Like a kid in a candy store

13-Sep-2010

As you can see, geophysicist Nobu Mochizuki was smiling and happy “like a kid in a candy store” this morning before his first dive ever in Shinkai. You can see the diversity of rock types collected on the cruise in the photo below (sulfides on left and basalts on right). Today I want to highlight something interesting that I learned during this cruise about how I use the English language. I learned that I often use expressions and idioms that are exclusive to native American English speakers. I learned over the past two weeks to use words with more of the correct meaning in a dictionary (or, in Japanese, “jisho,” pronounced gee-sho). I had planned on titling today’s blog “Icing on the cake” because we recovered the current meter mooring, and we now have data for the near-bottom flow during our larval collections. I talked with a couple of the scientists in the computer room, and we could not come up with a Japanese expression for “icing on the cake.” However, we did come up with an expression for Nobu being “tickled pink” – “hashagu” (ha-sha-goo) in Japanese.