Observe, if you will, a recent conversation between me and my flatmate -- a Spaniard with (almost) natively fluent English.
Me: "Did you buy a new frying pan today?"
Enrique: "No, not yet. I'll probably do it tomorrow."
Me: "Never mind, I'll just make do with the ones we have."
Enrique: [thinking for a moment] ". . . What's do? Is that some kind of New Zealand dish?"
Man, English is weird. But, living the Anglo-linguistic bubble of naïveté that is New Zealand for twenty-three years didn’t afford me the opportunity to realise it. Only now that I'm interacting with people whose native language is not English do I realise the true nature of the language. A bit of a surprise, really.
2 comments:
I had to think about this one for a while...
Intuitively it would seem that if you knew english that well you'd pick up the phrase "make do" somewhere along the way, apparently not.
Captcha: backlik. Delicious.
a brief googling of the phrase revealed nothing of its origin, does anyone know where it comes from?
(i must admit, by 'a brief googling', i mean 'following the first link google offered then giving up and going to bed, as its 3am')
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