"I saw them."

"- you think you can determine whether a food contains animal products by looking at it?"

"...I can tell if it's food. I don't know if animal products is the same thing. They didn't want me to eat a flower."

" - okay, so if, like, we baked two batches of cookies, one with butter and one with margarine, and they looked identical, and we mixed them all up, you think you could separate out the butter ones and the margarine ones?"

"If one of those things is food and one isn't then they won't look identical."

" - Aitim -"

" - sure, you can try it."

"I don't know how to cook."

"I will ask the cook to try it." He goes off.

"Commercials? Castes? Magic? Aliens?"

"New not not ish."

"Hmmm. Computers are not new, but trains are new."

Nod.

Aitim comes back with butter and margarine, shows them to Lintalai.

"That one could go in food but I think it's like the pasta I spat out," she says of margarine.

"But you can tell them apart?"

"Yeah the other one is not food."

He takes them back inside.

"The word 'food' is used by all other speakers of Anitami to mean 'the things that our species can eat'. If you use it to mean 'the things that look foodlike to Lintalai' then no one will know what you mean. It's usually a good idea to use words the way other people use them instead of saying things that make no sense to them because they do not realize you are using your own secret definition."

"I can't eat those not food things."

"I understand. But if someone has, say, an allergy to peanuts, they would say 'I have an allergy to peanuts', not 'that isn't food' at a peanut-butter sandwich. And that way people can understand them."

"Hrm."

Aitim comes back again.

"Watches. Time zones. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Laws."

"Not new."