People are people. We’ve been around for a long time. Amongst many other things, we’ve used our precious time on this giant spinning rock to come up with sayings that cover pretty much everything that could conceivably occur. Some of them we use without truly having any frame of reference for how they came about, and they are often particular to their originating cultures. I mean, how many of us have a horse to lead to water let alone worrying about if it actually drinks? Does that have meaning in any language besides American English? And though we might feel like it at times, we don’t actually burn bridges that we would not prefer to cross again. Most people are not that nuts (Yes, I qualified that) but it sounds a little harsh if taken literally. This scenario was a real conversation.
The place where I work has its parent company in Europe. When people from different areas of the world come together in one place for a common purpose, it’s not only inspiring and heartening, it’s downright entertaining. Sometimes it’s something simple, such as getting days mixed up and insisting that the meeting is on the 3rd when the date today is the 9th. What she meant was the 30th, but she couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t get our calendars straight. Ordinal numbers… The struggle is real. Another incident involved me asking someone to “chuck” something. That one earned me a cocked head and odd look. I had to explain that “chucking” something meant to throw it away. Local terminology is often lost in translation.
When my son was almost four years old and I was a much younger me, we went to Costa Rica for a language immersion program through my school. For six weeks, he and I bee-bopped about the country and learned that language and culture were far more complicated than we’d ever imagined. Dialects often change depending on which side of the street you are standing. I’m really not exaggerating. As examples, Guatemala has over 40 distinct dialects with varying degrees of Indian and Spanish mixed with colloquialisms and personalizations for each town or village. Eskimos have more than 50 different words for “snow.” There’s the wet sticky stuff and the light and fluffy flakes, the spitting glitter kind and the kind that falls so hard you can’t even see the insides of your own eyelids. There are places like Belgium, which is situated between several other countries. The local language is influenced heavily by the languages of the countries that surround it. People at my work frequently switch mid-sentence between Dutch, French, and German, and the transition is so smooth that the casual listener never realizes that they switched.
A friend of mine told me about a trip she took across several South American countries where she knew that the vast majority of people spoke Spanish, but she had not planned for the drastic differences between dialects and local cultures. She asked one gentleman to go get the “gua gua” which in her understanding meant “bus.” What it meant to him, however, was the equivalent of the F-word. She accidentally told him what to go do with himself. Whoops. That one took some creative communication to resolve.
When I looked up the name of my blog to make sure it wasn’t taken, I came across references to another literary work that states that learning another language is like having a second soul. While I agree to a point and appreciate the poetic imagery, I will go a step further to say that wielding language gracefully can touch another person’s soul. Because of this truth, the wielding should be done judiciously. So many words in so many places right now are flung as daggers, piercing far deeper than people realize. What we need more than anything is for each of us to remember that people are people. The only race is the human one, regardless of which languages lift from our tongues. We must consider that one person’s bus is another person’s…. well, you get the idea. It is time to build bridges rather than burning them, and language can help us do this. In all things, the most graceful use of language is the one where we do not lose each other in the translation.
Beautiful in all languages!