Corpsing: 02 (London)

To corpse

(from googling)

Quote

verb THEATRICAL SLANG

spoil a piece of acting by forgetting one's lines or laughing uncontrollably.

"Peter just can't stop himself corpsing when he is on stage"

cause (an actor) to forget their lines and start laughing.

"one singer ad libbed and corpsed his colleagues on stage"

British English uses a slang term, corpsing, to specifically describe one of the most common ways of breaking character—when an actor loses their composure and laughs or giggles inappropriately during a scene. The British slang term is derived from an actor laughing when their character is supposed to be a corpse.

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We started doing classical Chinese in Year.2 on the undergraduate course at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies).

    One of the texts was 史記 / 史记 / shǐjì / "history record" / Records of the Grand Historian (by 司馬遷 / 司马迁 / Sima Qian), taught by our beloved Mr. George Weys.  Being a historical text, completed c.104–91 BC, the contents are sombre, a lot of which focus on fighting for power, which is not a light subject at all.

    German classmate Robbie and I got on well from the start, so we'd sit together.

    Something happened one day in class (I can't remember what now, but it was a very minor thing) which set me and Robbie off giggling.  For the rest of the lesson, Robbie and I would start giggling all over again after subsiding, usually with one of us recalling the trigger and starting to giggle, which would then set the other one off.  During subsequent lessons, one of us would, out of the corner of the eye, catch sight of the other's body shaking in suppressed giggles, and that would get that person giggling as well.

    It got so bad that we decided to sit on opposite sides of the classroom, but then we'd happen to make eye contact across the room, and the corpsing would start all over again.

    For those of you who might not have been infected with the corpsing bug before, let me tell you that once it starts wriggling in your system, it's very hard to control it at the time -- and on subsequent occasions, time and time and again.  Long after you've forgotten what had started it.

(London, 1978–9)

Corpsing: 01 (Singapore)

To corpse

(from googling)

Quote

verb THEATRICAL SLANG

spoil a piece of acting by forgetting one's lines or laughing uncontrollably.

"Peter just can't stop himself corpsing when he is on stage"

cause (an actor) to forget their lines and start laughing.

"one singer ad libbed and corpsed his colleagues on stage"

British English uses a slang term, corpsing, to specifically describe one of the most common ways of breaking character—when an actor loses their composure and laughs or giggles inappropriately during a scene. The British slang term is derived from an actor laughing when their character is supposed to be a corpse.

Unquote

In Pre-U 1 at RI (Raffles Institution), I was in a Chekhov play The Bear for RI’s annual Drama Festival (with awards handed out).

    I played Widow Popova who was being visited by Smirnov wanting a debt settled.

    (My summary)  When Popova said she couldn't pay him there and then, Smirnov started to get very angry, shouting at her.  At some point, she called him a bear.  Feeling insulted, he called for a duel, and two guns were produced.  During the arguments, Smirnov had started to fall in love with Popova, so he threw the gun onto the floor, feeling that the row was getting to a silly level. (End of my summary)

    After being thrown onto the floor many times during the rehearsals, the aluminium toy gun that the director Utaman had bought for the performance broke, so the next time it was used for a rehearsal, the front half of the toy gun swung open (downwards at the hinge) just as Smirnov and Popova were supposed to be angry and shouting at each other.  Kwok Chow Thim and I collapsed into a fit of corpsing.  

    (In hindsight, I don’t know why we couldn’t have used a wooden spoon or fork for the rehearsals, or just mimed.)

    The director Utaman took it home and tied a wire around the middle section to hold the two halves together.

    At the next rehearsal, the sight of that crude home DIY got us corpsing again.  Every single time after that, rehearsals had to be called off because we kept corpsing.

    The thing about corpsing (in my case anyway) is that even after the cause of the corpsing has been visually removed, the memory would set it off again -- for a long time afterwards.

