Every day, since September, when I arrive to School in the morning, the janitor of the building nicely saluted me with what I always thought was a "morning, Bob"! Now, this made me feel very uncomfortable because I'm not Bob. My simple conclusion was that either the man was mad or we was mistaking me by someone else.
Because for 5 months the man kept calling me Bob, I had already asked to a number of Scottish friends what he might mean by that but no one could provide me with a satisfactory answer.
The answer finally came last week not from a Scott but from an Italian. He wasn't calling me Bob, he was calling me the Scottish version of pal, which is something like pol. But to me it really sounded like Bob, right?
That changed my relationship with the nice man! Now not only I answer with a good morning, as I already did, but I also comment on the weather... My fear is that if it took me five months to understand pal, how long will it take me to understand all the other words I still don't understand?
No comments:
Post a Comment