Yesterday I taught a Spanish class in which one of the students happens to be my husband. We were doing a sentence completion exercise, and one of the other students asked me how to say “space travel”.

“Well ‘space’ is ‘espacio’,” I began.

“That sounds like a word you just made up,” interjected my husband (who, I feel compelled to point out, has attended all of six Spanish classes in his life as opposed to my (::cough::Master’s Degree in Spanish::cough), as he reached for his Spanish-English dictionary.

“So, what does the dictionary say,” I asked, with just a wee bit of testiness in my voice.

“Espacio,” he replied.

“Oh really? It says exactly what I just told you two seconds ago?” I taunted, feeling the sweet wave of vindication rush through me.

“Wow,” interjected one of the other students. “I’d love to see what arguments are like in the Ryan household.”

“Well, we have had to pull out the Almanac occasionally,” I said, in the tone of one who has just admitted to Bringing Out The Big Guns.

“I bet they Google everything and then one of them is like, ‘Hah, I can type faster than you so I win’,” continued the student, officially destroying for me any remaining vestiges of pride and vindication.

Ooh, man-the truth? Really does hurt.