(Singapore, 1971)

Half full or half empty: 04 (Dealing with being jilted)

Someone I know was recently told by her boyfriend that he didn't want to be with her anymore.  (Ditto someone else whose husband ran off with another woman.)

    I was devastated when the same happened to me.  I spent all my waking moments feeling worthless as a human being.

    One day, the half full vs half empty struck me.  If I'd been the one to have fallen out of love with him, would I be experiencing this depression and self-doubt?  "No," came the answer.  I'd only feel bad about dumping him, I wouldn't feel depressed and worthless.

    So, the only explanation I could find for it was:  I was feeling sorry for myself, because I was the one who'd been abandoned.  The depression lifted once I looked at it this way.

(London, 1980s)

Half full or half empty: 03 (Dealing with news of a death)

I've just heard about the deaths of two people I didn't know personally but known to the bringer of the news.

    Both were not young, but a loss is a loss, whatever the age of the departed.

    My consolation to that person was:  "It's always hard on the survivor, but I always try and tell myself that it's kinder on the deceased, as s/he is no longer suffering.  This makes it easier to accept."

    I've used this half full or half empty perspective on two occasions to help me through a mega depression.

    One was the unexpected death of a Taiwanese friend from a traffic accident.  He had been a (platonic) soulmate, and I'd just spent a month in the summer with him in Taiwan.

    I asked British Monomarks (the telex agency where I was working part-time to support myself through my first degree) to give me all the spare hours they could find.  This way, I'd come home totally whacked, down a big glass of brandy and fall asleep, getting up the next day to another full shift.  Day in, day out.

    When there were no more hours to be had at Monomarks, I'd sit on the floor against the radiator in the basement flat, and grieve.  My West Hampstead flat was a short distance from Hampstead Heath, where I could go and take a long walk, but I didn't want to do anything, I just wanted to sink in my depressed state.

    One day, a thought suddenly struck me:  the person who had died wasn't suffering anymore, so I was not feeling sad for him but for myself.  I had lost a good friend, so I was feeling sad for my loss.  I was therefore being selfish.  That thought brought me out of my debilitating depression.

(London, 1979)

Word play: 02 (Frazer Dewar Gleig)

One of my students on the evening programme was Frazer Gleig (d. 20 Feb 2009).  This blog is dedicated to him.

    Frazer attended Reading School, and became a tunnelling engineer, working for Haswell, then Arup.

    He'd worked on Hong Kong's MTR (Mass Transit Railway) and in Taipei (presumably on the Taipei Metro).

    His middle name was Dewar (he was of Scottish lineage), so when he was in Hong Kong, the Cantonese speakers there pounced on the two sounds in Dewar, which sounds like the Cantonese F-word (dew ah).

    When China's 三峽工程 / 三峡工程 / sān xiá gōng chéng / Three Gorges Dam project was in its later stage, Frazer was invited as part of an international engineering consortium to have a look around (and behind the scenes) before it was opened to the public.  When he returned to London, he gave a talk to his fellow evening programme Mandarin students about his tour, calling it The Three Gorgeous Dames.

    That glass of Guinness is still waiting for you to collect, Frazer.  Missing you loads.

PS:  Frazer is also featured in this blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2013/06/chinese-tones-ii-london.html 

Word play: 01 (Pain / Pains)

When's the appropriate time to cosh an abductor?

    Reader Valerio posted this comment below to my blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/01/whens-appropriate-time-to-cosh-abductor.html

Quote

I am impressed by your thorough advance preparation for a possible abduction...what I mostly had in mind with my question was: how can a girl with an umbrella in the back seat of a locked car hope she can prevent from being abducted from some probably ruthless and experienced thug if he is really determined to kidnap her? In this scenario, I would think that any coshing would just aggravate her position...

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My reply: 

Quote

You're right, I'm not sure that I'd have been able to ward him off totally, but what's the alternative?

I certainly wouldn't acquiesce willingly. At least let him get some pain for it.

