So I was walking Shamus home from the dog park the other day and an immigrant gentleman was walking there as well. He stopped me and politely asked me to define a word -- he had a whole bunch of English words written down in a little notebook, so he was clearly working on learning the language.
"Coincidence," I read when he pointed at it. "Boy, that's a hard one. It's...like when two things happen at the same time, but no one planned them to?"
He stared at me, clearly not understanding. "Can you give an example?" he asked after a moment.
"Maybe," I said, thinking about it. "So, for example, I'm going out a door at a store and a friend of mine is walking in the door, and neither of us planned to see each other? I might say, What a coincidence!"
I'm still not sure he understand, but as I was walking home I was thinking to myself that maybe I didn't understand what 'coincidence' means either.
The dictionary says it's when two things happen at the same time but there is no causal connection. Too bad I didn't have a dictionary with me at the time.
This reminds me of when a student asked me to define irony, and then how irony differed from sarcasm, and then what sarcasm meant, exactly.
That was an adventure.
2 comments:
The only way I can explain irony is through examples. I've had so many conversations with people about irony vs. this just sucks ... possibly because my age means Alannis Morrissette was part of my foundational years.
That was the fix I found myself in. I knew what irony/sarcasm meant, but fuck if I could explain them. (Which Plato would say meant I didn't actually have true knowledge, but only an opinion, about what they meant.)
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