Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Four things

Four things

1. Miriam binge-reads The Friend magazine during sacrament meeting at church, which has been fine with me until tonight, when she turned to me and said, with an accusatory glare, "Mama, I've noticed that most people have TREATS with their Family Home Evening." Blast those FHE treat recipe articles!

2. Sterling loves Star Wars so much. Every night he lays out these three things by his bed: lightsaber, Darth Vader jammie shirt, Darth Vader mask. He is at that age where he's always asking questions, and some of these questions defy reason: "What color is a Rathtar's bed?" (Also, because he's a three-year-old boy: "Does Finn have a penis?")

3. Norwegian TV is currently the best. We watched Nobel on Netflix. We loved it. It made me feel All The Things. Then last night we wrapped up Occupied (also on Netflix). The subtitles were only in Finnish (Nobel had English) so it was a bit of a wild ride, but we enjoyed it.

4. Yesterday at church, a guy from China went up to the pulpit to speak for a few minutes. He spoke in English since he doesn't speak much Finnish. A Finn stood up there with him to translate from English into Finnish so the rest of the congregation could understand. But there came one sentence that the (extremely skilled!) interpreter just couldn't figure out. It was a total impasse - the Chinese guy (operating in a second language) couldn't find a way to rephrase so the Finn could understand, and the Finn tried to clarify but wasn't getting anywhere. They were stuck. And then a woman near the back of the congregation just called out the right translation in Finnish (she spent some time in the US and speaks even idiomatic English really well). You don't often hear someone yell things out in a Mormon congregation, so the whole exchange put a smile on this linguist's face.

There is a hole in the (American) English language

February 3rd, outsourced