Did the boy do this intentionally? Did he go unconscious when entering the pool? Was he trying to stay under as long as he could? Why was he not moving at all on the way in?
I do not know for sure. My believe is, that kids at that age sometimes simply do not know what they are able to do or not. They watch others, as they climb down the ladder and they just imitate them, somehow expecting the same outcome. This boy for sure was not able to swim, but he probably didn't know it. He perfectly copied the behaviour of other people entering the pool and then was maybe completely stunned that he did not float, but sink, I guess. He was in a age where most kids in Germany are confident swimmers and like to dive as well. It was not obvious to us that something was wrong, because his behaviour was so confident. He did not hesitate to climb down, and there were no sudden unexpected movements when he was under. I mean, we did not watch him specifically and guessed whether he was in trouble or not - he was just behaving just like any other boy. And you do not press the stop watch when a kid enters a pool. It just took some time until our subconscious minds shouted "something is wrong - it is too long!".
He entered the pool, face to the stairs, hands on the rails, continued to climb until the ladder ended (with his head already under water), released the rails, and sank, vertically, until the bottom. It was not a very deep pool, maybe 1.70m or so. He seemed to stand there, as if trying to see how long he could keep his breath. And when he shifted out of the upright position it became obvious that he was in trouble. A man standing next grabbed him, pulled him up, saw the boy was unconscious, started to shout for help and within seconds the boy was out of the pool and the lifeguards took over.
I don't understand why he didn't float? In my experience you bob to the top because of the buoyancy of air in your lungs - not above the water, but you at least float to the surface. Am I wrong?
One might not realize it, but many people who already know how to swim will take a breathe in while lowering themselves into water. When diving to do a cannonball the first thing many swimmers will do is take a deep breathe. Someone who doesn't swim might... not.
A child who doesn't know how to swim but is copying what they see others doing might be breathing as normal, have exhaled recently, and when they release the handles/ladder and enter the pool begin to sink. Not knowing how to swim and now head-under-water they are unable to get air into their lungs to have any amount of buoyancy.
> In my experience you bob to the top because of the buoyancy of air in your lungs
Depends on a number of factors -- body composition (fat is less dense), how much air you have in your lungs (did you inhale or exhale before entering the water), etc.
Yes, I could see someone trying to hold their breath and becoming unconscious before they are able to surface, however the urge to breath usually becomes overbearing for me long before I would become unconscious.
It's just an interesting situation to think about, because how would you know? And, why wouldn't someone come up? Obviously he became unconscious at some point, but was it due to not being able to breathe? Or did something else happen to him as he was entering the water (eg. aneuyrsm, heart failure, etc). It's hard to believe it could have been an intentional act of the kid (suicide at 6? probably not very common) or that he would go into that part of the pool in the way you described without knowing how to swim.
Some languages (particularly German) use the neutral gender when referring to children. It's actually quite jarring for me as a German to have a child (especially a generic child) referred to as "he" or "she" in English.
You're right, of course, but this sounds pretty rude in English. It would be nice if there was some way to privately suggest a correction without making a big deal out of things.
As someone who speaks other languages, I know there's a point where it's hard to make progress because you are fluent enough to be understood easily and yet you make significant mistakes that nobody will bother to correct unless you ask.
I don't actually understand the downvotes you are getting, unless people think that this just isn't adding to the conversation, but in the interests of making lemonaide:
We often use neuter (gender-neutral) pronouns in English, just not this one. I've heard native English speakers say things like "If a mother wants to use the nursing room, they can just key in the code in their pamphlet". There are definitely restrictions on using 'gender-neutral they' but this kind of usage is totally normal.
Which is a great sentence, because semantically the pronoun referent is obligatorily female and singular. And yet, we use 'they' in this context. Which shows (among other things) that syntactic requirements can be relatively divorced from semantics. C'mon, that's pretty cool, right?
A language is defined in terms of how it is used, but a language is not supposed to be used in the way it was defined, if so, we'd still be speaking proto-indo-european, or maybe we'd never be able to speak, as there wouldn't exist any grammar before a language existed. So, being a grammar nazi is plain stupid.
Be charitable. If you haven't been exposed to actual linguistics (and know about things like PIE), you have the current, normal, common-sense view on language, which is that what you speak is normal, and what speakers of any other dialect or language do it wrong. I've heard intelligent, university educated people say things like "I don't want to learn $Language with an accent". The fact that no such 'accent-less' language exists is simply not a fact that they know. Such misconceptions about, and people who suffer under them are misguided, not stupid.
Misconceptions do not matter here. One may have misconceptions, but this does not justify correcting people for their grammatical errors on a thread that has nothing to do with grammar or whatsoever and thus hijacking it. It should be obvious that a serious lot of people here are not native-speakers.
That wasn't an error, but the author made a few small errors (really, just unidiomatic phrases), which suggests he or she is not a native speaker of English:
> it was such a pure horror
> a happy end
> it did not wave the arms
> made no swimming movements with the legs
> a dozen of pools and slides
> 7 boys in that age
> not loose them
None of these are a big deal, though, and the writing was perfectly understandable.
Did the boy do this intentionally? Did he go unconscious when entering the pool? Was he trying to stay under as long as he could? Why was he not moving at all on the way in?
<- Down-mods for relevant questions.