FOB
11/28/2004
I am feeling: Curious
I bet one of the hardest thing for an immigrant coming to the states would be learning all of our little idioms. We have so many odd sayings that sometimes I don’t even know what they mean. Like “Bob’s your uncle” – I never understood what that was supposed to mean!? And where did the saying “in a pickle” come from? But can you imagine someone coming in and telling you that “something smelled fishy” and trying to understand it at face value. I bet a lot of immigrants are insulted a lot because of simple misunderstandings.
I remember one of the guys at a school I went to who was from Germany. He had his masters degree in English from a German school. This guy knew more about the English language than anyone who was at the school. He had only been in the states for weeks when we started to realize that when we had a question about grammar or spelling, Dan was the man to go to. But the funniest thing about the whole thing was when he would stop a conversation in the middle of a sentence because he didn’t get whatever expression was just used. We tried to teach him a few, like “all that and a bag of chips”. It was pretty funny when he would try to slip one in every now and again. I miss that guy.
Anyway, this was just a random thought and I had nothing better to do than write to you about it. So next time you are chatting with a tourist and he looks at you with a frieghtened look on his face, you might want to run over in your mind what you just said because he might not understand what you meant when you said you wanted to “pick his brain about something”!
