Today I overheard another conversation, this time in line in an ordinary store in the ordinary suburb I call home. A man and a boy were taking, father and son, I assume. They too were about as ordinary as could be, both wearing sports logo shirts (Backhawks and Cubs).

“There was the Great Pyramid,” the father said.

“And the lighthouse and statue of Zeus,” the son said.

“Yes, and the mausoleum and the hanging garden and the lighthouse, and what else?”

“I already said the lighthouse.”

“Right. Now let’s see…”

They were talking about the Seven Wonders of the World. Maybe the boy, about 10, had been studying them, though I’d be hard-pressed to imagine they come up in school any more. Or in living memory. I didn’t learn about them in school. Maybe the boy had his own interest in them, or maybe the father did. Anyway, it isn’t something you overhear in line every day. Or ever. Until now. It made me smile, though I didn’t say anything.

I’m reminded of them time when some friends and I were in line to see a movie in Nashville, ca. 1986, and somehow the subject of the Frisian languages came up, including the notion that Frisian is as close to English as any language is, without actually being English. We’d heard that was the opinion among linguists.

A fellow behind us in line — this was at the movie theater at Vanderbilt — was visibly astonished. He felt he had to speak up, apparently, and he asked us how we’d heard about Frisian. He was from the Frisian Islands, he said, though at school at VU.

I don’t remember what we told him. I’d heard of Frisian somewhere before, maybe first in my American Heritage College Dictionary, which has a fine family tree diagram of Indo-European languages, with Frisian on it as a close cousin to English. No doubt he’d resigned himself to not bothering to tell Americans he was from the Frisians, but rather from the Netherlands or Germany.