New 'Do Reactions/Calling All Theory Dorks

Some of my students' reactions today to my new haircut were too priceless not to be shared here. Most of the young girls went out of their way to call me "ugly," one student suggested that the job hadn't been finished and that I should return to the salon for a touch-up, and others thought it was an improvement over my old hairstyle (my Korean colleagues said that I looked "much better," and one of them, Mr. Lee, insisted that I looked so much younger that he couldn't tell the difference between me and a student). But the best reactions were from the elementary school boys who made comparisons between me and several different international soccer stars. The haircut I have now is commonly known as "Beckham style" among the Koreans, so David Beckham was an obvious point of comparison (which I thought was quite flattering since I don't think I could ever claim that I look like Beckham), but I was also called "Zidane" (hopefully, I'm not that bald yet), and, by far the oddest, Thierry Henry (who, for those of you that don't know, isn't white and whose hair doesn't look even remotely similar to mine).

On a more serious note, I've begun to notice something in one of my students, "Alex," that interests me from a linguistic standpoint. He has some difficulty distinguishing between pronouns and employing the correct personal referent. Instead of employing a self-referential pronoun like "I" or "me" (or even "my," which many of my students use as a stand-in for "I," but that's another issue entirely), he refers to himself as "you." I believe that this habit comes from hearing me and his other teachers ask him questions like, "Alex, what do you like?" At some point, he must have equated "Alex" and "you" in his mind. I notice it especially when I play Hangman with his class (which happens more often than I would like, but it does keep them under control). Alex always rushes up to me and shouts "You Hangman!" while pointing at his chest, meaning that he wants to pick the vocabulary word for the game. Alex's problem reminds me of a story a professor once told my seminar about her daughter when she was an infant. Whenever her daughter wanted to be picked up she would turn to her parents and ask, "Pick you up?" meaning "Will you pick me up?" If I remember correctly, some theorist who works/worked on language acquisition in children (Vygotsky? Chomsky?) did some work on referent-confusion, or whatever you want to call it, so if any of you theory dorks out there know who it was, please leave a comment because I would love to know.

One final note: as I write this, my main man Choi Hong-Man is doing the limbo on a Korean game show; truly one of the funniest things I've ever seen on Korean TV.