While we were working with our local newspaper on this story they just published about us (click here for more behind the scenes info on this story), one idea that came up was to do a “hot and not” list of our slang lessons. That is, a list of recent lessons on cool slang and a list of older, out-dated slang lessons.

The idea was ultimately scrapped, but not before I spent a couple of hours creating just such a list. While I am proud to say that we never actually did a lesson on “gettin’ jiggy wit it,” here are six slang lessons that either because of the context or the ever-changing nature of slang, are now rather amusing.

6. “old G” -  First off, the quote in this lesson comes from rapper Jadakiss. Um, who? But furthermore, I think even old Gs realize it’s not 1992 anymore and have quit talking about how gangsta they are.

5. “dope” – While this term is still commonly used (although not around anyone’s grandmother, of course), what dates this lesson is one of the example sentences that was used: “Mark bought a dope CD yesterday. It’s by this group called the Gorillaz. Have you heard of them? I think they’re from England.”

4.  “girlie men” – This one probably hasn’t seen much use since Hanz and Franz were on SNL, but the kicker here is that the quote for this lesson comes from none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger,  of Terminator and now Governor of California fame.

3. “wife beater” – I’m glad this one went out of style. I haven’t heard anyone call an undershirt a “wife beater” in several years. It used to be kind of sketchy to walk around wearing a “wife beater.” Now it’s probably sketchier to use the term “wife beater” to talk about anything other than a criminal.

2.  “off the hook” – This phrase truly died only recently when Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele starting using it in interviews frequently. Nothing kills slang like someone who is completely and totally uncool using it to try to be cool.

1.  “the three R’s” – I’ve come to learn that some crazy stuff happened before I started working here two years ago, but even I am surprised that this phrase became an Ebaby! lesson. I mean, most of our out of date stuff comes from the ’90s. I don’t know how far back you have to go to get to when this was a cool phrase. Maybe you could ask Donald Trump, who gives us the lesson’s quote.

So there you have it, the “not” list. The “hot” list isn’t nearly as funny. That’s probably why this idea never made it into the newspaper. But nonetheless, here’s what I came up with.

5. “bail out” – If you wanted to read a newspaper after October 2008, you needed to know this one.

4. “Joe six-pack” – It’s hard to believe it’s been less than a year since the US presidential election launched an unknown plumber into fame. Give this one 5 more minutes and it will be in the “not” pile.

3. “such as” – While not really slang, this one counts as “hot” because it was inspired by the incredible and viral misuse of this term by Miss South Carolina.

2. “dialed in” – Maybe it’s just me, but I hear this one all the time now.

1. “watered down” -  And finally, in the age when any band that was popular at any time can come back and make money on a tour with one or even zero original members, this one comes to us from Rage Against the Machine, who reached their prime back when most of the “not” list was in style and remained dormant until last year.

Since we just hit one million members last week, we decided to make a week’s worth of lessons that had to do with the number one million. It doesn’t sound to hard, right? It’s a number you hear a lot. But once we had What Would You Do with a Million Dollars?, a lesson about the millions made by celebrities and a lesson about the lottery, we started to notice a trend. What would make a good one-million topic that didn’t have to do with money?

Of course! The phrase “thanks a million“! It pretty much sums how we feel about the occasion–very grateful that a more than a million people around the world have chosen to learn on English, baby! and give us a reason to what we enjoy doing! A lot of people in the comments of the lesson were sweet enough to say, “thanks a million!” right back at us.

There were also a lot of good shout outs to other things people are grateful for. One member Colombia, andrescisneros, said “thanks a million” to his mother who, “who knows about my needs.” Amido Hernan Rios, also from Colombia, is thankful for “persons who are protecting our planet against air pollution, water pollution, land soil pollution, etc…” A member from China named andysun actually saw the phrase as a way to meet hardships: “whatever you meet or suffer, it is a good way to say ‘thanks a million’ cause the good things make you better, the bad things make you stronger.”

