Parties Are Advised to Chill

As far as my students go, I really consider myself blessed. There is not, at the moment, a single student I do not like. But of all of my students, probably my favorite is Volodya, the mild-mannered tax attorney to whom I have referred in previous posts.

For two weeks in August, Volodya was on vacation in South Africa and Zambia, but when he returned, he regaled me not merely with photos of Victoria Falls and of exotic African wildlife, but with a story of having been nearly eaten by a lion while he was staying at a lodge near the Zambia-South Africa border. Like virtually every EFL student I have ever met or heard about, he feels the occasional strong need to tell me how poor his English is, but when he is able to tell such stories, I feel hard-pressed to find anything in his English to criticize.

Nonetheless, Volodya has chosen me as a teacher because he needs a heavy dose of legal and business English, and this I do my best to supply him with, even if my knowledge of Russian tax law is non-existent. One major benefit of working with him is that I end up learning a lot about the differences between the American and Russian legal systems.

Today, I had a lesson plan for Volodya built around the case of Mattel v. Aqua. Briefly, this case involved a song made by the Danish group Aqua that not only poked fun at Barbie but even depicted the doll in sexual situations (as you would guess, Mattel ultimately lost the case on free speech grounds). I had planned the lesson as a way of teaching concepts like trademark, copyright, and infringement, and had hoped that the song, which was all but inescapable around the time I was sixteen, would be new and fresh for him. No such luck; as soon as he heard the song, he recognized it, and said he had heard it in discos about the time I used to hear it non-stop on Z-107.7 in St. Louis.

This is one of my few disappointments in being an EFL teacher--the sheer difficulty of finding songs, films, or television programs that my students will not have seen already. When I studied French in high school, and now that I am studying Russian, one of the joys of learning the language was the chance to hear real songs and see real films in the language of study (I can still sing a bawdy French song called Fernande that my high school French teacher had us listen to one Friday afternoon in language lab). Now that English is becoming so much a world language, however, and now that American and British films and television programs are so widely shown abroad--I recall reading at one point that something like 80 percent of the entertainment programming on Dutch television consisted of dubbed or even non-dubbed versions of American and British comedy and drama series--it's hard to find any genuinely new material. For me, the only solution is to look back into the deep past; the Andrews Sisters and Bobby Darin may be old hat in America, but I can at least depend on my students' not having heard them.

The other reason I gave Volodya the Mattel case was because of a much-quoted line from it. Apparently, after Mattel sued Aqua for trademark infringement, Aqua turned around and countersued for defamation. Somehow, the two cases became combined, and the judge in the case ruled against both complainants. In issuing his ruling, he said these immortal words:

Parties are advised to chill.

This was a good way to talk a little more about degrees of formality in English. Volodya has a good grasp of the difference between slang, casual English, and formal or official English, but this was an opportunity to review some of that and extend it a little bit further.

Perhaps second only to "we hold that, in the sphere of education, separate but equal has no place," this has got to be one of my favorite lines from any legal case. After the case was decided, I remember reading "parties are advised to chill" and thinking, "Man, this is just the kind of man we need to be a judge." How many legal cases are there where the judge should say that, in exactly those words?

Apparently, in Russia, not very many. The topic got us onto the concepts of vexatious litigants and frivolous suits. I actually had to explain to Volodya that, in America, there are people who will file lawsuits they know are without merit, with the sole aim of forcing the other side to incur the legal expenses of defending the suit. Volodya was appalled; somewhere in the Russian legal code, he said, there is a law against using the law for "illegal purposes," and this is the kind of activity which the code sought to enjoin. I have not yet gotten to teach him about the $3 million coffee spill (which, it turns out, was actually far from a frivolous suit), but I imagine he will be as stunned by that verdict as many Americans were.