When we English choose to leave our Sceptred Isle, or alternatively Old Blighty, we begin our travels with the highly developed delusional system that English is an international language which aids strangers from around the world to communicate with each other in a clear concise manner without any apparent built-in contradictions.
How wrong we are, as any immigrant to New Zealand, for example, would easily discover. It happened to us when we were first invited out to what we thought was dinner, but in fact it was tea, and we were given the instruction that we should “bring a plate”; naively, we thought that these poor folk simply didn’t have enough in the way of crockery and cutlery so dutifully, expecting some kind of Kiwi picnic we arrived with the necessarily requested items, only to discover that the purpose of bringing the aforementioned plate was to actually put something on it!
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Open Sesame
OPEN SESAME
SAYS WHO
SAYS I
SAYS WHY
More than anything I value the expectancies of those whom I have learnt to respect