Hebrish: Hung out to dry

By JUDY KRAMER
English grammar is the bane of most non-native speakers. Take prepositions, for example. You can't count the number of times you've heard your neighbor offering to meet you on 12 p.m. in Monday at Tel Aviv. But have you heard about the teenager who has a lot of experiment in babysitting on his naybers for two years (ouch)? Then there's the lack of prepositions, as in "I'm a good cook and my friends ask me to cook them," or the creatively invented ones, for example, "It's a bit unfair that you have decided to build this mall in the middle of our noses." One enthusiastic student requested to talk to a solider about the army because he'd like to be apart from it, and a fan of Gidi Gov wants to have the luck to bump in with people like him. Then there are the superfluous prepositions, as in the formal letter beginning, "I would like to draw back your attention to" or the kid who begs to start school later so that his grades will rise up. His friend was of similar opinion, saying that in this case, the teachers will be more wakey and will not shoot on us. And the use of the passive tense?! Those lobbying for starting school later declare that the students will be more concentrated, while another describes her favorite leisure activity as being hung out with my friends. Babysitting is an interesting topic to pocket-money earners, who proclaim with no qualms of conscience that the baby must be eaten at 10 p.m. A peer explains how she especially likes babysitting because it's interesting to see how babies are developed (doesn't she leave when the parents come home?). The words "nothing," "never" or "ever" seem to pose a challenge, as demonstrated by a serious objector to doctors' strikes: "I think doctors should not strike. Life above everything. Nothing worth life." Or another dramatic conclusion to a description of a trip: "It was the best trip that I participate in him NEVER." This reminds me of a monumental anti-climax to a student's tear-jerking essay about a child whose mother had died, leaving her a unique necklace. The child got lost and the father spent his entire life looking for her, and finally he found a young woman whom he thought might be his daughter, and it wasn't until he saw her neckless that he realized that this was his daughter. Tenses of verbs are agonizing things to learn, though can sometimes give emphasis to an idea: "Michael Jordan was, were, has being and will been a great sportsman always." There seems to be some past-present confusion in the mind of the would be student-donor who claimed that in the following years, "I have earned much more many than I excepted," or another who claims it shouldn't worry his parents where does he was Friday nights. Due to translation from Hebrew, there are those innumerable verbless sentences, like, "I the happiest parson in the world," or "Your newspaper most whorable thing in the world" (not, heaven forbid, written to this newspaper). The writer is a veteran English teacher.