Teaching about sarcasim takes all the fun out of it.

I'm teaching a one week (8 hours a day) class about American culture and communication to a set of new support engineers. Poor darlings- they are just learning how crazy Americans can be- and how it will take a long time before they really understand what it is that we really mean when we say, "I'm fine."

Actually, there's no way to know what that means, esp if it is said by a woman.

They gave presentations today, one of them was talking about facts about the USA- one of them quoted the amount of money the US military spends each year and said, "they spend an alarming amount!" That made me giggle.

Much of what Americans do is alarming to the rest of the world.