I also recall the curious contradiction between his colossal insecurity about the meaning of the words that he struggled to learn and his adamant conviction of the emotional truth of the comedy contained in those perplexing words.
When he came back, he had some perplexing news.
THIS is a frequently beautiful but perplexing book.
The words, it seems, are but steppingstones to a universal pattern of images and insights about human behavior and the perplexing world that thwarts and shapes it.
Being, at heart, a smug, mean-spirited, condescending sort of person, I was afforded a great deal of pleasure by the Japanese's often erratic use of the English language – not in conversation, but on signs, menus, T-shirts and shop names, the most perplexing example being the word "Boobs" in 10ft-high letters on the side of a shopping mall outside Yokohama.
They weren't nice about her fledgling Arabic, and she often gets other comments such as, "Oh, look how hairy her arm is" or "You're a slut" — jarring words made even more perplexing when they're tagged to a video about how to make your lips look plump.
He grappled with a perplexing question: Where was the book?
Words like podiuming and summiting, while sometimes perplexing or even irksome to outsiders, are part of a grand tradition of noun-to-verb transfers in English, which result in what linguists call "denominal verbs".
There's even what appears to be a book of poetry, with the perplexing title "A New Winning Season: New York Jeremy Lin-Sanity — E. Manning, LinCredible, JPP, Mario, Tuck, Tebow, Cruz Baby! (How to Live Before You Die)." "This short poetry book gives you the words to describe the emotions that found you speechless," the promotional copy promises.
"These are perplexing to us because while a couple of these movies were not great and had poor word of mouth, there were others that were," said Laura Groppe, who runs Girls Intelligence Agency, a market-research company that worked on several of the films.
