THE Lowly Peon

Good Morning! 
19 July 2010, 7:49am

Living in China, as a white guy, makes for some interesting linguistic studies. Take, for example, how people somewhat not horribly bad at English may greet me with "Good Morning" at morning, noon, and night.

I was never really too aware of language before coming here. English wasn't a language before, it was just what I called the words I used to say what I thought. I even learned some German back in the day, but that was more like a game to me than a real language. But after coming to China, where people speak their local dialect, and maybe Mandarin, it's something I'm much more aware of, and I realize now that it's nothing more than a tool to communicate.

At lots of international hotels, or some restaurants, the service people speak really good English. Being the international language right now, that's pretty critical. Even though my Chinese is really not bad, my big nose and blond hair give me up as an English speaker right away, so these service folk immediately speak to me in English.

Some of them, however, don't speak great English.

There have been many — far more than I can count — times when someone said "good morning!" to me, in perfect English, at night, or in the afternoon. I assume they had a list of greetings in their English books in High School and decided they liked the sound of it more than the obnoxious "hallo!"

So recently I started saying "good morning" to everyone, at any time of day, if they spoke to me in English. Oddly, they all know it's wrong when I say it. But I still get a kick out of it.

Try it some time. It's really a lot of fun.