On John Wick II, Language, and Hoosiers

After diligently checking DoesTheDogDie.com, I watched John Wick 2 and was rather amazed at his foreign language abilities (not to mention his ability to get hit by a car, punched a million times, get shot in the actual kidney and still go on to kill like, literally 400 people).  First he meets a Russian gangster and tells him, in Russian, Let's have peace, this feud is over, etc.  Then, an Italian guy shows up in his house, and they converse, in Italian, about having coffee and becoming an assassin again.  THEN, I shit you not, there is a deaf assassin in the movie, and he starts talking to her in ASL.

I finally took an ASL course this year - something I've been wanting to do for many a year.  It was great to finally get started.  Obviously I'm nowhere near fluent but I want to keep practicing (there are some great tutorials online - try these if you're interested).  Speaking of languages, one of the best things I've read this year was The Idiot, a hilarious book about, amongst other things, the connection between language and thought, something that's been occupying my mind a lot recently.  Little did I know that John Wick, of all things, would continue to pique this interest.  Without a word for "assassin", for example, would John Wick have ever become that thing?  Naturally, I wanted to learn all the dirty words in sign language but that is an on-going education.

Here's a funny story:  My parents came to visit this weekend and I mentioned that, God forbid, if anything ever happened to M, I would most likely never love again, with the possible exception of my cheesemonger. "Due to his kind nature or something else?" asks my mom.  "Due to his knowledge of and access to cheese!" I said.

Mom tells me an old family friend loves talking about "Hoosier Go-to" and when asked to explain she said, "Oh, you know, who you would go to if your spouse died."  And I said, "Well, do they have to be a hoosier?" and then there was some confusion until I finally understood that she was not saying "Hoosier go-to" but rather "WHO'S your go-to" to which M shouted out, to general hilarity, "WHO'S EAR?"  A joke, I suppose, only Hoosiers will understand.