Sunday

Matthew McConaughey and Edgar Ramírez in Gold (2016)

My wife and I were planning to go see the 4PM showing of Gold with Matthew McConaughey this afternoon. About 3PM, dearest wife tells me she is going to go take a nap. Her naps are always short, so it should not be a problem. But since she's going to take a nap, I take this as an opportunity to catch a little shut eye myself.

I wake up a 5:30PM. When I find my wife she tells me that she thought Kathryn and I were studying Chemistry in the basement. When I find Kathryn, she tells me she thought Mom and I went to the movies. Our communication skills are second to none.

But now it's Chemistry time and we need some distilled water. We go rooting around in all the obscure cupboards underneath of sinks and find bumpkis. Fine, we'll go to the store and buy some stupid distilled water. So we enlist Osmany to drive, since he now has a license and insurance, and we head over to Plaid Pantry, the closest retail establishment that might possible stock distilled water. We are 3/4 of the way there when Osmany realizes what we are after and tells us that he has some squirreled away in the choo-choos. Oh, right, back when he was on his coin cleaning rampage. So right turn back to the house instead of a left turn to Plaid Pantry. Like I said, our communication skills are second to none.

A word about choo-choo's, or maybe chew-choose, because that's what it sounds like. Osmany is working on his English, but it's hard row to hoe, and sometimes we just need a word to fill in the place of the object and the word of choice these days is choo-choo's. This is a little weird because in that Russian Science Fiction movie I was watching the other day (the title, to me, is unpronounceable, which makes it difficult to remember, something with a bunch of K's, D's and Z's), the natives of the alien planet have words for some specific things, but for everything else the word is 'Koo'.

Now it could be that they have a tonal language and speaking the word at one pitch conveys a different meaning than the same word spoken at a different pitch, but since I didn't grow up with a tonal language, it is unlikely I will ever detect the difference. There might be some inflection, and I think I would be able to pick up on that. So one word can fill a number of roles in spoken speech. Just look at what we do with fuck.