I cannot sleep, it was Eid today, the fast has been broken and one can emerge from the cafeteria at the university without first chewing all the food in one's mouth. Eid is the first day after the last day of the month of Ramadan, 'ram-it-in' the gay Americans and Britts in Saudi used to say. The first sound in 'eid' is one of those sounds unpronouncable without much practice, and never an attained perfection by those whose tongues and throats are less versed in mimicry. It is that harsh sound from the throat that the Emiratees like to particularly pronounce. It is a sound that has not even a phoneme in English, hence one of those sounds not furnished by the haberdashery of English, one of those Lowghosts Spicer would call it in the room in the mind that has all the potential furniture of language that poetry had to negotiate itself through and around in Spicer's mind during the transmissions he received at night. I had been pronouncing my student Asma's name the correct way with that proverbial glottal stop Arabic words have a tendency to begin with when I realized that it is the same word in English that is so badly spelled for Arab students who would have no idea how it is pronounced unless a native speaker would. At Carrefour's G.'s son A. was having a little cough that my daughter was mimicking when G. said that A. had asthma. I've been blind to similarities at the phonetic level between Arabic and English that I didn't see this, because I am assiduously applying myself to learning Arabic. I remember a teacher from Wisconsin who thought one of his students' name was very funny since the overweight student embodied her name, Fatma. It had never occurred to me, but now I find it rather amusing not so much because of the ridicule implied but by the ignorance of the teacher from Wisconsin.