Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Gory Grandma

One of my students handed in homework today in which she wrote that she visited her grandmother during the summer vacation. Her grandmother was in blood, she said, and so she was happy. "I hope she continues in blood forever," she wrote.

I didn't much appreciate the mental picture I got from reading this.

I can't figure out what she was trying to say. (I didn't read it until after she'd gone, and won't see her until next week.) I've been hunting through my dictionary all day, in every break, trying to figure out where she went wrong. She clearly means something positive. I've been looking up all the Japanese words for healthy and cheerful that I can think of, and can't find anything using the word blood that is even close. My dictionary also lists idioms using the word blood, and none of those fit.

The only possibility I've come up with is that somehow she discovered the word blooming, meaning thriving, and then looked away, looked at the dictionary again and chose the wrong form, in bloom, and then looked away again, looked back at the dictionary and moved up a few lines to blood instead of bloom and copied that.

It's far-fetched, I know, but I can't think of anything else that makes sense. Can anybody else think of any idiom using the word blood that would fit?

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