Happy holidays

I've been home for Thanksgiving, which has been utter bliss. The food is delicious, the house is so nice, and my family is wonderful! The only noteworthy occurrence has been:

The setting: Thanksgiving evening, the extended family sitting around and pretending to watch some football game on Fox. Fox apparently has this new CGI robot representing the NFL. It looks like this:



My mother: Do you think that's animated, or a real person in a suit?
Rachel: It's animated.
My grandfather: Oh, it's a real person in there.
Rachel: It's definitely animated.
My grandfather: He's a negro.
[silence]
My mother: How can you tell?
My grandfather: The way he moves! [sagely]
[general pandemonium]

The look on my sister's face at this moment can best be described with an emoticon:

Welcome to the holidays at my house!

In English

"In English, we have this expression: 'It's all Greek to me.' Do you know what that means? It means I don't understand what I'm looking at."


I was talking to my supervisor at the library this past Thursday, and we were trying to figure out how to deal with spine labels for a series of Chinese books. She wanted me to translate a few titles from their English transliteration back to the original Chinese, no big deal. In the process, she made a joke about the total incomprehensibility of Chinese characters to her, resulting in the above quote. So I find myself in the bizarre situation of sitting there, nodding my head and trying to contort my face into a look of dawning comprehension, as my supervisor slowly explains (the way one might explain something to the very young) a basic idiom in a language I have long considered my native tongue.

Thank you, very much, for teaching me the mysterious ways of your language. Bilingualism is a rare thing indeed if you cannot grasp the concept that there may not be an exclusive one-to-one correspondence between my ethnic appearance and the languages I speak.