"Waiter, this conversation isn't very good."

It was a lovely dinner at Andies--tasty food, excellent service, warmth and contentment--but I'm glad we left when we did. Overhearing this exchange from the next table was just amusing:

Waiter: The rice is one of the elements that's cooked together so we can't separate that out.
Clueless Patron: Could you just separate out everything that can be separated out?
Waiter: It's a stir-fry.

But once all the orders were sorted out and the subject veered toward Biblical exegesis, it just got painful. At first no problem--some chatter about about a theatre piece contrasting the Seven Days from Genesis and an evolutionary account or something; I mostly tuned it out. But my ears pricked up like fennec's at a mention of "the Semitic languages" and I was rewarded with this gem:

Languages like Arabic, Hebrew, they have no dichotomies....My favourite examples is this: The sentence which means 'I'm getting sick' and 'I'm getting better' are the same. It's context that tells you which meaning is intended. It's like the Oriental languages, they have no past, present, future. They rely on the context to tell you when something happened.

I almost had to grab the chair seat to keep from swivelling around shouting, "Say what?" I really wanted to demand he tell me what the sentence he had in mind was. (Any suggestions, Semiticists?) And ask him, "Hey, ever heard that Byrds song? You know, the one that's just a selection of antithetical couplets from Ecclesiastes set to music?"

Then monshu came back from the restroom and it was his turn. After we were back out on the street, he asked me, "Was he trying to say Tyndale translated the King James Bible?" I'm so glad we didn't stick around to discover what his eventual point was.