Speak Louder, I Can't Understand You

True Story: Captain James Cook, sailing the seven seas for Country and Crown, landed in or near (the legends aren't clear) Australia. In the course of his sojourns he'd encountered locals who could speak some of his language and thus enable him to speak to some of the aboriginal tribes in their languages. One day he saw a large marsupial, hopping on the horizon and asked one of his guides, in English, "what do you call that animal?", to which the man responded, "kangaruh." And that's how the animal got its name--except, as it turns out, the guide didn't comprehend the Good Captain's question and instead of telling him the animal's name, he had said "I don't know" in his native language. Soon, we'll have condominiums built right here, alongside the Tower of Babel.

Years ago, Steve Martin, the original wild and crazy guy (not counting Wendell Wilkie, of course) postulated everyone on Earth actually spoke English, just not in the presence of Americans. I had a similar experience (without fully appreciating it ) several decades ago when I arrived in Frankfurt am Main in what was then called West Germany and gave the taxi driver the address to where I was heading. In English, of course, and with a pocket full of US Dollars and zero Deutschmarks, the currency of the county I was in. Basically, because 'we' had won the war and I was another obliviot who had fallen out of the self-absorbed tree and hit every single branch on my way to the ground.

At some point, the driver said something--I have no idea what and the guy didn't speak English. The nerve of him! We both did the pointy-talky thing for a moment (growing louder by the syllable because we both seemed to think the problem had a lot to do with volume and nothing to do with comprehension) and I ended up where I needed to be (which wasn't necessarily where so many had wished me, but you can't have everything) and it was days later before I learned the hidden tuition for an attitude of 'the world is my ashtray' was that I had paid about four times more for the cab ride than I should have. Three plus decades on, I still blame that cabbie.

It was not that long after that I met the woman I was to marry, and because I was on active duty in the US Military stationed overseas, I had to request permission of my unit commander to get married (I wrote my parents to tell them I was getting married; an Air Force Captain from Texas had to be asked, and to grant, permission before I could do so. Go figure). This process required some five months of investigative paperwork (the German government also required background checks (or should I say Czechs? Can you spell S-U-D-E-T-A-N, I knew you could.) and all the AF Captain was left to ask me was 'so you're marrying a foreigner?' to which I replied, 'no, Sir. She is. This is her country and I'm the guest.' I discovered possession of a sense of humor, while truly a gift, is not a prerequisite in order to receive a commission into the officer ranks of the US Armed Forces, but I got my permission and that's all that counted.

Well, not quite all. We were married in the rathaus, or city hall, and, since I spoke close to no German, I was required to hire a translator. The city official would read a paragraph auf Deutsch, the translator would render it into English and so it went. After all the words had been spoken, my best man, Chris Hall, as my witness, was required to sign the marriage document. He asked the translator where on the form he should be signing. She stared back at him with a blank look that told me instantly I had just spent 200 DM on someone whose command of English was limited to memorizing the English translation of the marriage contract. Ka-ching! To this day, while I've been curious, I'm too afraid to find out what koala bear really means.
-bill kenny