We had a Chinese party the other day who barely spoke a word of English between them. And so their tour guide presented all the caddies with a wee booklet of pertinent words that he felt might be useful. It was really quite sweet as it listed about ten words including good shot, bunker, left, right, wind etc and were spelt phonetically in English. As such ‘good shot!’ was ‘How Cheuw!’ which soon became to everyone’s amusement ‘achoo!’ and there was soon a lot of amused caddies practising their pronunciation (Scottish wit thing) going on, some pretty perplexed looking Chinese visitors (not getting the Scottish wit thing going on), and a general feeling that this wasn’t really going to work. However they were soon all saying ‘Good shot’ in wonderful east coast dialects.
My chap was an amiable looking guy who had the best English. He looked at me with what I thought was a slight mix of concern and puzzlement, and then asked, much to my surprise, ‘How old are you?’ I replied that I was 53. Anyway this seemed to be a good thing and he kind of clasped his hands together, in that Buddhist way and sort of bowed to me. And I must admit it was all quite bewildering and marginally (if only deep down subconsciously) disturbing, as I was sure he was older than me.
But I think that is an age thing.