An Englishman In Korea (Barely)

(Two posts in one month? Don’t get used to it.)

In 2013, I decided my life needed direction. I was still stewing over a bad break-up, my writing career wasn’t earning me anything and I’d spent a long time out of work. My options weren’t great. I spent a year in postgraduate study to try and re-enter the workforce at the end of it, which didn’t go the way I’d hoped.

A friend put me in touch with the world of TEFL teaching – Teaching English as a Foreign Language. He spent a year overseas after a month of training and came back full of stories of what the world outside our grey, rainy isle was like. I decided to take the leap.

By the end of February, I was a certified TEFL teacher. In May, I landed my first teaching job. This wasn’t without struggles. The one I got wasn’t the first one I applied for, or even interviewed for. It’s definitely worth going through agencies and recruiters. But make sure they understand the concept of ‘time difference’; every Skype or phone interview I had suffered from some lost-in-translation time error. This applied to China and to Korea.

The job I landed was in Korea. The phone interview came an hour earlier than expected and had to be done while wearing a towel. Next came sorting the paperwork. My CRB check was easy, but slow. Then my CRB check and degrees had to be apostilled – which means notarized in an internationally-recognized manner by the government. Now, this was the sticking point.

To apostille your documents, take them to a solicitor. They’ll notarize them. Then you mail them off to the Foreign Office. Who will then return them with a rejection but not tell you what you did wrong. Repeat for three weeks until you’re at risk of losing the job you need these for and you’re all but accusing your lawyers of incompetence. Get the lawyers to contact the Foreign Office, do it right and then finally receive your apostille. Hurray. Now, all you need is a visa.

Now, visa requirements obviously vary from country to country. When you’re working TEFL it often makes more sense to enter the country on a tourist visa, arrange a job and then get a longer-term visa while you’re actually in-country. I was going to Korea, where that doesn’t really fly as well. But they do have specific visas for language teachers – one year, working and living. To arrange for that, send your apostilled documents, passport and job contract to the Korean embassy. Contact them several times and say that you intend to physically collect your visa. Turn up to collect them, be told they were mailed back to you in spite of your requests. Have a little cry. Have a fantastic sister lurk at the mailbox, grab your passport when it arrives and get the train to deliver it to you at zero notice. Spend a year evangelizing her band in thanks.

Get on a plane. Sit down for sixteen hours until you’re unsure if you have limbs, then disembark on another continent. Arrive at a tiny, pink bedroom and learn Koreans don’t have the same gender/colour values as the West.

Then get to work. If you’re lucky, you might have come in time to adjust to jet-lag on the weekend. But more likely you’ll be told to come to the school at get to work as soon as possible.

And that’s how to get a job in another country.

“Mere” Semantics: The Case For Pedantry

Let’s get one thing straight: I love linguistics. It’s my pet discipline. It occupies this fun space between an art and a science, so no-one’s really sure how serious to act around it. It gives off mixed signals, like that guy you think has a crush on you but then blanks you for a week at a time. The best descriptor I’ve come across for it is an ’empirical art’.

So while I do understand when people dismiss linguistic arguments as being somehow lesser than other disciplines, that doesn’t mean I particularly like it. One phrase that really gets under my skin is the derisive, dismissive ‘mere semantics’. Semantics, for those of you who don’t know, is the study of meaning. It means calling people out when their meaning is ambiguous, or when they’re saying the opposite of what they actually mean. And it’s really useful.

Don’t believe me? Okay, let me introduce you to someone. Class, this is Larry Silverstein.

Hi Larry!

Larry’s a pretty wealthy guy. He’s a businessman and a real estate developer worth billions. He knows the importance of semantics, having graduated from Brooklyn Law School. He owns a lot of property in the Manhattan area. Specifically, he owned the land on which the World Trade Centre was built. He’s quite lucky too, in that he was able to finish insuring that property before tragedy struck.

If the property was victim of a “destructive occurence”, that insurance policy said that Larry was good for a payout in the neighbourhood of three point five-five billion U.S Dollars.

Also worth 3.5 billion

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. How many “occurences” was 9/11? How many “destructive occurences” hit the World Trade Centre?

Larry’s lawyers argued that each individual plane constituted an “occurence” and therefore the insurance policy should pay out not $3.55 billion (billion) but $7.1 billion; two pay outs for two seperate events. Naturally, the insurance companies didn’t want that to fly and argued instead that 9/11 as a whole was a single destructive occurence or event; despite the difference of time between the two plane impacts, the whole attack should be taken as one whole.

What was once “mere semantics” suddenly became a debate worth literally more money than I can properly imagine.

You can read a little more about the debate and the linguistic processes behind it in Steven Pinker’s excellent “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature”, but to cut a story short the courts decided to go with the “two occurences” interpretation. Larry “only” got $4.577 billion for his troubles, though.

Then there’s the case of Derek Bentley, one of the last people to be hanged in the United Kingdom before capital punishment was abolished in the 1960’s. Derek was involved the shooting of police constable Sidney Miles, but didn’t actually pull the trigger. His friend and accomplice, Christopher Craig, actually shot Miles but at age 16 was too young to hang for the crime. Bentley, at age 19, was eligible for the noose and the courts were determined to see someone hang for the shooting of a police officer.

The whole case hinged on what witnesses heard Bentley shout to Craig moments before the killing: “Let him have it, Craig!”

Dr Who actor Christopher Eccleston played Bentley in the 1991 film "Let Him Have It"

Again, the courts were divided over what this actually meant. The prosecution interpreted what Bentley said as “Go ahead, shoot him!” and hence that he was responsible for the shooting; that meant he could hang. The defense was that Bentley was actually saying “Give him the gun!” and that therefore Bentley was not responsible for Miles’ death. Unfortunately, the prosecution won that day, and Bentley was hanged. Craig was sent to prison for ten years.

His conviction was eventually quashed posthumously in 1998 with the help of forensic linguist Malcolm Coulthard. Coulthard went over the police records and found that a “confession” Bentley had given was clearly forged – it was written using the word ‘then’ far more often than normal. That linguistic quirk was, however, extremely common in police reports. This led Coulthard to conclude that the confession was faked by the police to sway the case against Bentley, leading to his tragic death.

Far more important than mere money, semantics can sometimes mean life and death.