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Re-reading my answer above, I've just thought of a word play (had my brain been quick enough at the time...) if I'd done my original reply as:

I certainly wouldn't acquiesce willingly.  At least let him get some pain for his pains.

(from googling)

Quote

"For his pains" means in return for the effort, trouble, or work someone put in, often used ironically to highlight a disappointing or negative outcome, like getting complaints instead of thanks for trying hard. It refers to the "pains" (great care, trouble, or exertion) someone took, implying the result wasn't worth the effort. 

Examples:

• "He worked all night to fix the computer, and all he got for his pains was a bigger mess".
• "She went to great lengths to explain, but was laughed at for her pains".

How would life have turned out: 02 (Singapore)

In my younger days, most Chinese parents aspired for their children to become one of the following three when they grew up, and in the order given: 

1. doctor

2. lawyer

3. accountant

    I read a book about Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) and his work in Africa when I was about ten, and aspired to go and work with him.

    I was in the Science Stream for my four secondary school years, and got good marks.  It was, therefore, automatically taken for granted that I should go into the pre-med(ical) class for my two Pre-U years.

    For some reason, however, in spite of all the hard work I'd put in for physics and chemistry, I simply never got my head around them.  Even the physics and chemistry lab experiments never quite produced the readings required, although I'd followed the instructions to a tee.

    In hindsight, I should've switched over to the Arts Stream after a year of this, but it was never my ambition to do History or Geography or Literature, I wanted to heal people, so I doggedly stuck to physics and chemistry, perhaps hoping a miracle would happen last minute.

    Well, that miracle didn't happen, so I couldn't get into medical school.  It was a huge shock (/ source of shame) at the time, to have failed for the first time in my school life when I'd been top girl of the grade seven years out of ten for my secondary school.  Top girl out of 200 students.  (In those days, the standard size was 40–44 students per class, with five classes per grade at my convent school.  Nobody suffered from the size, although a big deal has been made out of class sizes here in the UK.)

    The alternative was nursing, but with three health professionals in the family, I was strongly discouraged from going into it:  low pay and low status; hard / heavy / dirty work; shift work which would mess up my family life when I got married.

    So that I could be financially independent as soon as possible, I took up a secretarial course.  That completely changed my life, because it got me to Taiwan (the American oil company job), and then I was able to use my secretarial course skills to support myself throughout my student years in London, working part-time as a telex operator.  (Typing wasn't a default and universal skill in those days, unlike now -- one had to learn it properly.  Don't forget it was the manual typewriter then, with the electric typewriter being still fairly novel.)

    Looking back, if | had passed my physics and chemistry and got into medical school, this is what I might have become -- based on what I think is a fairly typical model:

1. maybe set up my own health practice

2. lived in a bungalow house (rather than in a high rise block), or in an affluent residential compound

3. got married, had children

4. driven a Mercedes Benz

    No sour grapes here, but that's not me.  And in view of my being squeamish about blood and open wounds, failing Pre-U physics and chemistry was the message from above, I think.  (I know, I know, one can always go into the bloodless branches of medicine, but I think the basic training requires one to go through the whole gamut.)

(Singapore)

When's the appropriate time to cosh an abductor? (Taipei, Taiwan)

In my blog Be careful you don't get abducted: 03 (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/01/be-careful-you-dont-get-abducted-03.html), reader Valerio has left a question: "...what would the appropriate time for coshing be?!...".

    The answer is a bit long, so here's a separate blog for it.

    My reply to Valerio's question above:

    "Appropriate time in a general sense would obviously be when his head was turned, which would make it easier for me since I'm small and female.

    "Appropriate also in the sense of if I thought he was indeed going to abduct me."

    The daughter of my Chief Geologist boss at Conoco Taiwan was 18 at the time in my first year at Conoco Taiwan.  She was blonde and curvy.

    She told me about what happened to her one taxi ride home.

