Jerryism #8: Am I Just Dense?

San Geraldo and I Skyped with our friend Judy in Seattle the other day. San Geraldo was telling us about going to the supermarket at El Corte Inglés that morning without his Spanish/English dictionary. He needed to buy toothpicks, couldn't find them, and didn't know the word in Spanish. He stopped one staff-person and began by miming picking his teeth. She ignored the rest of his hand movements that he thought described a stick and she immediately took him over to toothpaste. When he tried to explain more clearly, she simply shook her head and made no effort to try and follow along in his peculiar game of charades. So, he moved on to someone else. He pulled a package of skewered shrimps from his cart and showed her the sticks. He then said in Spanish that he needed "much smaller" ones (yes, San Geraldo's Spanish has advanced that far). She laughingly led him directly to the toothpicks. As San Geraldo described it to us, the first woman he approached for assistance never would have gotten it. He said she appeared to be "as dense as a lava rock." 

SMALLER THAN A SKEWER? YOU MIGHT WANT A MONDADIENTE.

San Geraldo continued prattling on while Judy and I stared at each other with heads tilted and perplexed looks on our faces.

"Aren't lava rocks very porous? They're not at all dense, are they?" we asked almost in unison.

San Geraldo paused and thought about it. "Hmmm, I guess so," he said. "Oh, you both know what I meant!"

I think San Geraldo was perhaps aiming for "as dumb as a rock" or "as dumb as a box of rocks." But then maybe I'm just being dense.

LAVA ROCK: IT DOESN'T LOOK VERY DENSE TO ME.