SPEAKA DA LANGUAGE

With foreign languages, sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

That’s usually my problem. I know a respectable amount of French and German, having studied them in high school (and, in the case of French, middle school). I know liturgical Hebrew, although my conversational skills are nil. I can scrape by in Yiddish – thanks largely to my high school German. And over the years, in large measure due to business travel, I’ve picked up a smattering of Flemish, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia, and Spanish.

My gift – and curse – is that even if I know only a few words of a language, I can generally pronounce them well enough so that people assume I know far more than I do. This results in them launching into a high-speed monologue of which I understand precisely zilch. After a while, my glazed-over eyes are a tip-off: “You don’t understand a fucking word I’m saying, do you?”

Years ago, a wiseacre by the name of Ethan Mollick concocted a website called the “I Can Eat Glass Project.” The premise was beautifully demented:

The Project is based on the idea that people in a foreign country have an irresistable [sic] urge to try to say something in the indigenous tongue. In most cases, however, the best a person can do is “Where is the bathroom?” a phrase that marks them as a tourist. But, if one says “I can eat glass, it doesn’t hurt me,” you will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect.

The original I Can Eat Glass page provided translations of that fine phrase into over 100 different languages and dialects. It’s long gone, but archive copies and extracts are still floating around the web; a good one is here.

Sometimes, knowing just a little bit of a language can get you in trouble. At our post-Minyan breakfast this morning, one of the Minyan Boyz, who shall remain nameless at his request, told this little story on himself:

Seems that, years ago, he was living in Israel but had not yet become fluent in the Local Lingo. One day, he found himself at a juice stand, where he decided to purchase a glass of carrot juice.

A glass of carrot juice, in Hebrew, is kos mitz gezer.

He requested kos mitz gever.

The counterman gave him a really strange look. Eventually, my friend was able to make himself understood. He got his carrot juice, but it was only some time later that he understood the reason for that slack-jawed expression of combined horror and amusement.

In Hebrew, “kos mitz gever” means “ a cup of man-juice.”

A rather critical distinction between the “v” and the “z” there, innit?