The problem with peanuts 🥜 and crickets 🦗

I was pretty sure I knew what "peanuts" and "crickets" meant.

You know:

peanuts - арахис - a nut that grows underground in a thin shell
crickets - сверчки - a small brown jumping insect that makes a loud high sound by rubbing its wings together

But when I saw each of them in a specific context, they didn't make sense:

They paid me peanuts
If you get crickets after sending your email, you're writing to the wrong people.

As you can see, they were not (арахис) and (кузнечики)

I suspected they meant something different, so ...

I looked them up and was right:

I mean, I've been teaching English for 20 years, and I only discovered these meanings recently.

I'm a teacher. And I'm still learning.

My point?

There is no finish line in learning a language.

There is always something new and interesting to learn.

Some people find this fact frustrating.

I find it fascinating.

What interesting words or phrases have you recently discovered? (in English or maybe in your native language).

Write me back and share.

Really.

Yours curious language nerd 🤓

Tania.

Here's my weekly update for Jan 17, 2022...

A fragment from our discussion of the movie "Shakespeare in Love" on 19 Dec 2021.