The World Is Your Oyster

Wait, what??  I'm back on language again.  Specifically, our strange idioms.   The world is your oyster?  Oysters smell, are slimy and usually have grit.  I'm sure if I looked up the phrase online there would be some explanation of how this crazy phrase got started and what the denotation means.  Probably something to do with finding a pearl. 

A friend of mine spoke fluent mandarin.  He taught me how to say the most insulting thing he knew in Chinese.  The translation was something like "your mother is a thousand-year-old egg."  Doesn't sound that insulting to me.  But different languages and cultures have different idioms. 

It still strikes me that learning English as a second language is an entirely different thing than being able to navigate all our particular phrases like "down the hatch" and "under the weather."  I've tried recently to remove idioms from my speech.  It's hard.  They slip in, you don't even realize how many we use on a regular basis.  I don't think to speak well, or speak clearly, we need idioms.  So I'm going to continue to work on it.

The Big Boy Update:  Sometimes he still has bad skin reactions to food or something else.  Today at lunch he got all red and was trying to scratch his forearms on the edge of the table and tear the skin off the bottom of his chin.  He won a bath and a dose of Benadryl when we got back.  He's sleeping soundly now.  Usually, the irritation goes away after the first interaction or two.  His body seems to get used to new things after an exposure or two.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She is hungry, only she doesn't want to eat.   That's her new complaint.  She complains multiple times per day.  But she's sleeping through the night.  So I'm definitely not complaining.  Speaking of, it's time to go feed the little girl--or try to.