I answered with a line I’d gotten years ago from a German woman. Her name was Tini Haffmans, and though she often apologized for the state of her English, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any better. When it came to verb conjugation she was beyond reproach, but every so often she’d get a word wrong. The effect was not a loss of meaning, but a heightening of it. I once asked if her neighbor smoked, and she thought for a moment before saying, “Karl has… finished with his smoking.” She meant, of course, that he had quit, but I much preferred her mistaken version. “Finished” made it sound as if
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