I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

I have this little pinky ring. You've all seen it. Wanda got us a matched set of them 10 years ago or so, and they're inscribed with hebrew around the outside. You can see a picture of them here:

The Ring

I love this ring. It saved my hand once when I wiped out on a lakeside biking trail (when I still rode my bike on lakeside biking trails) - it was the only thing that kept my hand from being crushed between the handlebar of my bike and a tree (the roots of which had grown heavily into the trail, which is what caused me to wipe out in the first place). When I recovered sufficiently from the ground to realize it, I noted my right hand hurting quite badly, and discovered that my pinky ring had been crushed, and was crushing my pinky along with it. I pried it off and restore it to some semblance of roundness, and have worn it this way ever since.

According to the Signals catalog (from which these rings were purchased), the inscription reads "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine", a quote from the Song of Solomon, which it actually would be...

If that were what the inscription read.

Today during a staff meeting an Israeli co-worker of mine asked to see my ring. I'm used to this, and I love telling people what the ring means, and usually I wind up explaining why it is no longer ring shaped, all of which makes me very happy. She examined the ring for a moment and then looked at me as if to say, "What in Jehova's name is wrong with you?"

"What?" I said.
"Do you know what this says?" she asked.
"Yes?" I asked. "It says 'I am my beloved's. My beloved is mine?"
"No. It says,"

and I quote:

"I am my uncle's. My uncle is mine."

She then proceeded to write both phrases out for me in block Hebrew capitals, and then cursive. And I'm buggered if her block capital word for "uncle" didn't match what was on the ring exactly. The word for "beloved" looked like it, sure, but clearly not the same.

She found this alarming, I found it exquisitely, painfully funny. She wanted me to call the Signals catalog immediately and demand my money back, but we settled on my writing them a caustic e-mail asking them, among other things, if they had in fact ever actually met a jew in their lives. I will be sure to include their response here as soon as I get it.

Meanwhile I now get to be even happier when someone asks me about the ring. Because now I get to say what the inscription means, and the tree story, and then I get to reveal the punchline. I need to meet some more new people soon!