2025-01-27
53 分钟You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I'm Grant Barrett.
And I'm Martha Barnett.
We got an email from Jan Kutsabel, who is a school principal in the Czech Republic.
And he writes, I listen to your show quite often, usually when walking to the school.
I even have a place I call Chanesky's Place.
This is the place where his quiz always begins,
since it comes more or less at the same time from the start of the show.
Anyway, he was talking about our conversation that we had about helicopter parents, you know,
those parents who tend to hover in their children's lives and about the fact that in Denmark,
they're called curling parents, alluding to the sport of curling and, you know,
those frantic efforts to sweep away all the obstacles that are in your children's path.
Well, Jan and his wife, Sharca, decided that they're golf parents.
And the way he put it was,
we tend to strike our children approximately in the right direction toward the hole and let them fly.
Oh, those are both so perfect curling parents,
like this well cared for stone, gliding slowly down the ice.
The parents in front frantically brushing away all obstacles.
And then golf.
Golf, you're just using your best know-how,