Watch, Look, and See

One thing about teaching English to foreigners is that it sometimes makes you stop and wonder at your own language. Take LOOK , WATCH and SEE:

How do you explain the difference?

While separate words for “see” and “look” are found in most languages (Fr: voir and regarder; Sp: ver and mirar; Port: ver and olhar), the word – and whole notion -- for “watch” seems particularly Anglo-Saxon. Based on the small cluster of foreign language dictionaries on my bookshelf, it seems like the Latin languages simply make do with words and phrases they already have – such as the words for “attention,” “keep under vigil,” and “survey.”

Meanwhile, our words for “watch” and “wake” are both related to the Old English, “waeccan,” meaning to stay awake or keep vigil. The last names “Waite” and “Wakeman” come from the job of being “watchmen,” or the guards who kept awake and alert to enemies from outside.

In Norwegian and Swedish the word for “watch,” respectively, is “vakte” (pronounced vohkteh) and “vakt” (vahkt). In German, it’s “wachen” (vahken); in Dutch “waken” (vahken) means both “wake” and “watch.”

So it seems that WATCH, in addition to SEE and LOOK tips the scales of confusion for my students -- even for my German and Swiss students because they “see” TV (in German), instead of “watching” it.

I first noticed this confusion last spring, when I taught some young Argentine sisters how to play the card game, Go Fish; as they fumbled awkwardly with their cards, they would say to each other, “Don’t see! Don’t see!” This week, a Japanese investment banker said he needed to “watch his Blackberry;” a 9-year-old Swiss boy asked me to “watch” an illustration in a book; and a French actuary (he figures out insurance premiums) said he planned to go home and “see” TV.

My reaction to those first two mistakes was to expect the Japanese man’s Blackberry to have words jumping around in the message space, and for the Swiss boy’s illustrated bear to pop up from the page. I expected something to HAPPEN. So I am now newly aware that when we WATCH something, we expect that something to move or do something. It also means that the person doing the watching is standing or sitting, either observing or waiting for action somewhere near -- which perfectly explains why we “watch TV.”

“So,” the French actuary concluded when I explained all this, “ze people who watch TV are ‘watchers’?”

” No,” I admitted, “they’re “viewers.”

Meanwhile, the little Argentine girls now say, “Don’t look!” when they play cards (and, more recently, Clue).

LOOK requires a certain element of involvement – focus or attention, however brief – whether to look at another person’s cards and cheat at a game or to fasten one’s attention to something, as when someone shouts, “LOOK!” But it’s funny how quickly we can switch from “looking” at something to “watching” the very same thing:

“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No -- ” It may be Superman or just some geese (once so mysterious to me when they used to migrate), but it’s perfectly normal to say, “I looked up and watched (whatever it may be) fly out of sight.” Which means that a split second after you looked and figured out what it was, your mind sat back and just took it in. SEE?

SEE, used like, “Get it?” or “Understand?” requires a bit of perception –SEEING is one of the five senses, after all. (And “seers” are ones who have extra sensory perception.) Still, it seems like the most general of the WATCH-LOOK-SEE contingent. “I see you.” “Did you see that?!” “I haven’t seen you in so long.” Or William Steig’s immortal, “CDB.”