Parle-Vous Pig Latin?

By David Wood

That I can’t speak foreign languages fluently has always been a major source of embarrassment to me. In my international travels, most every foreigner I meet speaks their own language and at least one other. Many speak five or six languages. Upon learning that I’m limited to just English, they always give me a pitiful look like I’m the banjo playing kid in Deliverance.

My addled American mind seems to only have enough storage space for the limited vocabulary of my native tongue. As a tot, I did learn a bit of “Pig Latin.” However, it’s difficult to sound like a citizen of the world when saying “ ixnay” after every other word.

It’s not like I haven’t tried. Studying high school French as a tenth-grader, I ranked 17 th out of a class of 12. With a sports-crazed brain crammed with the names and statistics of every NBA player as well as the batting averages of every member of my beloved Minnesota Twins, there didn’t seem to be room up there for even a petit baguette. No matter how hard I toiled conjugating French verbs and learning the differences between feminine and masculine nouns, I couldn’t seem to get the knack for it.

Our French teacher – Sister Kate – came to my rescue. At the Catholic high school I attended, she was untypical of most of the nuns I’d locked horns with. She was kind and patient. Sister Kate had a lovely smile, soft manner, and was delighted when one of her students grasped something new in the language she loved. She saw that I was trying hard to parle francais, and she started tutoring and encouraging me after class and it began working. With countless hours of tutelage, I became (amazingly!) her best student.

Unfortunately, Sister Kate, disenchanted with being a nun, left our high school after that year. French II was taught by a sinister nun who bore a striking resemblance to Charles de Gaulle in a habit. Sister Attila (that’s what I called her) wasn’t about to spend any extra time with me. That would have taken the away the energy she needed to berate her students with her stern disapproving scowls. Discouraged, I dropped out of her class and my French came to a screeching arrest!

Prior to a trip to Italy a few years back, I did study Italian for several months beforehand. I envisioned myself sitting at a sidewalk café on Rome’s Piazza Navona as I regaled the locals with tales of my travels in perfect Italiano as we sipped coffee, looking chic and cool as Romans so easily do. However, once there, the only phrase I could remember was “ due cappuccino” (double cappuccino with “ due” pronounced “Dewey”) only because it sounded like a great name for a baseball player. “Now batting for the Twins, second baseman: Dewey Cappuccino.”

I fared no better linguistically on a recent trip to South America. I had bought a self-learning cassette tape course of elementary Spanish in order to give myself a crash course in Español. The basics were easy. Mucho gusto (Nice to meet you). Cuanto cuseta (How much does this cost)? Habla ingles (Do you speak English)? Having decided to take this trip only two months prior, there wasn’t the time to learn Spanish as thoroughly as I would have liked.

South America is the wild dog center of the universe. On most every block, packs of ferocious canines trot around in hungry roving gangs like American tourists looking for a cheap buffet. Mucho gusto doesn’t do the trick. The phrase needed is: Perdóname, ¿cuándo fue la última vez que ese gruñiendo, destraillido Doberman tuyo mató y comió un viajero norteamericano (Excuse me, when was the last time that growling unleashed Doberman of yours killed and ate a North American traveler)?

Of course, two months wasn’t enough time to learn Spanish, but I tried. I think Sister Kate would have appreciated my effort. I have often thought about kind Sister Kate. She was young and beautiful and didn’t seem to hangout with all the old battle-axe nuns. I have often hoped she left the convent, and found another calling. Perhaps she taught English to students in her much-loved Paris. I hope she sipped cafe au lait on a quiet Parisian street and had a boyfriend who treated her well and brought her flowers. She was the best teacher I ever had. I’m going to go have a Dewey Cappuccino in her honor.