Wear clothes

Before I left work for the day I was talking with our librarian.  She's quite a lot of fun and we laugh a lot, which is a good thing.  This is book week and all week long she has set up events for students and staff to participate in.  Tomorrow is a "dress as your favourite character in a book" day.  I think she meant to say wear a costume, but that's not how it came out. Instead she said to wear clothes.  I told her that wearing clothes would be a really good idea and that it would be a pretty frightening thing if I came to work without any on.  It's interesting how language can have so many implications.  Her simple statement "wear clothes" has all sorts of things tied to it.  Like, do I not usually wear clothes?  I think I do.  Yes.  I'm certain I do.  Well, ok.  Not in the shower, but generally speaking pretty much all the time.  It could be a command - wear clothes, with the implication that I will sometimes, or often wear something that isn't quite clothing, like a bathrobe, or a bathing suit, or a gunny sack maybe. Maybe she meant instead of a black plastic garbage bag (not that I've ever worn either a gunny sack or a black plastic bag - but you get the picture).  I'll never really know.  We did have a really good laugh, though. One of my students asked the other day where all the words from English come from (I was insisting they do vocabulary, thus the question) and I told him English is a language of borrowing.  We borrowed a little Anglo Saxon, added some French, tossed in little German, some Spanish, and spiced it up with a little Arabic, Chinese and Hindi, stirred it all together and voila!  English.  It's handy.  This way we have lots of words to describe things.  Take flag for instance.  It could mean a marker planted in the ground to indicate a place of importance (like a buried power line that you really don't want to accidentally dig up), or a piece of cloth on the end of a tall pole, usually belonging to a country, state/province or territory.  It can also mean to run out of steam.  Given the way many governments in many countries go, maybe the idea of things flagging isn't so far from the actual flag.  You know, droopy, lacking colour after so many encounters with hot air, cold reality, and the inability to stir on too many occasions.  Words are such fun, but do wear cothes.  Until next time.