A supposedly uneventful errand ...

[Chav]

admin ขอประเดิมเขียน post แรกของ forum นี้เลยนะครับ

The other day I was taking a taxi from my home to a nearby supermarket in western part of Bangkok when I saw a scene that would make me feel ill at ease for the rest of the day. It was a routine trip, something I did every week, so I didn't pay attention to the traffic and was pretty much in a lull when the driver suddenly made a noise and moved his hand about. When asked what happened, the driver said he saw a man on the pedestrian overpass that the car just went under. The man was pacing back and forth, acting like he was about to jump. I looked back but saw nothing, since the car was already some distance away. I made no comment, but the driver murmured on, convinced that the guy was going to jump sooner or later.

During that time, the car was heading in the opposite direction of my destination to make a U-turn. That meant in a few minutes we would circle back to the same spot. Anticipating another chance to confirm what he thought, the driver's eyes were fixated ahead. I wasn't sure what to expect.

When we got near the overpass, the driver cried out, undoubtedly because he just saw something. I sat on the back seat and couldn't see through the windshield very well. But just as the car drove away from the overpass, I turned my head back and, for a split second, saw a shape of a man whooshing down, hands and legs spread as though he were a skydiver.

I was stunned. That mid-air image was the only thing I saw as the jumper was on the other side of the street divided by a row of trees at least a meter tall. We didn't stop. The car kept moving and the driver kept on babbling about what just happened. I made a mental note to find out more once I got home. When I did, I immediately turned on my computer and checked some online news websites. I found nothing. Only after some Google searches did a single news report come up. It was posted on some traffic news website, not a news story so much as a footnote, with the barest of information: "An unidentified male jumped off a pedestrian overpass near Nongkhaem Mall. He is now in critical condition."

http://www.js100.com/en/site/post_share/view/32993

[CompoundInterest]

Hi. My first one! Just to throw in some comments and observations to kick this ball rolling...
--

The other day I was taking a taxi from my home to a nearby supermarket in western part of Bangkok when I saw a scene that would make me feel ill at ease for the rest of the day.

[1] "nearby supermarket in western part of Bangkok" --> "in the western part"?
[2] "would make me feel ill at ease for the rest of the day" --> "ill at least for"?

It was a routine trip, something I did every week, so I didn't pay attention to the traffic and was pretty much in a lull when the driver suddenly made a noise and moved his hand about.

[3] "something I did every week" --> "do" To describe things that happen in the regular, it normally goes with the present tense.
[4] "I didn't pay attention to the traffic" --> I feel "pay any attention" sounds more natural.
[5] "in a lull" --> Cool! I never used this idiom before.
[6] "moved his hand about" --> I think in the US, it's more common to use "around".

[Chav]

ขอบคุณที่แนะนำครับ ผมเขียนพลาดไปหลายจุดจริงๆ ([1][3][4])

ส่วน ill at ease นี่ตามลิงค์นี่เลยครับ

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/ill+at+ease

[CompoundInterest]

ขอบคุณที่แนะนำครับ ผมเขียนพลาดไปหลายจุดจริงๆ ([1][3][4])

ส่วน ill at ease นี่ตามลิงค์นี่เลยครับ  

...

Wow! Thanks. Like I said, we learn something new everyday!

[NaiDui]

Thank you for all the trouble you must have had to go through to start this website. Hope there will be sufficient participation to make it very successful. We do need a website that is geared towards the more advanced users of English.

I have two comments in regards to the previous corrections.

1) I don’t believe ‘would make me feel ill at ease for the rest of the day’ needs to be modified. If it is changed to ‘would make me feel ill at least for the rest of the day’, the word ‘at least’ would seem to imply that the narrator did not know how long he felt ill.

2) Changing ‘something I did every week’ to ‘something I do every week’ implies that the speaker still makes that trip weekly. If he used ‘did’ and did not change it to ‘do’, then the reader has the feeling that the speaker no longer makes the trip, possibly because of the attempted suicide.

By the way, the word อนุญาต should be spelled without the vowel ‘อิ’ unlike the word ‘ญาติ’, otherwise it means minor relatives, if there is such a thing.

[Chav]

ขอบคุณ Naidui ที่แนะนำครับ ผมไปแก้คำว่าอนุญาตเรียบร้อยแล้วครับ

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