His mother *was* a KGB agent. Maybe she gave him some rudimentary English instruction.

Okay, very glad I was not the only one who initially thought that!

Was that herring fantastic? I bet it was fantastic! I like matjes, but seledka is similar (sweet and salty). Geez, I really miss living in Brooklyn.

I'm kind of feeling that way, too. The only thing keeping me from totally being on the Gorp Guy train is that I'm betting he's the smart guy who doesn't 'get' Monty Python.

"Mischa" is the nickname for "Mikhail." Like "Jack for "John."

A wizard did it!

She's following her brother there!

Some of those faces combined with the noises she was making were…odd.

The amount of extra, silent letters in many Irish words is just astonishing. :-) I had a few reasons for wanting to learn Gaelic. I thought it would be nice to be able to sing in Gaelic, plus, I'm a Celtic-leaning shamanic polytheist (pagan). So it kind of felt like my liturgical language.

Nope, no relatives. I was the only person in my class who was learning it who *didn't* have relatives who were Gaelic speakers. And yeah, it's a crazy language to choose to learn. It's not a language you can learn easily from printed materials; it really wants a face-to-face teaching situation. And gods forbid you…

I'm an obsessive completist — as proof, I am still watching Once Upon a Time (I have a soft spot for Robert Carlyle) — and even I couldn't watch the last season of Lost Girl.

What, never?

Thanks for the link; I really enjoyed reading that! I have French and Gaelic (not quite fluent in either), plus a smattering of singer's German and Italian. Next up is Finnish!

That's the zombie apocalypse I want to live in.

Wow, that's fantastic. I love learning little linguistic quirks like this! I have Leo Rosten's 'The Joys of Yiddish' somewhere in the house, but can't get my hands on it quickly. But Wikipedia says, in its article on English words of Yiddish origin: "Schmatta: A rag (from Yiddish שמאַטע shmate, from Polish szmata)…

It's also Yiddish for the same thing, which is how Grandma acquired it. I'm kind of surprised to hear that it's also a Ukrainian word, though: most Yiddish comes from German. And actually, Grandma was from Odessa.

Okay, so you're going the optimistic route. :-)

That's fair. FWIW, my Ukrainian grandmother would have said "schmatta" for that particular kind of scarf.

It's also slang for the head scarf that they (traditionally) wear.

I yelled at the tv, like Janice, "I don't have your LAYG!"