9/11, Planes 'Falling', and a Grammar Course

I script courses for a living. Not a very flashy means of sustenance but it has its moments. The courses I script are meant for clients the world over. A good number of clients I have interacted with are Americans. Good ol' Americans! They who elected Bush...twice! They who make life a living hell for us writers with their senseless Americanization of the Queen's language, the basic premise for which is "Let's just spell everything differently in the US of A, shall we?" They who reached an all new height of paranoia ever since a bunch of Islamic extremists decided to commit yet another act of terrorism, about six years ago, but on American soil.

Ever since the tragic 9/11 occurrence, the most powerful nation in the world has been reduced to nothing more than a bunch of paranoid blustering idiots with a serious case of prejudice towards brown skinned people wearing any kind of headgear. But how deep this paranoia runs would have to be seen to be believed. Recently, I scripted a course that was meant to teach basic English skills to Arab males working with an oil manufacturing company. And rest assured, the said company is definitely not a front for jehadis!

Once the scripts were ready, they were sent to an American voice over artist to record the necessary VO for the course. The artist came back a day later, saying that there was a rogue sentence in one of the exercises. This rogue sentence would make it quite difficult for him to export the recorded content without spending a lifetime in a US prison! The exercise required learners to pick a correct word from a list and complete a number of sentences. The missing word for the rogue sentence was "ground." The completed rogue sentence would have read as, "The airplane made a lot of noise when it fell to the ground." This was enough to send quite a few people at the recording studio into a tizzy, first because they thought the sentence described an air crash in a nonchalant manner and next because they were convinced that certain government officials would definitely see this sentence as being 'terroristic!'

The result? The course is yet to be developed, with final judgment yet to be passed on the rogue sentence. I can only hope that a plane does not really fall and hit the ground before this time. Till then, if you're reading this blog, don't send mails to your relatives abroad with words like 'airplane', 'crash', 'boom', 'bang!'