Vocab Lesson: "Suicide Bomb"

By Margaret Lyons in News on Aug 2, 2004 6:28PM

A flight out of O'Hare to Dayton, Ohio was delayed yesterday after a passenger wrote "suicide bomb" on a piece of paper before the flight took off. Another passenger saw the note, flipped, and told authorities. Upon investigation, it turned out that the man, a Japanese citizen, was simply writing down English words he didn't understand so he could look up in a dictionary. According to a police spokeswoman, "'He teaches himself English by reading newspapers... It was all just a miscommunication.'"

The man was arrested, but after police questioned him, he was released without being charged. Passengers were all re-screened, and the plane eventually took off. We'd be pretty freaked too if the person next to us on a plane wrote down "suicide bomb," so we're not going to call anyone out on being paranoid, but we think we can all agree that now, after the fact or whatever, this is just funny. Also, Chicagoist's foreign language teachers always told us to write down unfamiliar words to look up later, but we had no idea anyone was actually diligent enough to do it. Way to be, Japanese business traveler. Maybe this is why you're learning English and we're still drawing a picture of a toilet and gesturing frantically. Hmm.