I was happy to see how an EXTREME English lesson, which was designed to be really silly, made people think about what really means a lot to them and express it in English. Our million members continue to amaze me.

I watched this video interview with Joey Keithley before I talked to him for today’s English lesson on Ebaby!, so I knew the guy could talk. Which is great. I always edit the interviews for the lessons, and the more someone has to say, the more there is to work with.

So what I’m getting at here is that there’s a lot of material that didn’t make into the lesson from our 15-minute conversation. In addition to explaining how his band name can be used in a conversation, Keithley talks about playing Poland in the ’80s, how D.O.A. got booked for a tour of China that starts this week, his philosphy on political music and a longer-term view of the singing-in-English phenomenon I discussed with Hutch Harris. Full text below, but first, D.O.A.’s tour dates, which are also available on their MySpace.

Jan. 9th Beijing, China at Mao Live House
Jan. 10th Wuhan, China at Vox Bar
Jan. 11th Shanghai, China at Yuyintang
Jan. 12th Nanjing, China at Castle Bar
Jan. 13th Beijing, China at D-22
Jan. 29th Oak Harbor, USA at Oak Harbor Tavern
Jan. 30th Seattle, USA at El Corazon
Jan. 31st Portland, USA at Satyricon
April 1st Valence, France at Mistral Place
April 2nd Barcelona Spain at Estraperio Club
April 3rd Zaragoza, Spain
April 4th Arrasate, Spain at 360 Arretoa
April 5th Limoges, France at CCM John Lennon
April 7th Torino, Italy at United Club
April 8th Milano, Italy at All Blacks Pub
April 9th La Spezia, Italy at La Spezia, Italy
April 10th Roma, Italy at Forte Prenestino
April 11th Firenze, Italy at CSA Ex Emerson
April 12th Cremona, Italy at CSA Dordoni
April 13th Gorizia, Italy at Pieffe Factory
April 15th Vienna, Austria at Arena
April 17th Kerkade, Netherlands at The Rock Temple
April 18th Diksmuide, Belgium at Muziekclub 4AD
April 19th Cologne, Germany at Sonic Ballroom

Jason: Have you guys ever been to China before?

Joey: No we have not. This will be a first.

Jason: And what do you expect the punk climate in China to be like?

Joey: I guess I’m going there to find out. I’m also going there to find out what China’s like in general. It’s fun to go play shows and entertain people and get them to sing and stuff like that, which is what D.O.A. always does. It will be an eyeopener culturally, politically and musically. You know what? I’m hoping to stumble across some great Chinese band and sign them up to my record label. Who knows, there might be something there that’s really great. Now, sure, there will be a million bands we won’t see, but who knows, there could be something that’s really unique, right? Something with a different twist. There’s got to be Chinese punk rock that people have heard but maybe there’s something over there that nobody has yet. So that’s one thing, and we’re pretty fascinated by it. D.O.A. has been about trying to go to places that we’ve never been before. New vistas, I suppose.

Jason: How did you end up getting booked in China?

Joey: It always involves somebody saying, “Hey, I think I can put on a couple of shows, or a mini tour or a whole tour.” We had to go find people in Europe when we started going there in ‘82 and ‘84, and we went some unusual places like Poland and Yugoslavia that, you know, punk bands hadn’t been to before. So it’s a similar kind of thing. You just have to find somebody to say, “OK, I can get it together, you’ll play here, here, here and here.” Because it’s too hard to do it from here. So finally a promoter approached us last September, and said, “How about D.O.A. coming over? There seems to be some interest.”

Jason: You guys have been touring internationally for a really long time and i wondered if you guys have seen the number of bands that sing in English increase over the years.

Joey: I would say so. Take an early German band like Die Toten Hosen all their early records were all in German. A lot of punk bands we played with there sang in German, but I find a lot of bands now will sing in English. But I think it’s kind of cool if they mix it up and appeal to different people that way because I guess English is the language of music around the world, that’s how it turned out. There’s this great record from when we played Japan in 2001. It’s called, We Still Keep on Running with D.O.A. and it’s all Japanese bands covering D.O.A. It’s pretty hard to find. You can find it on my label. It’s not exactly a well-known record. But they did some really great, incredible versions of a bunch of D.O.A. classic songs. And they sang in English too, and the inflection makes it pretty interesting, right?

