Ain't it funny

It puzzles me when I speak a certain non-English language to an individual and he/ she feels the inclination to reply in English in return.

This morning, I spoke to this Malay guy in Malay and he replied in English. Fine. I thought if I continued speaking in Malay, he’d follow suit eventually but that wasn’t the case.

I’m like, what the hell?

Most of the time, my previous encounters were with Chinese (taking into consideration the fact that my Tamil vocabulary is, indeed, limited) who chose to reply in English when I speak to them in Cantonese. It seems that some of these people think that "Speaking got more standard mah, talk in Cantonese no standard-lah. You think I dunno how to speaking meh???"

This kind of situation makes me marvel - since when do I look like an English teacher?

It’s like me asking for the time and the person telling me that it’s a Thursday.

Here comes the hypocrite part…

I remember doing the same thing when I first started working in KL 5 years ago (Oops, did I just revealed my age?). My clients would speak to me in Cantonese and yours truly would reply in English or Mandarin because her command of the Cantonese dialect s**ked big time (even though she watched a lot of TVB dramas during her leisure time).

Those were the days.

Nowadays, her Cantonese has improved compared to the olden days. Although every now and then, being the banana that she is, she still doesn’t have any clue of some phrases that her friends use.

And when she can’t find the words in Cantonese, fret not, there’s always a substitute word in (i) English (ii) Malay and/or (iii) Mandarin.

Don’t we all love being Malaysians?

“Be what you would seem to be – or, if you'd like it put more simply – never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” – Lewis Carroll in ‘Alice in Wonderland’

Amused,