I like the driving part. Your friend should never drive in Paris!

Oh Man, I can’t wait to hear your Quebec stories. I suspect you’ll have very similar experiences. I suspect a language experiences a bit of “drift” when it becomes isolated in different groups.

But your post also sounds familiar because, as a non-native speaker, my English fails me. I do use whatever words that I think do fit the most with what I actually mean. But I often feel very inaccurate, or even wrong. That’s frustrating! I always worry about me being too harsh, too friendly, not enough this or that…

Cultures being very different, I find it difficult to always get the appropriate tone and also use the appropriate tone. For example, you wouldn’t say “Take care” in France to someone you just met. You have to be pretty close friends before saying that kind of things. I found it very confusing at the beginning: “Does this guy want us to be best friends or what?”

And my “Indian Head Bob” here in Canada (I should say North America) is when someone says: “Aweeeeesooooome!” or “FantAAAstic!!!”. I keep not being able to figure out if it actually means: “I really don’t care, but continue, I pretend I’m interested”, or just “Nice” but nothing that would justify someone to be so enthusiastic, or if what I just said is actually very exciting (what I doubt…).

I really look forward to visiting Quebec so that I’ll find the same kind of interesting differences of use of my own language.

Keep posting your stories about India, they’re so informative and funny!

I have seen “only” and “exactly” used on cheques; perhaps it’s a British thing, historically?

I’ve always thought it was there to make it impossible to someone to sneak in some extra zeroes; rather than an ungainly line or something, you can simply put the word and it definitively closes off the area for writing more numbers.

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Well, it looks like the case of only on cheques is solved. I still feel it shows up in weird places outside the context of cheques. I’ll try to find more examples – I couldn’t think of any at the time of writing.

Being an Indian I find your blog posts about India quite amusing and fun to read.

By the way, reason for cheques having “only” at the end of an amount is safety. Since we place our currency symbol at the beginning of an amount, the “only” is to prevent anyone from adding extra amount at the end of it.

For e.g. if you had a cheque of amount “Rs. Fifty Thousand”, any one could add to make it “Rs. Fifty Thousand, FIve Hundred and SIxty”. “Only” is to mark the end of a amount. Same as we add a “/-” at the end of a number.

However I found it hilarious on my first pay cheque too.