You may, or may not, have heard of the story where President Obama retook his oath of office because they screwed it up at the inauguration – mixing up a word or two.

Here’s a link to the story.

Supposedly, some lawyers were half-joking that not abiding my the Constitution exactly, by not stating the exact words for the oath of office, there is a doubt, or question, that he is truly and officially the President of the United States. So, they did a “do-over”. Continue reading →

Every language has words that have multiple meanings. Sometimes the meanings are quite the opposite of what the word means. Others, it is similar, but not nearly the word at “face value”.

Take some standard American-English slang as example:

• When someone is “tripping”, it doesn’t mean they are falling, it means they are overreacting.
• When something is “bad”, sometimes it means it is really quite good.
• When someone says “I have no cabbage”, it means they don’t have any money, not that they don’t have any of their most favorite vegetable.

When foreigners come here after studying their “English”, they may be able to translate every word perfectly, yet they may have no idea what the heck we are talking about! It is not a stretch then to acknowledge that when we hear statements or sayings in other languages, that similar misinterpretations can happen quite easily? … and most likely without us even realizing that we have made a mistake in translation? Continue reading →

I believe that many of you are like myself – knowing that the Gaza situation just feels inherently wrong. We are smart enough to know that the national media / propaganda doesn’t tell us the whole story.

We know that the responses by Israel are unbalanced, where thousands of Palestinians are injured and hundreds killed for less than 10 Isrealis killed. We know that countries can live side by side – even if they hate each other – without murder, war, and conflict. For this stuff to happen, there has to be provoking by one side. Continue reading →