so liesl has this one teacher i’m not a big fan of. she’s pretty scattered — which can play out as “fun and goofy and o-so-silly” or plain ol’ “scattered and annoying”. and with her, it usually plays out as the latter. too much homework, combined with forgetfulness on what she assigned and a lack of willingness to explain things, even when she’s unclear.

but last night, while taking liesl and her friend to dinner, i found out something about the teacher: she — in her moments of being flustered and not thinking of the word she wants — uses the catch-all non-word “huna-huna” (pronounced HUH-nuh-HUH-nuh). it seems to be used thusly: “liesl, could you go get my gradebook out of the huha-huna”, or “ok, kids, as soon as you’re done with the huna-huna, i need you come see me.”

i must say, i found this highly humorous — so much so, in fact, that i am choosing to add ‘huna-huna’ to my own language use.

my friend bob constantly says “blah” as a filler word, for anything hypothetical, like: “if we make that choice, we’ll have to deal with blah.” i’ve found myself occasionally using this also. so maybe i’m just a sucker for the nonsense word. my buddies and i, when we were in high school, made up two nonsense words: ronka and bishka. ronka was used as a positive explative, and bishka as a negative explative.

anyhow — this darn huna-huna thing has warmed my little icy heart a degree or two toward the scatter-brained teacher. but we still turned in the application for the private school today, and expect she’ll begin attending there in about three weeks, right after the huna-huna.