Another in-joke that is in our circle of Michigan friends: "The fastest land animal on earth is the Ethiopian chicken."

1) "Fuckin' A, Bubba!" "Fucking' A, Bubba!"

Humm. "Bubba" is doll/baby in Hebrew.

Hubby and I have several in-jokes derived from multilingual puns.

1) "Burros" for thank you, from Danke to donkeys to burros. There's also Burro Knees, from Danke shoen (sp?), to donkey shins, to burro knees.

2) "blue nose?" for Are you ready?, from Ready, to red eye, to blue nose.

3) "going to Germany" for "finding a way to do something completely inadvisable", from a British show called QED we saw many, many years ago, a precursor to Myth Busters, where they couldn't get permission to drive a car around a giant Van Der Graff generator to test if you're safe in a car in a lightning storm. Then the announcer said, "So we went to Germany." Hubby and I will use variants of the phrase in conversation.

I have no significant other, but I do have a brother, and we will frequently randomly bust out with a reference to some videogame we played over ten years ago. (For instance, when we were in Pensacola last year, we kept saying, "Are you from Americola?" And when I saw him last month we started making Streets of Rage 2 references for no apparent reason. The wonderful thing is we never have to explain ourselves. We always understand each other because we're on the same wavelength.)

With amyth, well, I have a ton but the one that comes to mind is: "You doan peel no taters, you doan get no tea!" It's also now office policy for certain things.

With KBD: "WUUUUHHHHAAAAAT?!?!?" with a rising intonation.

With sis: "Yogahotties" as a greeting.

With brother: "Rutabega!" (said on the inhale)

With parents: "Caring weird" instead of "hearing impaired"

Some friends of mine use "peeling potatoes" to refer to masturbation. It started when a friend of theirs was confused by the masturbation scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High - she asked, "Is he peeling potatoes?"

I think I just found out that while I'm pro serial comma in English, I'm against it in Hebrew.

Here's why.

"Anyhow, Vasily's son, the Czar Ivan, complained afterwards, that the Boyars, along with Dimitri, his father's nephew, "plotted many deadly death conspiracies" against the father, and even the grandfather himself "was talked slander and admonishment about". (Kliuchevski, A History of Russia, translated into Hebrew from Russian)

Seriously.

Those aren't serial commas. A serial comma (why are they also called Oxford commas?) is the comma just before "and" in a list of more than two items (e.g. in "my parents, god, and ayn rand" the serial comma is the second comma of the phrase). Those are just excess punctuation. You could lose half of them and improve the text.

There are no serial commas in there, Shir. But there sure are a lot of other commas, most of which are necessary. Two of them aren't. One of them is definitely wrong.

Seriously? Not even one serial comma in there? (I know not all of then were, and still).

I should really get some sleep.

Also, in case it wasn't obvious - I was going for a very direct translation from Hebrew into English, in order to keep up with the commas. Of course, it affected the whole text. It looks better in Hebrew, though.