    A lot of expats in Taipei during my two years there (1975–6) lived in an area of Taipei called Tianmu (天母).  Her house was one of those built on the slopes of the hill there, looking down on a huge swathe of Taipei.

    On a taxi ride home one day (evening?), Beth said to the driver when they got to her house, "停 tíng / stop," but he kept going.  She started to use English ("stop!") and Malay ("berhenti!") (her father had worked in Conoco Singapore for a few years), to no avail.

    The driver got to the very top end of the road, which was then just forest around.  As soon as he halted, Beth shot out of the cab and ran down the hill.

    If I'd been Beth in that cab in that situation, that would've been an appropriate moment for me to cosh the driver first from the back seat before I made my escape.

    Of course, I'd need to unlock the car door first before I could run out of the car after coshing him from behind (or the side).

    The frightening bit is:  the locking was controlled by the driver from the lever near his gear stick.  I can't be sure that I'd be able to pull the latch up from its sunken position in the door sill quickly enough, if at all.  I do have vague memories of surreptitiously easing it up on a few trips, just to make sure I could escape when needed, so I think it can be done by the passenger from the back seat as well.

(Taipei, Taiwan, 1975)

Chinese perspective on inter-human relations

The Chinese generally have fairly strongly defined rules about inter-human relations, especially within the family or clan.  You have to show respect to your elders, whether you like them or not, whether they're worthy of the respect or not, etc.  You also have to acknowledge the familial link with them, in the sense of accepting their authority or position, say.

    Back in the 80s, I met a mainland Chinese chap in his 30s at dinner in a friend's house.

    His father had gone over to Taiwan pre-1949, to seek a better life, I think, leaving his wife and fairly new-born son (the man I met at dinner) behind in mainland China, to be sent for at a later point.  Then 1949 happened on the mainland, and the father was stuck on the other side of Taiwan Straits.

    After x number of years, the father gave up hope of being reunited with his wife and son, so he started a new family in Taiwan.  Another x number of years on, he emigrated to Sweden, and sent for his son to join him there.

    I asked the man, "So, how did you feel when you first met your father at the airport?  Did you feel anything for him?"

    His answer was: "Of course!  He's my father!"

    It got me thinking afterwards.  I'd like to have had the opportunity to do a kind of control test on this, like how they do it in science and research.

(from googling) Quote You test the instrument or method on known negatives (e.g., testing a pregnancy test on people who aren't pregnant) to catch false positives. Unquote

    My control test would be:  send a total stranger to the airport to collect him, claiming to be his father, then take him home to live with him for a few years, maybe even a couple of decades.  Then tell the son, "He's not your father," and see if he might feel the same "of course!" closeness to the real father, having built up a relationship with the stranger over the years of living with him.

How would life have turned out? 01 (England / Singapore)

 

A student of mine (in her early 80s) from Lancashire told me that her mother had worked in a textile mill, and expected her to follow suit.

    Just as well she didn't go along with that, for she then went on to lead a very interesting life, publishing articles about her experiences too: teaching English in (alphabetical order) China, France, Singapore, Spain and Switzerland; editing an educational magazine in N.E. China near the Korean border; and is now learning Russian as well.  (She already knows French, Spanish and Mandarin.)

    I used to visit some relatives on my father's side who lived on Singapore's biggest offshore island, Pulau Ubin, where granite quarrying was done.    

    I was then told, aged 9, that when I arrived, a fourth girl, my mother had wanted to give me away to this family, who only had a son at the time.  It was a common Chinese practice to give away children, e.g., to let the child have a better life, to give the childless family a child, or a son-less family a son -- in my case, a daughter-less family a daughter.

    It got me thinking how different my life would've turned out, growing up on that outback of an island off the north-east coast of Singapore, with a family who ran a ferry service between Singapore and Pulau Ubin, as well as a grocery shop.  An environment that was very rural and quite different from my suburban upbringing (English stream Catholic convent school education).

(England / Singapore)