Fuddland

I quite often have to talk to students about Western dining habits—the differences, the etiquette, and so on—and one of the phrases that appears in their vocabulary list is, “going Dutch”. The phrase always requires an explanation, after which the students generally nod and say that in China it is called “AA”.

The term “AA” has puzzled me since I first heard it, being made up of English letters as opposed to Chinese characters, and no-one seemed to know what it actually stood for. In fact, most of them had never even thought to wonder.

“What does ‘AA’ mean?” I would ask.

“Go Dutch,” the reply would come.

“No, I’m not testing you on something you just learned. I mean, what does it stand for?”

“Oh … we don’t know.”

They wouldn’t even guess, and I was similarly stumped. [I could see no obvious connection with alcohol or automobiles.] Until, that is, yesterday, when a student was finally able to put me out of my misery.

As anyone who has learned a language while living or working alongside its native speakers will testify, one’s vocabulary can have some fairly eclectic entries. I knew how to say “mobile phone charger” in Chinese before I learnt the colours of the rainbow, simply because buying a new one was more of a priority than shopping for oil paints. [And when I do get around to building up a palette, it will probably conspicuously lack a purple, because I have immense trouble pronouncing that particular hue.]

And so it was that, somehow, a student who earlier in the class had no idea what “to go on a date” meant, was able to inform me why “AA” means “to split the bill”: it stands for “algebraic average”, which is what most people mean when they say, “take the average”, but in the world of maths is more commonly called the mean.

This of course answers another question that I frequently get asked, namely why—given my background—I’m not teaching mathematics in China. Any country that adopts a mathematical phrase into its everyday language clearly doesn’t need any help from me.