Jason: I wanted to ask you about the band’s slogan, “Talk – Action = 0.” I wondered if singing a protest song is talk or action.

Joey: I guess in a sense you’re trying to inspire people to action. It’s both, I suppose. You can change the world to a far greater degree by convincing people that you have a good idea and getting that idea to spread around as opposed to taking a violent method, which I’m not backing. At the same time, sometimes people really get backed into a corner, right? It does take sometimes protest to really change things. You just have to look at Eastern Europe for example with the fall of the Warsaw Pact. Or Suharto in Indonesia or Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia is another example. It’s kind of the people power sort of thing, right? That’s why I think it’s interesting that D.O.A. is going [to China] because we have something of a reputation, but we’ll see what happens, right? I’m pretty excited about it.

Jason: You’ve been involved with a lot of different causes doing benefits and things. What are some that are on your mind right now?

Joey: The usual things we’ve done the last few years are ecological or environmental-type causes. We’ve been involved in a bunch of concerts and rallies opposed to the Iraq war. There’s a big one we did a couple of years ago, we were the warm-up act for Noam Chomsky. That was pretty interesting, about 20,000 people on the beach in Vancouver. And “free trade” versus what I like to call “fair trade”.

Jason: You guys have been around for so long that there are a lot of bands that have been influenced by you. Have you also been influenced by some newer bands? Or are you still drawing on some of the same influences from 30 years ago.

Joey: No, you know, I really write songs and get my view of the world from talking to people, watching TV, reading newspapers or websites. I don’t think D.O.A. is really influenced by any younger bands, some of them certainly we admire. They’re doing good work, like Anti-Flag. Musically and politically, I was influenced by people years and years ago. I’m talking like Woody Guthrie and Jimi Hendrix and stuff I heard in my formative youth. That kind of spirit stuck with me even though the stuff we do doesn’t sound anything like that.

Jason: We always have people define a slang term so our members can learn a new term and I figured an obvious choice is the name of your band.

Joe: We took the idea from an old movie starring Edmund O’Brien. It was Dead on Arrival. It’s like a toe-tag. So when an ambulance picks up a body and they’re not quite dead when they arrive at the hospital, they stick a tag, I think on their right toe and it says, “D.O.A.” on it, because they arrived dead. So the most famous D.O.A. is John F Kennedy. Dead on Arrival. You could make up all sorts of things for that. There was a pretty funny thing with this English band called Dead or Alive for a while. We’ve kind of outlasted them, I would say. This older lady was booking us into a hotel one time and she’s really straight and she goes, “What’s D.O.A. stand for?” And our base player in a rare moment of brilliance goes, “Disciples of the Apostles.” She went, “Oh, you sound like really nice young fellows.” She thought we were a religious group or something like that.

Jason: What are some ways that “D.O.A.” might come up in conversation outside of a morgue?

Joe: It’s a common thing in the band practice. “If you don’t get this part right, you’re going to be D.O.A.” We don’t threaten each other quite that much. But it’s something like that, like, “You’re D.O.A.” It’s gonna be curtains in some way or another.

Photo by Bev Davies.

We just posted an English lesson based on an interview with San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis.

I tried something new in this one that I think we’re going to keep doing. I asked Vernon to define a slang term for our members, in this case “Hail Mary.” He seemed happy to do it, and I think it will be cool for our users to learn new slang from athletes and entertainers.

This interview was shorter than the last one I did with Hutch Harris from the Thermals, because Vernon was on the go. So there are fewer outtakes, but there’s still some stuff that didn’t make it in. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until afterward that I realized I should have asked him about his choach’s pants-dropping speech. Here’s the whole Q&A.

