When I Wash My Hands in England...

... my left hand burns and my right hand freezes. 

Mynydd Pen-y-Fal

You know how I know I'm in Wales?

NHS and other stuff

I know I've been keeping you on the edge of your seats for a while (my apologies), but I finally have the answer to Round Three of GUESS THAT THING!

Thing number one: fungus. Yep. Fungus.
The Thing that cures That Thing: hydrocortisone and miconazole cream. And the NHS!

So, a quick breakdown of points (rolled over, of course)

Mom - 7 for teaching me a new terrifying affliction with your original guess (impetigo), plus 10 rolled over = 17
Maryann - 7 for making me laugh out loud. Plus your original 5 = 12
Dad - 10 (no guesses this time)
Grandma - 10 (no guess)
Uncle Don - 7
Jordan - 7. I'll probably still show up in Scotland with your answer proudly growing in my pits, even if it was the wrong answer.
Aunt Luanne - 7. To be fair to you, it was a great guess. They do deodorant weird here.
Grandpa - 5
Rebecca - 5... I like your guess though, it makes me seem all outdoorsy! =D
Karen - 5
Jacob - 5
Sheryl - 3, for an almost guess (see how generous I am with these points??)

And if you're wondering "hey where's MY name on that list?", well. I have an easy solution for you. Jump on the bandwagon next time and guess! Matt Stephenson, I'm talking to you.

Now, on to the cool part about catching Armpit Fungus in the UK:
THE NHS. Seriously. I walked in, made an appointment for the next day, sat down in the chair and went "hey this itches, look", the doctor said "hey that's a fungus, try this cream", wrote me a prescription, and 3 hours and £7.40 later, I was on my way to healthy normal pits! (It all cleared up within 2 days, in case you were wondering).

But it leaves me thinking: even if I wasn't in favour of socialist healthcare before this, I would be converted. Rachel Romeo, any thoughts on that? Was your experience as nice?

Happy Cheersgiving!

In a wordswipe from my friend FresherMatt, Happy Cheersgiving! (A week late). That's, of course, the British version of Thanksgiving, when they celebrate.... nothing. Or, more accurately, when their American friends force them to say something they're thankful for and eat orange foods. And they say "this is a weird holiday."

I've been paving the way for Cheersgiving since October, when I started telling my British friends that for Thanksgiving, Americans traditionally dress up as Pilgrims and Indians to commemorate that peaceful first meal. Approximately 0% of my British friends believed me, but an impressive 80% agreed to dress up anyway.

They dodged that bullet, though, because I snuck away to London on Cheersgiving, where I had a lovely orange-themed meal at Brown's in Covent Garden with fellow BFSA folk (that's "British Fulbright Scholars Association" for those not in the know). Pumpkin soup, nutroast... roast, parsnips! By the way, that was my first parsnip experience, and I'm happy to report that they are delicious. Unreasonably so. Also, I could eat pumpkin soup every day for the next month and still crave it.

So - thanks to the BFSA for a delicious meal and delightful company. My thankfulness on Thanksgiving gets a little cheesy, so we'll save most of it for one-to-one conversations (whew, another bullet dodged - in a single post! impressive.)

You know you should be a linguist when...

you've said, without irony, the sentence "I just can't get enough of particle verbs!!"

Guess That Thing!

Round 3:

Seriously. Guess that thing.

Double points for guessing the Thing that will cure the thing!

Mom, I've already got you down as guessing "Impetigo".

Adventures in English II

Today in my Sociophonetics class, my lecturer said something like "Of course, your lexical choices are often constrained by your grammar." I heard "Of course, your lexical choices are often constrained by your grandma."

And I thought, "Well, yeah. That makes sense."