It is a rainy and chilly fall afternoon and my son comes home from school all soaked and miserable. He had an awful day: The teachers were “totally unreasonable” in the amount of work they assigned, the lunch break was cut short, his favorite pants got stained, and someone screamed something really hurtful from a car window as he was walking back home in the rain. I hug him, stroke his wet hair, and whisper: “I feel zhalko tebia bednogo (sorry/pity for you poor [soul]).” And then I immediately begin to ponder upon this code-switch ‘across the feeling boundaries,’ which violated subcategorization constraints of the Russian equivalent of ‘I feel’ (Ia chuvstvuiu). Since our conversation until that moment was in English, I must have started out saying, “I feel so sorry for you,” and then changed my mind because in this context the polysemous ‘sorry,’ with its many connotations, may have sounded like a polite acknowledgment of his problems, and thus distancing and condescending.