Category Local Word

Somebody told me it was very close and it was nine kilometres. Somebody else told me it was far and it was twenty minutes. Distance is a report about a body and a vehicle, not about a map, and I kept forgetting that.

I tried to count the people who have solved a problem for me and vanished before I could do anything about it. The list got long fast, and the usual ways of squaring it up mostly do not work.

I asked a fourth person the same question and watched her face do something I did not want to have caused. Notes on the point where curiosity turns into extraction, and how to tell you have crossed it.

A shopkeeper drew me a map to a courtyard, and I turned up and realised within thirty seconds that I had been sent somewhere that was not for me. What I did wrong, and what I now ask before following a recommendation.

A woman at a bus stop and I had about eleven words in common. We still sorted out my problem, but not in the way the phrasebook advice suggests, and the translation app made it worse before it made it better.

I asked three versions of the same question outside a hardware shop and got three yeses, then walked into thorn scrub. A working method for figuring out who actually knows the thing you are asking about.