Tag Archives: English

Have a good one

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Ever since I’ve been in the US everybody seems to say, “Have a good one.”

Is this a Boston thing? Or something that creeped into the general language over the last few years?

I’m sure it was not an almost universal way of saying goodbye when I was last here. Everybody seems to use it – store clerks, receptionists, nurses, people in the elevator … Almost everybody.

It sounds a bit … off to me. A bit too casual or something. And of course you can’t help but think, “A good what?”

The correct pronunciation of GIF

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Definitely worth a blog post. I have been saying this for years:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/04/jeopardy-gifs_n_4383490.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

There are lots of words which begin with G and have a soft G (J) pronunciation: Gillette, gerund, gene, generous, Gibralter… I could go on and on. GIF is just another one. It just is.

So there.

Forgot an English word… should I worry?

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Ever have one of those times when you know a foreign language word for a common thing, you can see the thing, you know what the thing is, but for the life of you you can’t remember the English word?

In the supermarket today I saw a fruit and knew it was あんず (anzu). I knew what it was. I knew what it was called in Japanese. I knew it was a common fruit. I’ve eaten them before in the U.S. and in Japan. I know I knew the English word. It was not an unusual word. But I just could not recall it all day.

I thought if I didn’t try hard to remember it would eventually come to me. Finally it was bothering me and I looked it up in Google Translate – apricot. Of course.

But how could I forget the English word and remember just the Japanese word? It feels really … weird.

Is something happening to my brain?