Water…

It has been raining constantly lately. I must be really tired of it. It is obviously getting to me because yesterday I wrote this very ‘serious’ poem about water. Ahem!

Water is an essential element

They say I’m 60% water
I thought it was more, still
Water is an essential element.

PERHAPS I WOULD HAVE DROWNED

If there were no water
I’d never have learned to swim
Perhaps I would have drowned.

MAYBE WE’D ALL DRINK WHISKEY

What would we drink without water?
Maybe we’d all drink whiskey
with breakfast, lunch and dinner.

WE’D FALL INTO THE FLOWING RIVER

We’d all be so drunk we’d fall
into the flowing river
On the way home.

WE WOULDN’T HAVE UMBRELLAS.

Without water there would be no rain
We wouldn’t have umbrellas
And would get soaked through and through.

P.S. I’ve been writing this blog for a long time. You may enjoy this old post, ‘Favorite Sayings’, dated June 8, 2012. Just go to the upper right where the eyeglass is and type in the name.

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Idiomatic idioms..

Having taught some poor souls struggling with the complexities of the English language, I know what a son-of-a-bitch idioms can be. They don’t say what they mean and even kids born into English speaking families are sometimes confused by them.

My own son, at three, opened those

Little Rafi with big sister Susan

big eyes of his in terror when my friend told him she was picking him up from nursery school because his dad was ‘tied up’. She quickly noticed Rafi’s distress and explained his dad was just too busy to come. Whew!

A son of Polish immigrants painfully related what happened long ago in his 7th grade woodworking class. Dissatisfied with his sanding job, the instructor told him to use more ‘elbow grease’. Having no idea what that meant, he told his teacher he didn’t have any. I hope teachers today would be kinder, but he was sent to ask another teacher to ask for  some. He’s never forgotten how embarrassed he was when that teacher and his whole class burst into laughter.

It’s raining cats and dogs

When I taught an adult night class, I had one student who loved idioms. He’d regularly watch English TV and bring in the idioms he didn’t understand and ask me to explain them. He brought in many, including ‘The buck stops here; The Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; and Don’t upset the apple cart’.

 

We live in a rain forest

We live in a rain forest. It happened to pour the evening I told him we’d say: ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’. I then asked what they’d say in Chinese. He seemed uncomfortable and said he couldn’t tell me. I didn’t push it. The next week, he came into class. came up to me and said ‘I can tell you now. We say ‘It’s raining dog excrement.’

I didn’t laugh. But I found the whole incident hilarious and have never forgotten it! Well, we’ve had a whole lot of rain lately and it’s been raining dog excrement for weeks for sure! Enough already….

Enough already!

 

 

 

Thank you for reading my blog. I love that you do. Enjoy whatever you are celebrating — and may 2020 be kind to us all.