Trouble

I’ve told my friends that I know just enough in several foreign languages to get myself into trouble. I learned a few words in Russian, reading them in a novel that are not very polite to say. In my youth, those words weren’t to be spoken in mixed company, but now it’s too often those of the female persuasion that use it just as often as their male counterparts.

I took two years of Latin in high school. Since no one speaks it, I’m safe there with a sheltered education learning only some Christmas hymns and songs. The same was true with the two years of high school French I took. I was harassed by the Spanish students who said I’d have to travel to France to use it, but reminded them I only needed to go to Canada to sharpen my skills while they’d have to travel to Mexico. Today, the Spanish language has come to us with the influx of Latinos from our southern border. My troubling knowledge of Spanish words came from the John Wayne movie, The Cowboys. It isn’t polite to speak either.

I was reminded of this because while at PNC Park in for the Pittsburgh Pirate and San Francisco Giants game. During the rain delay a young couple sitting behind me was talking in French. I was only able to understand one in about two-hundred words. My recollection of the French language has deteriorated from the last time I needed to use it. As a corpsman at the Naval Hospital in Orlando, Florida, a woman and her child fell out of a moving vehicle. They were Arabic and didn’t speak English. The doctor and I didn’t speak Arabic. The only common language was French. It was a struggle to examine mother and child with limited abilities to speak and to understand.

My grandfather Raymond Miner was Pennsylvania Dutch. I picked up some German words, but not enough to speak full sentences…just a few, counting from one to five or calling someone a rubber nose, “gummi nase.”. While stationed in Iceland, the key phrase I learned was Ég skil ekki Islensku,” “I don’t speak Icelandic” and “Gledileg Jol,” which means “Merry Christmas.”

A phrase I learned from a Greek Orthodox coworker was “Christos Anesti” which means, “Christ is risen” and the response is “Alithos Anesti,” which means, “Truly he is risen.” Although it is a day late, I say to you all Happy Resurrection day and Easter blessings to my friends.