As a lifelong lover of language and card-carrying "reader", one of my great pleasures is discovering the meaning of words and understanding the nuances of different definitions.
Which is why, in the past couple of weeks, I've been delighted and amazed to learn that two long-held assumptions of mine were false!
Assumption #1: A pony is a baby horse. (Like a puppy is a baby dog.)
No! My friend (and superstar intern) Dagmar taught me, just a few weeks ago, that a pony is an entirely different animal from a horse! She should know, as she has a beautiful pony named Sir Valentine (not pictured at right). All this time I thought ponies were just the smaller, cuter, younger versions of a plain ol' horse! How did I never know the difference before now? As a Texan, I probably had an extra responsibility to understand the difference, even though I didn't grow up around horses. Thank you, Dagmar, for the education.
Assumption #2: "Whisky" is just a careless and common misspelling of "whiskey".
Wrong! There is a difference between the two! As Alex taught me today at lunch, "whiskey" is bourbon, typically from America. Kentucky bourbon, for instance. And "whisky" is Scotch. Or something. Actually the differences aren't really that simple, and maybe my explanation is wrong. But the point is - they are different liquors, both spelled correctly!
Who knew?
One final note on semantics: What do you call the disgusting and desperate concoction you and/or your high school college classmates made from any stealthily-procured liquor (Everclear, for instance), combined with various amounts of fruit-flavored beverages and/or soda?
This morning my friends referred to this as "jungle juice", a term which I've never heard before. I always heard it, back in the day, in Texas, called "trashcan punch". Have we stumbled upon a new colloquialism?