There's a fox who lives around here, small and silent, he walks around at night when everyone else is presumably asleep. The other day I was watching out the bathroom window, dreaming away while brushing my teeth, and there he was, carefully wandering past the swing then the slide. He was approaching the rubbish container by the main entrance of the complex, probably in search for a leftover bucket of chicken.
The fox, in my opinion, is a guy. Why? I don't know. Perhaps because of the Fantastic Mr. Fox, perhaps because the German word for fox comes with the masculine definite article. It might make sense, it might not; but the fox that I've met twice since I moved here is a he, just like the sun that greets me most mornings is a she. Again, perhaps because she's good to me, perhaps because in Germany she's a girl.
Language is a funny thing. The more I get interested in it the more I study, but the more I learn the more I grow sick of it. Most people communicate on multiple levels without even knowing it. I mean, I'm no expert, but anybody who does anything remotely connected to linguistics probably pays a lot of attention to not only the what but also the how. It's interesting, but it often leaves me with a headache.
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