Language Is Neato

I often wish I knew more languages than I do and I really admire those who have more than a couple of languages under their belt.

I'm especially appreciative of the many people I run into here who speak English as their second language.  French is the only other language I could currently attempt to speak regularly and it would take me a while to get up to speed and still, I imagine it would not always be perfect, you know?

So it's always interesting to me to talk to someone who has an "accent" aka they are speaking English as not their first/mother language.  Sometimes really cool things happen.  In my mind at least!

Like, at the pool I do the classes at, there is a really tall lifeguard.  He's something close to 7 feet and one of the older ladies and I were chatting before class and she mentioned him and said "he is SO long!"

Which OMG that's so true!  He is long.  Not short.  He's very LONG!  The fact that that's not how we refer to someone un-short is now something I'm thinking about because a string is short or long.  But a human (or creature???) is short or tall!

But for this woman, speaking a language she learned along the way the process of describing this tall man came out as "he is long". I just thought that was so neat and such a cool example of how language learning maybe happens?  

And as you know sometimes happens to me, if I think about it too long I'll get really weirded out about long vs tall and my brain will stop working and it'll be like when you say a word so often it sounds wrong!

Or maybe English is just extra weird, eh?