Jason: I hear you went to school on Tuesday.

Vernon: Yeah, I did. Take a player to school. It was good!

Jason: What grade were you in for the day?

Vernon: Well, actually I had to go knock on someone’s door. So, it was a kid that was in second grade and I had to go with him to school and pretty much what we had to do was make up workouts and stuff like that for the rest of the kids.

Jason: Did they have a good time?

Vernon: Yeah, they had a great time.

Jason: How do you pick the charities you work with and what’s your favorite one?

Vernon: Whatever I’m pretty much thinking about. My favorite is pretty much helping people who are in need, so I’m all about giving back. This summer I did a charity weekend and what I wanted to do was raise money for people who are using drugs, drug abuse. My thing is to help them get better.

Jason: Oh wow. So let’s see, you majored in studio art in college. I just wondered if your background as an artist affects the way you play football and if art still plays a role in your life right now.

Vernon: It does. Art still plays a role in my life. I paint or draw or whatever it may be every chance that I get. Once you start painting you probably…like me, for me…I sit there for hours and I’m looking at my painting from different angles and, you know, I just can’t stop looking at it. You know, I want to get up because I get tired…

Jason:  Yeah.

Vernon:  …but I can’t leave the painting without pretty much finishing it, you know, so it can be perfect. I want it to be perfect. And how that translates to football or rolls over to football is that, you know, everything I do on the football field, I like to be perfect. I like to win. I don’t want to lose and it just makes you competitive, I think.

Jason:  Totally. You’re a tight end and tight ends do a lot of things, but one of the things they do is catch passes, and I wondered if you’ve ever caught a Hail Mary pass and if you could talk about what a Hail Mary pass is.

Vernon:  It’s pretty much like a bomb in the air. They also call it a bomb. The quarterback just throws the ball as hard as he can.

Jason:  Totally. And when do you use it?

Vernon:  You can use it in the fourth quarter when you have like 10 or 15 seconds on the clock.

Jason:  Have any Hail Mary passes come your way lately?

Vernon:  I actually had a Hail Mary when we played Dallas. It was 43 yards.

Jason:  But it’s pretty hard to catch a Hail Mary, right? It’s kind of a long shot?

Vernon:  Hmm…Not really. You just…I mean, if you work on it, no, it’s not hard.

Jason:  Oh cool.

Vernon:  I pretty much work on it every day.

Jason: Right on. And then the last thing I wanted to ask you is I notice you have these braids that come out of your helmet and I didn’t start seeing that style until a couple of years ago. Who started that? Where’d you pick that up?

Vernon: I don’t know. I mean guys before me like Bob Marley and I think it roots from Jamaica or Africa.

Jason: Do you feel ties to Jamaica or Africa?

Vernon: No, I just woke up one morning and decided I’m gonna have dreads. It was time to do it.

I sort of misfired with that last question. What I meant was, “When did NLF players start wearing dreads that come out from under their helmet?” I think Vernon just thought I was talking about dreads in general, but I had all I needed for the lesson and didn’t want to keep him on the phone. So if anyone can tell me when players started wearing a tail of hair that comes out the bottom of their helmet (see photo below) I’d be interested to know. I think it looks cool and I don’t remember seeing it as a kid!

Now, I have seen some funny translations in my travels. “Homos” for “hummus” and the like, but this takes the cake. This is just one of many groups of incredibly bizarre “vocabulary” words from a set of Chinese English learning blocks featured in this hilarious blog post.

It’s worth checking out just for the laughs, but it also raises a good point. As English becomes the global language, how will it change? The author of the post cleverly notes that as China’s 1.3 billion people learn English, it may become the case at some point that what they say goes since they’re the majority of the speakers. Chainsaw? Sorry, Yank, that’s a reactance.

According to this recent story from Indian news outlet NDTV, there are already more English speakers in India than in the US. Soon the tables will be turned and English slang will come from Asia instead of the US and I’ll be the one trying to keep up by reading ESL websites!