This one actually took place in St. Augustine when The Wife and I went up to celebrate our anniversary.

We’re in the hat shop, and I’m looking for a straw hat. My other hats are felt and they get hot in the wet season. The Wife pulls one down.

The Wife: What about this one?

Me: Hell no.

The Wife: What? Is it too white? To plastic looking?

Me: It looks too Madonna.

I heard the shop clerk give that snort laugh when someone says something funny, but you don’t want to laugh in case someone takes offense. To The Wife’s credit, she immediately understood what I meant.

The Wife and I have different dialects.

The Wife and I had very different upbringings. As a result, there are somethings that we say that the other has no clue.

The two examples recently were “polite fiction” and “tempest in a teapot”.

You know how you use a colloquialism so often, that you forget how best to define it? Yeah.