Ronald Reagan Has the Weirdest Connection to Rural Upper Michigan

Somehow, I JUST found out the right-wing actor-turned-president-turned-saint played one of our local heroes in a movie

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Part of my job as a teacher is to find interesting aspects of the English language and introduce them to my high-level professional students. It usually involves me drinking too many coffees and bouncing around the internet reading news articles and combing through blogs for unique vocabulary, idioms, and expressions.

In the last two weeks, however, I’ve had a student give me better ideas than I’ve come up with in months. First, she taught me some Czech proverbs and asked about them in English. It turns out both languages share ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ and ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ — Nesuď knihu podle obalu and Jablko nepadlo daleko od stromu respectively.

Czech doesn’t have, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’ but does have this gem: ‘After the battle, everyone is a general,’ meaning once one can see how events have turned out, everyone pretends to have seen it coming all along.

The student then asked me about movie catchphrases that have become part of the cultural zeitgeist and melted into our everyday English. It is another awesome…