Hi, this is Jiro.
I misunderstood for nearly half a century why a group of Americans laughed when I said,
“I am expecting a toothache.”
I used to think they laughed primarily because a man — that is, me — had said he was pregnant, and secondarily because I seemed to mean that I was giving birth to a toothache.
But imagine my astonishment when I found these expressions in some of Lauren Weisberger’s novels:
“We are pregnant.”
— said by a man and a woman
“Dad is expecting.”
I did some research and found that expressions like these have become increasingly common, reflecting the idea that a man and a woman raise a baby together.
But the implication went further than that.
This discovery shed new light on that long-ago incident. I realized that I had misunderstood the reason for the Americans’ laughter for nearly fifty years.
It is not unusual for a man to say that he is “pregnant” or “expecting” in the USA. So the real reason they laughed was probably much simpler: I had said “expecting a toothache,” putting the unexpected object toothache after expecting, where they were expecting the much more natural object baby.
In other words, I had accidentally created a very strange sentence.
When you learn a foreign language, you come across this kind of unexpected discovery from time to time. And I think that is one of the special rewards of learning a foreign language.
Happy English learning!
私立学校に英語教師として勤務中、40代半ばに差し掛かったころ、荒れたクラスを立て直す策として、生徒に公言して英検1級に挑戦することを思い立つ。同様の挑戦を繰り返し、退職までに英検一級（検定連合会長賞）、TOEIC満点、国連英検SA級、フランス語一級、スペイン語一級（文科大臣賞）、ドイツ語一級、放送大学大学院修士号などの成果を得る。
アメリカで生徒への対応法を学ぶ為に研修（地銀の助成金）。最新の心理学に触れた。4都県での全発表、勤務校での教員への研修を英語で行う。現在も特別選抜クラスの授業を全て英語で行っている。「どうやって単語を覚えればいいですか？」という良くある質問に答える為、印欧祖語からの派生に基づく「生徒には見せたくない語源英単語集」を執筆中。完成間近。常日頃洋書の読破で様々な思考にふれているが、そうして得た発想の一つを生かして書いた論文がコロナ対策論文として最近入賞。賞品の牛肉に舌鼓をうっている。元英検面接委員