I dreamt that Lauren and I were in the company of women who were all married to men from ex-Yugoslavia. They all spoke some Serbo-Croatian, and some of them were quite fluent. The children from many of these marriages were running about, as well. I remember sitting at a small round table with Lauren and Lesley O’Connell, whose husband also turned out to be from the old country. Lauren and Lesley would occasionally switch into Serbo-Croatian. At some point a Japanese woman came to our table and exchanged a few words with us. When one of her children joined us to ask for something or other, she shooed the child away playfully: “Why don’t you play with other kids?!” She spoke in Serbo-Croatian, or, rather Serbian, as her husband was from Belgrade. To emphasize her question, she used the expression bre, whose only function is to serve as an audible exclamation point. It is of Turkish origin, but it has spread to some parts of ex-Yugoslavia that were never in Turkish hands. When I commented on the usefulness of this little word, the three women just looked at me. I guess I was stating the obvious.