Eakspay Igpay Atinlay Ayday

This past Thursday was Speak French Day, when everyone in FHS who wants to participate wears a French flag and speaks only French for the entire day. On Speak French Day last year I wanted to participate, but alas, I do not speak French. I came up with a plan, but by then it was too late to implement it that day. I saved it for this year, and it turned out quite well. The plan was this: print a picture of a pig, pin it to myself like the French students do with their French flags, and speak Pig Latin all day. Unfortunately, I did not know that Speak French Day was Thursday until Thursday morning, so I was not able to print a pig. Fortunately, I was sitting in front of David when I realized this, so I asked him to draw one for me. This is what he came up with:


Very nice for such short notice, and more than sufficient for the task ahead of it. My first class was ToK, and Mr. Wolf gave me permission to speak English (a rule which applies to all those participating in Speak French Day) for pretty much the entire hour, so nothing Pig Latin-related (other than the drawing of the pig and my search for tape to attach it to my shirt) took place. Second hour was Spanish, where we are required to speak entirely in Spanish for an hour and a half. I used Spanish Pig Latin (which I found out is not quite as hard as it sounds) during my conversations with Sra. Riggs, and she seemed quite impressed. We were reading our novel aloud in small groups that day; I tried it while reading to my group and got through several paragraphs before they noticed. However I then reverted back to regular Spanish, as of course I wasn't internalizing any of what I was reading in Anishspay. Going a bit out of order, fourth hour was math, during which I didn't speak all that much, and when I did Miss Hessler let me speak English.

Third hour, history, was (I feel) the most enriched by Speak Pig Latin Day. We were discussing the concept of a just war, i.e. different rationales for going to war and the validity of each. We were divided into groups, and each group was put in charge of an imaginary country. I was with Moose and Shriram, and I wanted our country to have an awesome name. Mr. Majask hadn't planned to give the countries names, but I asked if ours could be pig-themed. Laughing, he shrugged off the question. "How about Pigland?" I suggested, but quickly realized that that sounded dumb. Jokingly, and from across he room, Mr. Majask suggested Pigonia. I liked it, and that became out country's name. We then got to work thinking of ideas for our military's code of conduct, like that it is acceptable to fight off an invading nation, but not to go to war over natural resources. We also had to decide which sorts of targets it was OK to bomb, from a list of places like bases, military hospitals, schools, etc. When we shared our ideas for acceptable reasons to go to war, one group suggested that if a large number of a country's citizens were attacked on foreign soil, that country would have the right to go to war with the attackers. To clarify, Mr. Majask gave an example of what he thought the group meant. He explained: if a group of three hundred Pigonian citizens on an airplane were shot down by Butcheronia, Pigonia would have the right to declare war.

Also, when I went to write the name of the country in my iPod so I wouldn't forget before I wrote this post, it auto-corrected the word "Pigonia" for me. Furthermore, a Google search for "Pigonia" yields 89,400 results, yet there is no Wikipedia article with that title. Generally speaking, of course, this is sufficient grounds to conclude that something doesn't exist, but I'm curious about this one. Most of the useful-looking results are in Polish, so could someone who speaks Polish help me out on this one? It's IA...I know you're out there.