Amy Teaches English

Two days ago, I was sitting at the San Jose airport, waiting for my fiance to arrive. I started chatting with a local guy who works as a tour guide and found out that he was waiting for the same flight as me.

His English was quite good, but he told me that he was always trying to practice and he had lots of questions for me. He pulled out a piece of paper and started going through this big list.

First, he wanted to know what it means to say you're 'into' something. It means that you like it, I told him. So, he said, can you say 'I'm into taxis?' I cracked up laughing. I think he thought of taxis because one was driving by in front of us, but it just sounded so funny. I told him that you could say you're into taxis, but I've never heard of anyone being into them.

The words on his list were too funny. 'What's the difference between livestock and cattle?' I found out he's reading a book about the history of Costa Rica in English, to practice, so that's probably where he is getting these words from.

He wanted to know what the word glisten means. Then he pointed to some hub caps and asked me what they're called. 'So, could you say that the hub caps glisten?' I told him that you could, but you'd probably just say they were shiny. To me, glisten is too nice of a word for hub caps.

The funniest one was the word wag. He asked me about how you use this word. I said "well it's pretty much just for animals. A dog wags his tail." He said that in Spanish the word is 'menear' and it has a few meanings. He did a stirring motion with his hand and said that in Spanish it means that also. So he asked me, "can you wag your coffee?"

That was the perfect way to blow a few hours at the airport, and I learned a Costa Rican phrase too. "Me extraña araña" means "of course". (I just looked on wordreference.com and someone compared it to saying 'of course, my horse' in English.)