Female?

I just put on my innocent wouldn't-you-just-do-anything-for-me voice and asked Andrew to get the mail.

I looked at him, batted my eyes, and said, "Mail?"

He looked at me and said, "Female."

I said, "I don't know. Fii mail?"

We had a good laugh about that. Fii in Arabic means yest in Russian or che in Italian. In English, we really just don't have a good word for that. We do have a few phrases, though. Some that come to mind are, "Is there any _____?" or "Does _____ exist?" Needless to say, it is so much cooler to say "Fii mail?" or "Che mail?" than "Does the mail exist?" or "Is there any mail."

I asked Andrew how you say mail in Arabic (all in Arabic, by the way). The word is "burrita" kind of like a female version of burrito. I thought that was pretty funny.

In case you were wondering the outcome of our mail situation, maa fii. No mail is existing.

To make myself feel better about this I checked my email. No emails were addressed to me, but I did have 10 pieces of junk mail which I deleted without looking at. Had we had any snail mail, that's probably what we would have done with the majority of it, too. I suppose it is better that we had no mail...at least we didn't have to throw anything away.