All My Exes Live in Texas

Teaching ESL/EFL really makes you realize that some words are defined more loosely than others. Much is made, for instance, of the word home in English. This word does not directly translate into many other languages--or at least, does not translate in the sense of a place where one not only lives and sleeps but has a sense of security. The French cannot distinguish between a house and a home the way Britons and Americans can; neither, as far as I know, can the Russians.

You also start to realize, or to recollect, that some usages of particular words are very loose usages. When I was a freshman in high school, we had weekly vocabulary tests of "SAT" words. On our vocab tests, my teacher always made us not only give out a definition but use the word in a way that showed we understood what it meant. I remember being marked down for using proximity in the sentence, "She felt she had too close proximity to him." My teacher thought this did not quite convey the sense of the word, and no amount of protesting on my part could get him to change my grade.

When the words "United States" are used to refer to the state bordering the Rio Grande, I have always considered this to be a very loose usage of the name of my country. Somehow, I have never really been able to see Texas as part of the United States, in much the way I have never been able to see Staten Island as really part of New York City. In both cases, my feelings aren't based on snobbery--as a Brooklynite, I hated the idea many Manhattanites had that Brooklyn was not part of New York, and would never have imposed a similar idea on Staten Island. But Staten Island clearly never felt like part of New York. Its culture and way of life were totally different from those of the rest of the Big Apple. That Staten Island had tried to secede from New York in the recent past only confirmed by belief that it wasn't part of the city I lived in and loved.

Texas, to my way of thinking, is much the same. We are talking about a strange land where people give their daughters names like Gracie Belle and their dogs names like Lady Bird, worship a man named Tom Landry, and attempt to kill their neighbors over high school cheerleading. Texans are not lower or beneath other Americans, just different--different enough, in my opinion, that Texas should rightfully be what it in fact was before 1845 and what many of its inhabitants claim it still is, a separate country.

Nonetheless, I've had a bit of a Texas fixation lately. I have not the foggiest idea where this comes from. Not once in my short life have I lived in Texas or even stepped foot in Texas--not even to make an airline connection in Houston. Yet I find myself entranced by King of the Hill and a relatively new NBC show about Texas football calld Friday Night Lights. And tonight, I found myself downloading George Strait's country hit, "All My Ex's [sic] Live in Texas."

Now, until fairly recently, I didn't even know this was a song. I had heard people say, "all my exes live in Texas, that's why I live in Tennessee," and thought it was just some sort of weird American catchphrase, a dumb joke people made about divorce, Texas, or divorce in Texas. But somehow, I found out it is actually a song, and I wanted to hear it.

Well, as it turns out, the song itself is just about perfect for use in an EFL/ESL classroom. It's reasonably humorous, and its first verse contains no really complicated vocabulary apart from the names of towns in Texas. The only expression that requires explanation is the phrase "hang my hat".

Unfortunately, the second verse contains a reference to "transcendental meditation". For a low-level class, this would be challenging vocabulary. Transcendental is a hard word to explain even to native speakers. So I think I might have to reserve the song for a more advanced class.

Nonetheless, this has got me thinking up a whole Texas-themed class, with the song and a reading comprehension exercise about how Texarkana got its name. Such a reading would tie in nicely with the song, since one of the singer's exes is a "Rosanna down in Texarkana".