When we were first married, my wife had absolutely no idea what ham radio
was and, therefore, no knowledge of our terminology and "ham speak." so,
when, shortly after we were married, I got up in the middle of the night to
go over to my ham shack room, she asked me what I was going to do. I told
her that I was having a hard time sleeping, and so, I was going to listen on
the air for a while. She had no idea what that meant, except she took me for
my word, and took what I said quite literally. After a fashion, she, too,
got up to see how I was doing listening on the air. She went outside looking
around for me in an attempt to understand such, seemingly, weird, totally
bazaar behavior of her new husband, getting up in the middle of the night to
go outside and listen to the air. She didn't realize that I had gone into
the room where my ham equipment was and put on my headphones and was tuning
around on the bands to see if I could hear and work some DX. When she didn't
find me outside, she looked in my ham shack room, and of course, there I
was, and when she realized what I had meant by "listening on the air," she
started laughing, and when she stopped laughing long enough to be able to
share the humor with me, we both broke out into uncontrollable laughter, an
inside joke we share and still laugh about to this day!! <lol>
It reminds me of my foreign students who struggled with understanding the
English language and all of our expressions; they, too, often took our weird
expressions quite literally, resulting in total confusion and puzzlement,
asking things like: "Dr. Ron, why do you think I knocked something out of
some park just because I got an A on my exam?" <lol>
Ron, K8HSY
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