Past and Future

A few linguistic oddments:

I was at a birthday party recently, where the attendees ranged in age from me at the very youngest, to one or two people in their 60s. One of the older men referred to his "ehemalige Verlobte" ("former fiancée") and it actually took me several moments to realize – oh, he means his wife. It's the sort of slightly odd play on words that seems to work well in German.

Shortly after, he then referred to her as his "zukünftige Witwe" ("future widow"), which somehow struck me as less charming.

The next day was a birthday party of a different sort – my good friends' baby turned one year old, and they invited friends over for a cozy birthday brunch. The little one herself, of course, didn't know it was her birthday, though she seemed to enjoy being passed around among all her adoring admirers.

And I think – I think – I heard her say her first word. Some people were starting to go, everyone saying "tschüss," "tschüss" ("bye"), and the baby looked up and said, "tschüss!"

Since she's being raised bilingual German/French (though the language of the country you live in generally ends up being the more dominant language), her mother jokingly admonished, "Not 'tschüss'! 'Au revoir'!"

One last language bit: There was one other child at the party, a two-year-old whose parents had just been on vacation with her in Australia, and brought back with them a stuffed toy echidna. The girl came up to me at one point, held out her stuffed animal, and stated, "echidna." And I tried to properly show her how very, very impressed I was, because seriously, what two-year-old knows what an echidna is? I wasn't even entirely sure until I looked it up just now.