The indignity of having your vocabulary upgraded by a foreigner half a century late

Humiliation is a nasty sentiment we should leave behind in youth. By my age, dignity ought to be protected like a museum artifact. It should not be kicked around like a tin soda can.

And yet, last week, my wife Minako — born in Japan, raised speaking Japanese — informed me that after 87 years of speaking English, I didn’t actually know the correct word for part of a table fork.

A fork.

Not quantum physics. Not medieval theology. A f…… fork.

Apparently, those pointy things are called “tines.”

Tines!

For nearly nine decades, I have been eating eggs, spearing meatballs, waving forks in restaurants, loading dishwashers, and owning restaurants. In my restaurant career, I probably purchased a million fork tines a year. Stainless steel mountains of them. Salad forks, dinner forks, dessert forks, and forks that vanished mysteriously from waitresses’ aprons.

Not once did anybody whisper:
“By the way, boss, those little stubby things are called tines.”

I always called them “the pointy parts.”
Which, frankly, seems perfectly adequate.

But no. Minako calmly explained that forks with four tines provide the best balance.

Balance?
I thought forks provided mashed potatoes!

Now I find myself wondering whether other educated men know this word. Have husbands across America been casually tossing around “tines” for decades while I wandered through life linguistically barefoot?

Perhaps at elegant dinner parties, people murmur:
“Marvelous tine spacing on this entrée fork, Margaret.”

And I, poor fool, would have nodded politely while chewing chicken.

The deeper humiliation is that my immigrant wife now corrects my English with the serene confidence of a Harvard linguistics professor. The student has become the teacher. Next week, she may explain that the spoon differs from the rice paddle because of its bowl, or reveal that shoelace tips have names too.

Apparently, they do.

Old age is full of surprises. You lose hair, gain prescriptions, and discover your foreign-born spouse knows more English than you do.

Still, marriage is about growth. Mutual respect. Shared discovery. Indignity is small potatoes if you are going to make a relationship work happily. Through the gender, cultural, religious, and racial differences, for two people to love each other  60-plus years is a priceless treasure of life. A bit of indignity doesn’t even move the needle or a tine.