Too Young To Understand

‘You talk as if you farted in a puddle.’

When Kate and I were going through puberty, my grandmother — on my paternal, Jewish side — gave us books on etiquette. There was a blue one for me, “101 Rules of Etiquette for Boys,” and a pink one for her, “101 Rules of Etiquette for Girls.”

Like many who grew up in the Soviet Union, my grandmother has a sleeve full of colourful phrases. One time, when she got into an especially heated argument with my grandfather, she stopped mid-sentence and yelled at him, “I won’t even shit with you under the same tree!”

I wrote it down in my notebook and have repeated it to friends in London ever since, enjoying their reactions.

“What do you think about Matt?”

“He’s fine. It’s Tom I’m concerned about. I mean, I won’t even shit with him under the same tree!”

“Um, alright, I guess?”

My grandmother is a poet, though she doesn’t know it. Her collection boasts a concise, metaphorical phrase for every occasion, many of which rhyme in Russian but lose their charm when translated into English.

Say, you want to describe someone who is nonchalant, dispassionate, calm, or simply doesn’t care. Instead of using any of those words, my grandmother would say, “Even if you piss in his eyes, it’s all God’s dew!”

If someone is talking nonsense, you can say they’re speaking “as if they farted in a puddle.”

The next time you ask someone what they’re working on and they reply with a thick American vocal…