my dyslexic ex

A man who loves to cook but cannot bake is so good for a girl’s convenience and ego. Years ago I lived with a guy who thought “hundreds of thousands” were called “thousands of millions” and that croissants were a cross bread. He wasn’t wrong but his dyslexia was a continuing delight and I always […]

Two swains drifting like white roses on the dark canal. My Berliner swain calls them swains and I never correct him. Similarly I refrained for reasons of selfish enjoyment from pointing out to an earlier, South Australian swain, who though a native speaker was heartily dyslexic (he called our chimney ‘the chumley’), that the swans’ […]

Favourite German-English idiomcy of the week: a friend confesses to ‘bunch-watching.’ That’s when you borrow an entire season of some tv show on dvd and watch the lot. Favourite personal neologism of the night: idiomcy. I didn’t have the right word (it’s not exactly ‘mistranslation’) and didn’t want to insult my friend’s English. As I […]

A German friend trying to understand a phone call from a Polish colleague just asked me could I stop typing… as I was rattling away at a fine old pace and it was very distracting. I learned to type on an old manual typewriter where you had to exert actual pressure to get the keys […]

On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”  

I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? […]

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Years before I had driven from Adelaide to Melbourne with my then partner. We towed behind us the tower of terror: all of our possessions lashed to a homemade trailer. His possessions were mostly tools and mine were mostly books. In a seaside town we stopped with his best friend and her husband. They had […]