That went right over my head

TIL that a good portion of the subconscious - or even conscious - gestures we use is language-based or location-based and may not translate if speaking to someone whose first language isn’t the same as yours.  It makes Perfect Logical Sense, but somehow had never occurred to me.

Background:

😂 I was in Spanish class and we were (somewhat ironically) talking about idioms.  And I said something about “that went right over my head.”  But since I was having a lazy moment I didn’t bother to say it, just used the hand swiping over head gesture and we continued on.  However after the lesson part, my teacher, who is a native Spanish speaker who is fluent in English and reasonably competent in Korean (random) mentioned it and said he saw someone do the same thing in an English movie the other day but didn’t know what it had meant.

So the rest of the lesson was all about gestures in each language and what they mean which was actually fairly fascinating.

Idiom Origins

TIL that the phrase to “wash your hands of…” whatever actually has religious origins?!?!   lol but since it made such logical sense to me I never questioned it.

Pencil Crayons vs Coloured Pencils

TIL that while in Canada we say “Pencil Crayons” while the rest of the English-speaking world says “Coloured Pencils”, the same phenomenom exists in Spanish?!?!   Apparently there is one country somewhere in South America that uses the Spanish version of pencil crayons, while everybody else uses the literal translation of coloured pencils.  So random.  And the kind of thing that actually fascinates me.

TIL: Black pencils have a blue base

TIL that black pencil crayons (that’d be coloured pencils to the rest of the world) have a blue base.  And if you use them to darken yellow or orange, you run the risk of ending up w green ;). Suffice to say, I learned this the hard way *sigh* only to have the explanation given shortly after my intended-to-be blond person started sporting greenish hair ;)

#TIL - when colouring, use another colour under black

TIL that if you want something to be truly black and you’re using coloured pencils, put another colour down first.  It adds more depth and realism to the colour.