Newcomer is moved to laughter

Image credit: William Fortunato on Pexels.

By Preeti Sinha

My neighbour Stacy and I were chatting one morning as we waited at the street corner for the school bus as our children played nearby.

She said she’d watched a documentary on rescued animals in shelters the previous night.

“It was so moving, it teared me up,” she said.

Any other time I would have reached out to pat her arm and ask about the documentary or shared a story or two of my own, but I was astonished by her use of the phrase “teared me up”.

Surely Stacy, a Canadian of English origin, knew enough English to know it was “tore me apart”?

Teared me up was just plain bad grammar. Or so I thought.

I have to confess I was smirking a little about how newcomers knew more English than Canadians when I told my cousin about this when we met at her place for our weekly Friday night dinners.

Swati, who had been in Canada for several years by then, looked at me in surprise.

“But it’s a perfectly normal way of describing an emotional experience. It means something brought tears to her eyes.”

We laughed over my misconception, and I came home thinking that one learns something new every day.