Let’s play language

Four Chinese entrepreneurs, the eldest of whom is no more than 24, are toying with me in a language studio that aims to do exactly what our playful slogan advertises, that is, to play language.

The title of the outfit already playfully takes the resilience and sturdiness of a small creature called tardigrades, aka “waterbears” and “moss piglets.” “Ugly or cuddly” (a matter of preference) looking tiny living things, they survive radiation in outer skies and cold temperatures of trenches like that of the Marianas.

In Chinese, the Hanzi is pronounced as “wo te bier” with the sound derived from, you got it, waterbear. The formal name of the outfit is Waterbear Language Studio where students (in academe and business alike) are cajoled to come and play language, frolic in the vast fields of their brains.

Wait a minute, you say. There is something out of the ordinary in the use of words here.

Sure. But when an umpire hollers, “Let’s play ball,” as he (yes, Betsy, it’s still a male’s game) does in baseball, it means the game begins. When an artist fingers a keyboard and starts hammering a calibrated set of strung strings, a musician is “playing” the piano. The “playroom” for children is a place where they are encouraged to create and innovate.

Waterbear Language Studio aims to do the same in inviting folks to come and “play language,” an offer to encourage the language creating and innovating part of the brain in four forms: writing, reading, listening, and speaking. Now, the choice of the critters’ name might be stretching the rationale a bit, but it works for the audience and t’aint that bad on me, either!

Besides, way more than two scores ahead of their time, in a culture that still honors the elderly and looks up to anyone with a tenuous relation to academe, my advice commands a captive audience. So there you have it; I am back to helping define the parameters of an enterprise, how it manages and operates, develops and does research. And you thought I was quietly retired!

As befitting any modern business concern and following the four categories of “DOING” (action) in my four columns of knowing (sensation, emotion, cognition, and action), we have structured the group as a non-hierarchical operation.

Staff meetings focus on what assigned roles are played (presently, a general manager, marketing, finance, office operation, and pedagogues) and what the specific functions, or DOs, each role entails. No one worries about organizational “face” since “faking it” is not necessary. Meetings are around the table before a magnetic whiteboard, and either I as the oldest, or the one playing GM, facilitate meetings. The focus is on the “real” rather than on “pretend.” I “pedagogue” to broaden the function beyond the Confucian image of the expert pouring gems of wisdom on the flipped-open brains of students, duly certified when they return the same “wisdom” in standardized tests.

We are in between academic sessions in this university town and attending third year students from out of the region look for part-time jobs, and take evening courses generally to help them pass standard government tests, improve on their speaking skills–in this case, oral englisCHe, aka, ChEnglish! The last two terms are my ad words promoting learning sessions. The CH highlights a language with “Chinese (CH) characteristics,” a phrase Beijing uses to promote, i.e., “socialism with Chinese characteristics”!

Our class admonition to leave “face” outside the door, and just be one’s self around the table regardless of how one talks (“come one, come all” and “first come, first served”, are acceptable English phrases; definitely of “Chinese” characteristics), the permission-giving ambience appeals to many who usually refuse to speak because of fear of being judged “wrong”, or worst, laughed at, thus “shy or shamed” for loss of “face.”

As a rule of thumb, Euro-Anglos tend to focus on time, clarity on “what” and precision on “when,” like schedules (English in India made sure the train ran on time) while Asians in general identify with place and location, and what role to play, “where and who.” Thus, half of university students sit at the back being “nobody” and the rest, in some level of being “somebody” toward the front. Where one sat determined what station one claimed in the scheme of things.

Class architecture of assigned seats around a center table converted hierarchy to flat operations. “Image determines behavior,” K. Boulding opined; changed image invites changed behavior!

We see ourselves as Language Studio artists, creating and innovating on images: sensual, emotive, cognitive, and willed.

In my computer dictionary, there are seven categories of the word “play” as a verb, five as a noun, 39 as part of a phrase, 17 as phrasal verb, with two noun and adjective derivatives, with the word’s origin in Old English as pleg(i)an ‘to exercise’ plega ‘brisk movement’, related to Middle Dutch pleien ‘leap for joy, dance’.

Wanna play?