I had an exam this Monday. We got three sheets of blank paper to write on and one sheet with three typed sentenced, to make a commentary on (which most of the Spaniards wrote a full sheet front AND back about... did I say there were THREE sentences?). So I receive this paper with three typed sentences, start to panic, but thankfully my cold-hearted evil philosophy professor announces that she will verbally tell us the three other questions that make up the exam. "1. Development of the conscious; 2. Intencionality in Husserl; 3. Language and intentionality." Yes, these were our "preguntas" and if I'm translating that correctly, which I'm pretty sure I am, "preguntas" means questions. Basically, we were supposed to write, aka copy, as much as we could remember from the teacher's lectures and our notes about the given topics in 2 hours.
We frequently play a little card game here called 'kings' which is trivial to say the least. Well, if you draw a queen out of the pile in this juego (i.e. game), you become the question master and everyone you speak to must respond to you in a question. While there have been many efforts to deny losing to the question master (to deny the fact that you responded with a statement), we police ourselves quite well. One time, a friend responded to the question master's pregunta, "Hey, Sean, are you the question master?" with the statement, "I am the question master." As we called him out on his mistake, he tried to change the intonation of his voice to make his statement into a question, imitating a pubescent boy on just the last few syllables. While this provided a few laughs, we stuck to the rules and ultimately he lost that one...
I have a creeping suspicion that Spaniards, or at least Spanish professors, would not excel at this game. Simon Says would perhaps be a better bet as they thoroughly enjoy when any student regurgitates exactly what they have said previously... or is that called the shadow game, you know, the one that young children like to play to annoy their babysitters? But alas, they can never truly convince me that they actually are question masters they claim to be, regardless of the intonation they invoke.
