The Clam, the Crane, Crusts, and That Hard Thing On Toast

One of the lessons this week is about a crane who spots a clam sunning itself on the beach. As the crane pokes its beak to extract the tasty clam, the clam clamps down on the crane's beak. Neither would budge, waiting for the other to die of thirst or hunger. A fisherman sees them and snatches up both of them with his net. The moral: When two people fight, someone else stands to gain from the conflict.

We're learning the word for shell, "ke" 殼, as in clam shell, and the same character can be used to describe the Earth's crust. So I ask the teacher if it can also mean a pie crust, pizza crust, or crust on bread. She says, "No, there's no term for that in Chinese because these are foreign items, they would just say "that thing on top of the pie" or "the thing along the side of the pizza" or "that hard thing on toast."" Then we talk about how to say a loaf of bread as opposed to a slice of toast. My teacher used the same phrase to refer to both toast and a slice of bread, to which I had to explain that toast is a slice of bread that has been toasted, and that a slice of untoasted bread is still just bread. She gave me a blank look, then said, "That distinction doesn't exist in Taiwan."

Maybe Eskimos have the same frustration when we refer to the cold white stuff as simply "snow."