I should have been lecturing this particular English student about his obnoxious habit of not doing his homework, but honestly, I was more interested in his shirt, which featured the English phrase “Molars Forest” in giant capital letters.

What exactly was that all about, I wanted to know. Who/what is Molars Forest? And why is it that when it comes to meaning, the English speaker in this room is just as clueless as the English student?

But it was a fools errand. He had about as much background on his shirt as he had on the past conditional. He just liked the way it looked, he said, and had no idea what it meant.

That’s when another student walked in wearing a shirt featuring a Hawaiian theme, a picture of a parrot, and the sentence “Get Lei’d Island Style.”

Same question, only this time it was rhetorical: Do you have any idea what that means?

Yes, the new student told me, but she had only found out after another English teacher explained it to her. She also had bought the shirt based not on what it said, but how the letters and other design elements looked.

You can find examples like this all over Zamora, and probably all over Mexico. It’s English, but somehow, it has nothing to do with any language.

Sometimes it’s innocent, like the time I translated “get hooked” off of a friend’s fish-themed shirt. Sometimes, it’s borderline scandalous, like another female friend’s shirt that read “I’m expensive.” Sometimes, it’s weird, like the shirt that read “You cried and your tears tasted sweet.” That one was a caption for a truly odd Salvador Daliesque drawing.

And sometimes it just gets surreal. The other day I found a friend of mine - a grandmother, in fact - happily dancing away to a Snoop Dogg rap that prominently featured the word “motherfucker.” I was horrified, but for her, ignorance was bliss. I elected not to translate for her. It’s just as well, since the reaction of people to the meaning of their shirts is usually just passing amusement.

This is a situation English speakers don’t find themselves in too often, being fluent in the World’s official language, and it brings up some interesting questions. Do we have some kind of obligation to know what is printed on our shirts? Let’s say I had a shirt that read, in some obscure but not dead language like Tamil, “I have an IQ of 10.” I would want to know. True, few would understand, but those few that did would give me very strange looks.

Or maybe not. The use of language in odd contexts is nothing new. For instance, nobody seems too bothered about the actual contents of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, nor Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, possibly the two most famous pieces in the classical repertoire. We just like the way they sound.

Yet while the poem that Beethoven worked into his masterpiece is basically an ode to brotherly love, peace and harmony, the Carmina Burana is a salacious screed about lust, gambling, drinking, and general hedonistic ruckus. And old conservative audiences give both standing ovations all the time!

Perhaps next time they will trade in their tuxes for “Get Lai’d Island Style” shirts.