Man, this is some dangerous acid

The things kids bring to school.

One of my esteemed colleagues came into the office yesterday morning with a bottle of concentrated nitric acid, which he’d taken off one of the nitwit students who’d brought it to school for reasons which I still can’t fathom. This is the stuff that would be found in research labs, and was a mostly full bottle.

In a civilised country, this would be a rather serious incident, but in the great imperial chicken coop, the concepts of health and safety are the subject of meaningless banners displayed on building sites. The cretinous student in question wandered into my class the following period without the slightest hint of contrition (or an apology for being late) and then seemed to be narrating the entire aftermath for the entertainment of his classmates. No serious consequences will arise from this, of course.

My colleagues in the English Department, whose Chinese is way better than mine, were talking about the concept of common sense in Chinese. I think Fred had been trying to get the A2s to understand the idea. One translation in Chinese is 常识 (chángshí) which means “common knowledge”; another is 判断力 (pànduàn lì) which means “(ability to make a correct) judgement”. Neither seems to quite capture common sense, which isn’t exactly common knowledge and isn’t exactly a judgement.

In fact, translating common sense as “a supposedly sensible belief” would be just as accurate because common sense is only assumed to be correct and can often be shown to be completely wrong. It might also be translated as “supposedly prudent course of action”.

Well, as I said, no course of action will probably be taken. The witless blot who brought the acid will be unable to comprehend that his action was a bad idea; the parents will probably yell a bit and then buy him the latest iPhone.