Christmas at work (2 of 3): More fun.

Amidst the lead-up-to-Christmas levity, I worked a shift with my one (tall) (thin) (Latino-American) coworker who recently graduated high school and who is attending community college in the area, and who has a (very white-skinned) (very dark-haired) girlfriend who sings in a punk band and who laughs at my bad jokes and who seems to like me.

So, referring to her with the name that I’ve been using lately, I was like, “So, what are you getting your cool girlfriend for Christmas?”

And, it turns out that he had already gotten her a gift, something that he found online and that he said that he probably spent too much money on, and it was like sculpted barbed wire, only as a bracelet and as a necklace, the latter of which would presumably hang down on her white skin and nestle among her shapely breasts and stand out as barbed wire, and it was like $120 for everything, but that’s what he wanted to get for her.

Also, my one (tall) (new) (Thai) coworker had been asking me a lot about linguistics, and I had been telling her that (Thai) had actually been popping up a lot in patterns of historical evolution in the world’s languages in this book that I’d been reading this summer, and since I’d been telling her I’d bring it in, I did that one day, along with another article, only I messed up reading the schedule and she wasn’t there, and I ended up talking about it with my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones.

And, the article I was reading was about these funky deferential pronouns where different nouns become substituted for words like “I” and “you,” and I showed them the article, and they had to sound out the English letters-spelled words, but then they began recognizing them, and telling me about how they were used in their language.

Like, one word for “slave” that the article said you’d say was a legitimate word and it’d be used in certain contexts, but no-one had really used the word that way in a hundred and fifty years or so, they were saying.

And, they had these examples of these really long titles that were used by a (Buddhist) priest when addressing others and by others when addressing the (King), and they both said that yes, those were both really words that were used, and the last one was super long and I was amazed at it, and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker just pulled up some YouTube video of a recent political speech where someone was giving an address to the king, and we just waited, and like twenty seconds or so in, there was that super long pronoun used by someone addressing the (King), and she was like “See, see!”

Later, too, it was time to close, and my task ended up being cleaning the bathrooms, so I asked them what my pronoun would be, as someone who cleans the bathrooms.

“Slave,” my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phone was like, referring to that one pronoun that hadn’t been used in like a hundred and fifty years or so.

. . .

(Interestingly, both said that this super-elaborate pronoun system is something that you’re taught as part of your [Thai] language education, in like late middle school or so. At that point, I guess, they teach you these words for “I” and “you” and stuff that you should only use with [high] [Buddhist] priests and whatnot, in case you’re ever in the situation where you should use them, or if you ever come across them.)