My students are relentless in their quest for making interesting and thought provoking mistakes. An hour ago a student said to me that he had " finished one second of the Haruki Murakami book - 1q84 ." Even I, the world's champion at understanding that which cannot be understood by mere mortals, was confused by my student's words of wisdom.... for a few seconds. It soon dawned on me that he should have said , " one half " instead of" one second" . Of course if the English language was logical we would all say "one second" instead of "one half ". After all, we go about our merry ways saying "one third " , "one forth " , " one etc " all the time. There are so many things in a language that are downright bizarre that we just never take the time to notice. In Japanese, people say "aoshingo, aonori, Aoyama, Aoki," which mean literally -blue traffic light, blue seaweed, blue mountain, blue tree .(the last two are family names ) Obviously all of these things are not blue but rather green . Since a long time ago people in Japan believed that what we call " green " was simply a shade of the color blue, these objects have these strange names today even though modern Japanese now has the a Japanese word for green. No one here thinks about this linguist abnormality. All around us- and not just in our languages - there are mysteries that we don't even notice.