "quite good" and "very good" since to me these meant pretty=2 0much the same thing. Mabel explained that "quite good" means "almost good" or "less than good." Oops - I think I had tried to pay a few of the children a compliment earlier in the week by telling them that their work was quite good…. I hope my words didn't demoralize them but maybe inspired them to work a little harder.
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