8/03/2004

Oprah and the Trolls

Actually, I had a hard time even typing that header for this post, if you must know. I'm sitting here laughing my lily white ass off.

Z is not a native English speaker. Even so, after 15 years with me, it is WAAAAY improved, but still, we get little glitches now and then. Tonight is a prime example of a glitch.

See, in his office, August is low season. Dead. In his office, the guys have 2, YES 2 (!) 45" Plasma Screens hanging on the wall. Attached to a satellite dish. The guys alternate between the news and various music channels throughout the day. As he works technically in Saudi, the office is ALL MALE. This is an important fact in my story.

See, apparently, everyday at 3pm, the boys watch Oprah. Yes, Oprah Winfrey. Isn't that a hoot?

Z was trying to tell me about the topic of Oprah's show today, asking if I saw it. No, I didn't. Enlighten me. So, he goes on to tell me like so.....

"Well, Oprah's subject today was people that overcame some type of problem in their life, an adversity, and she had these, um, trolls on that..." (and he makes a hand gesture to make his troll point places his had about maybe 2 foot off the ground) and that my darlings, is when it clicked in my head....as he continued saying.... "yeah the trolls, this one troll, he had a problem wi....WHAT??" I can ONLY IMAGINE what my face looked like, but I think my eyes had bugged out and my mouth was gaping open and I said:

"TROLLS???? DO YOU MEAN TO SAY DWARVES?????" and he replied, "Oh yeah, trolls, dwarves, same thing..." At which point, I went into hysterical laughter and said "no they are not the same thing!!! First, there is no such thing as TROLLS! They are some fairy creature that guard bridges and, well, are generally evil mean things. Dwarves are NOT TROLLS!" He keeps insisting there is no difference. I keep insisting there IS A BIG DIFFERENCE.

Now before I finally get some comments from people ripping me a new a-hole for laughing at dwarves, I want to tell you that, I WAS NOT LAUGHING AT THE DWARVES! I was laughing at his grammatical MURDER. GOT IT? He managed to use the word "adversity" properly, but ffed up the word dwarves? no. no. no. No hell. (another one of his beauties, instead of Hell No!) Cat, back me up on this!

Of course he went on calling the trolls to irritate me, and told me that this dwarf couple had 6 kids (of which 2 were twins!) and I said "and they were all normal size, right?" "Yeah! How did you know??" "well, cause it happens all the time!"

The dork is still calling them trolls though.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Due to your previous admonishment, I am here to say: hi, I am a lurker, and I'm posting. :)
Summary: I have a friend with PCOS who sometimes links to Chez Miscarriage, which I started reading because she's fantastic, and linked from there to a little pregnant, which I also have been reading for oh, six months, and I saw you mention you had a blog in her comments and so I read yours now, because you're so damn funny. I'm permanantly a lurker though, because I haven't had any problems (unless you count lingering trauma from a C-Section after 17 hours of labor and my 12 lb 2 oz son spending 4 days in the NICU with evil nurses) and I'm usually too nervous to comment.

But my mom's husband is from Syria (btw I really admire that you two have put aside the huge cultural differences for fifteen years!) and he's always cracking us up with the language differences. He used to say "piece of sugar" instead of "piece of cake" and he always makes fun of the nasal way Americans talk, and he pronounces Cherokee "cher-oo-ke" and Buick "byook". And he thinks the coolest American phrase is "Chill out, dude." :D

-Marisa

Hula Doula said...

Let him call my cousin Vinny a troll!! Yah Yah. He wouldn't have the knees or the balls to do that again!!!

Unknown said...

LMAO!!!!!!!! Maybe you should show him a picture of a troll and then a picture of a real dwarf so he'll really get it. Maybe he'll get a kick out of it too :o)
-Carrie Jo

JenP said...

Delurking to say: I couldn't stop laughing when I read this. It totally cracked me up. And I thought minor English discrepancies (between Her Majesty's and mine) were enough to boil down the walls between my Kiwi husband and I. But this...This is hilarious!