I was trying to explain to David not too long ago about brain freeze (you know, the pain you get from eating or drinking something much too cold and your head start to hurt for a few seconds?) and he said he had no idea what I was talking about.
I tried explaining it further... perhaps the name was a little misleading, but no, he said there was no such translation of experience in German.
Okay, so believe it or not I even doubted my own sanity on this. Was this something that I made up? But later that weekend, I saw something on Yahoo! about brain freeze--it clearly was not all in my head. Maybe it was only David.
A couple weeks later, by total coincidence, I'm preparing an English lesson that springs off an article in TIME on the topic of 7-11 Slurpees (there really was something worth talking about involving Slurpees, I swear) and the title was "Why Free Things Can Cost A Lot (And Make Your Brain Freeze). So in class I ask my student if he knows what brain freeze is. He says he does. I'm relieved, until he starts describing it as something that happens when you forget what you want to say. While he was correct, I described to him the other scenario that we like to call by that same name, and he too was at a total loss for what I could possibly mean. His reaction, "What's wrong with Americans' brains?"
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