fact versus sentiment

English is a language that has the possibility of so much subtlety and nuance - I guess I always kind of knew this but it becomes clearer with every lesson I teach. This morning I was talking to my mom about things like this. We looked up a word that had come up in my lesson last night to see what the Japanese equivalent would be, and it seemed like none of the definitions fit at all. Pairing this with last night's debacle, I started to think maybe her dictionary was outmoded. I mean, it did kind of look like it was from the 60s and there's an entire set of Collier's Encyclopedias from the 70s in the other room, so I asked her, "How old is your dictionary?"

She looked at me despondently and sighed, "I know!"