Had a great visit from two old mission friends \u2013 one a favorite companion I haven\u2019t seen for a while, and the other a beloved former zone leader who I haven\u2019t seen for over twenty years. The occasion was this zone leader\u2019s arrival from across the pond \u2013 he\u2019s an Englishman who\u2019s now relocated to Calgary and trekked down with his family to visit Temple Square and its environs. We had a barbecue over at the Cornell pad and relived old times. We remembered the triumphs and the tragedies and the knife fights \u2013 talk to my zone leader about that one \u2013 and got reacquainted. It was as if we\u2019d seen each other just yesterday. I love it when that happens. <\/p>\n
My children very much enjoyed playing with the other children, too, especially when the zone leader\u2019s kids trotted out their English vocabulary. They played in the back garden instead of the backyard; they played football instead of soccer, and they had pudding instead of dessert. Those are some of the more benign variants in the dialects of the English and the Americans, and we remembered some times when the conversational mishaps were less benign.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Zone Leader told of a time recently when he was in an American library helping his child with his homework, and he went up to the librarian on duty and asked if she had a rubber he could borrow. He only wanted a small one, he said, which disturbed the librarian even further. It took him a moment to realize that the proper Americanized term was \u201ceraser,\u201d and that Yank libraries weren\u2019t really keen on tiny condom distribution. <\/p>\n
We used to play around with this kind of nonsense all the time over in Scotland \u2013 we yanks would call him a bloody bugger with his head up his fanny, and he\u2019d call us fags that were all stupid sons of bitches. See, in Scotland, \u201cbloody,\u201d \u201cbugger,\u201d and \u201cfanny\u201d aren\u2019t really words used in polite conversation, whereas a \u201cfag\u201d is just a cigarette, and \u201cbitch\u201d meant female dog and nothing else. Indeed, we American missionaries would go out of our way to compliment people with feminine canine companionship on the quality of their bitches, just because we could. <\/p>\n
As Americans in the Old Country, we learned quickly that we could avoid embarrassment by remembering a few simple rules: \u201cpants\u201d were underpants, so say \u201ctrousers\u201d instead; \u201csuspenders\u201d were pantyhose, so talk of using \u201cbraces\u201d to hold up your pants \u2013 I mean trousers \u2013 and feel free to eat \u201cfaggots\u201d anytime you like, so long as you\u2019re fond of meatballs, which is what the British definition means. <\/p>\n
The other story I recounted, which may be apocryphal, is that our very American mission president, upon his arrival in Scotland, held a banquet to host the highest-ranking church leaders in the country so that everyone could get to know each other a bit better. In the course of the evening, he told of how he\u2019d fallen in love with his lovely bride because she was a woman with a lot of spunk. <\/p>\n
Note to those visiting Britain: \u201cspunk\u201d is not really an appropriate term when describing the qualities of a prospective wife. It is, however, very crude slang for a liquid that a prospective wife is biologically incapable of producing, and thus mention of same made for an awkward silence at the dinner table. <\/p>\n
I hope I haven’t made you buggers uncomfortable. If there’s any part of this post I should delete, I’d be happy to get out my rubber and get to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hada great visit from two old mission friends \u2013 one a favorite companion I haven\u2019t seen for a while, and the other a beloved former zone leader who I haven\u2019t seen for over twenty years. The occasion was this zone leader\u2019s arrival from across the pond \u2013 he\u2019s an Englishman who\u2019s now relocated to Calgary ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4844,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/4844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}