>>(snip)
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>>>And then, for the nth time, I find that someone wrote "I resemble that remark". What does this mean, he's (they is?) similar to a sentence? Is this a deviation from "I resent that remark", or is this a way to fix a flaw in the dictionary - "no word left behind with a single meaning, they should all graduate to multiple meanings".
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>>My recollection is that "I resemble that remark" is a line from The Three Stooges. Sorry, I don't have a more precise reference - I think it was Moe, but maybe Curly who committed this classic malapropism. Your linguistic education is not complete until you've seen every single episode!
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>Ah, so it's just a different set of coordinates. You can't properly understand spoken Serbian, no matter where you learned it, until you've learned by heart the two dozen cult movies and the thousand basic jokes, because almost everybody is alluding to them. Here, it's the TV.

Actually, Dragan, The Three Stooges episodes were short films, dating back to the '30s and '40s, and subsequently revived on TV. Here's a related mystery: the host of the program I used to watch was Cap'n Jack McCarthy, and he would always close the show with this line: Hut to peen, and smoooth sailin'. Over the years, this became one of my favorite slogans, but I must confess I don't know what the hell it means.

A friend of mine recently did a Google search on the phrase "hut to peen". Sure enough, he confirmed exactly what I recalled, but the truly amazing thing is that there was one, and only one, reference. I'll bet you'd be hard-pressed to come up with any other expression that appears exactly once in a Google search!

As a student of linguistics, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to discover the meaning of "hut to peen", thereby vindicating my use of it for all these years.

Mike