Archive for the ‘restaurant’ Category
On knowing what to listen for
December 12th, 2007
In your hometown, you pretty much know what everyone’s going to say before they say it. There’s really no new thing under the sun. In Eden Prairie, MN, the grocery bagger’s going to ask me about paper or plastic, the restaurant greeter’s going to apologize for my wait, and so on. It’s the flip side of knowing what to say in a given social situation — knowing what to listen for reduces the complexity of the task faced by your overtaxed linguistic processor.
But the farther you get from home, the more you have to adjust your expectations. Here are a couple I missed recently. Read the rest of this entry »
