Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Less Blasphemous Than "God's Nightgown," More Satisfying than "Great Balls of Fire"

My children have devised a new exclamation. I may not have mentioned in these pages that R. is teaching himself hieroglyphics with this book. Apparently while working on one of the exercises he mistranslated "Great Lord of Debju" as "Great Basket of Debju." There is some long and uninteresting reason why. At any rate, he and S. were taken with the phrase and started going around saying, "Great basket of Debju! It's Harry Potter!" in their best English accents. I helped them branch out a bit into things like "Great basket of Debju, boy, what are you on about?" and "Great basket of Debju! Is there any clean laundry in this house?" It helps if you imagine that you are wearing a frock coat and have a large moustache. Yesterday S. ventured into new and brilliant territory with this combination: "Great basket of Debju, it's like Sputnik!" N.B. S. has never seen "So I Married An Axe Murderer." The torch is passed to a new generation.

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