Hilarious Misunderstanding

Another fun day of classes. Though I do confess to having skipped out of the second half of the grammar workshop, because the pluperfect tense has never given me difficulty in any language - it is always entirely regular, and the rules about when to use it could be grasped by an intelligent monkey.

So I had to me the hairs cut instead. No more expensive in Paris than in S.F. As the lady was cutting it/them, there was much amusement at the reception desk of the salon, where a prospective customer had brought in her laptop, and was exchanging mysterious 6-digit codes with the owner. They would enter in a code, guffaw uncontrollably, then try a different one. Finally, the lady cutting my hair explained to me that these were different color codes. Perhaps understandably, I immediately started to jabber on about how (paint) colors in the U.S. all had these poetic names named for nature or food, like eggshell white, oatmeal, peach, or avocado. Which led to a minute or so of hilarious misunderstanding, until it finally clicked in my head that they must be talking about hair colors.

I must confess that I do enjoy a good hilarious misunderstanding - it's one of the little pleasures of travelling abroad, and this was my first halfway decent one here in Paris, even if it was more contextual than linguistic. It wasn't quite as amusing as the hair-related h.m. that ensued in Spain, when I walked into the barber's and informed him confidently that I wanted him to cut to me the horses, because it had been two months since I had had to me the horses cut.

But still, one takes one's amusement where one finds it.