teaching gaffes

It's often unwise to teach slang or more stilted forms of English because the students have a tendency to (1) overuse what they learn and (2) use it in the wrong context. I appear to have made this basic pedagogical mistake in my CNN English class: the first lesson I taught this semester came not from CNN, but from a Marmot's Hole article about a certain Jason Lee, a Korean-American who defended his Philadelphia diner from two robbers by shooting them: one was killed, the other injured. The blog post used the locution "popped a cap in his ass," which I explained was a slang term for "shot him." What I should have done, however, was impress upon my students the fact that they shouldn't be using such an expression when writing practice sentences. Here's the howler I got yesterday from a student practicing the verb "to gore," which came from a chapter in the CNN textbook about the yearly Running of the Bulls in Pamplona:

The bull wants to gore the hunter, but the hunter pops a cap in the bull's ass.

I'm at the office and trying like hell not to cackle like a mad scientist.


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