>>>>BTW, this all makes me wonder (get ready for this one) - should 'understanding' and 'overlying' mean the same thing?
>>>
>>>No way (ergo, unreachable :). If you're understanding a tree, you're in danger of it falling on you; if you're overlying it, you have already fallen on it, not the other way around.
>>
>>But I thought in grammar that a double negative makes a positive. So if 'under' and 'over' are opposites and 'standing' and 'lying' (regardless of the truth) are opposites, then taken as one, they should end up meaning the same thing. Are you saying that my logic is peccable?
>
>Ah, _that_ lying.
>
>Speaking of witch (ok, _whitch_ :), a few Saturdays ago we tried to buy lye. My wife wanted to make soap, simple as that. But you can't buy lye anymore, it's now too dangerous or something, so it vanished from the shelves. At the same time, in any lumberyard there's enough poison in the gardening department to kill a brigade :). There was an interesting disconnect between my accent and the gentleman at Home Depot (or was it Lowe's - got them all mixed up, having visited about a dozen places that day), who mistook my "lye" for "light", assuming I pronounced the final "t" the Southern way, as a "d" which was then made practically inaudible. His belief that I was asking for a bulb was further confirmed when I said "sodium hydroxide" - ah, one of them chemical things, it must be, "yes they give a real nice warm light those sodium bulbs"...
>
>So... every other day, they all try to sell me lies. Once I want to buy some lye, nobody has it.
>
>(epilogue: we actually found it when we visited the 5th shop second time. It's in the drain declogging department.)
>(btw, if dialog should actually be dialogue, epilog an epilogue, etc... then we better start writing all the words ending with a -gue with a -g or vice versa... so, either vog, seg, leag, dialog, monolog, or vogue, segue, league, dialogue, epilogue, dogue, blogue, smogue, clogue)

After Hurricane Katrina I was drove, along with two others, to Houston. We drove straight through and stopped in the middle of night for Cokes at a convenience store in Arkansas. They had one of those coffee and soft drink areas and only styrofoam coffee cups of various sizes. I went up and asked the clerk where the soda cups were. "The what ones?" he said. I repeated the question and he repeated the answer. Finally I realized he was saying "the white ones," i.e. same cups as for coffee.

BTW, soap must be expensive there if it's worth the trouble of making your own ;-) (Oh wait, there must be something horrible I don't realize about capitalist soap, right?)