B. U. G. S.

Pain mentioned that he knows five languages. He then added a separate cautionary comment that “knw” is not the same thing as “fluent.” That later comment convinces me — though his word is enough — that he DOES know five languages.

In another comment, Dave said,

“If you are a target of any kind ploy by someone who is attempting to hustle you, you have the option to remain silent and passive and admit to yourself that you do not know his or her objects. As BW keeps pointing out, there is great value in failing to be shrewd.”

“You can also pretend that you are a retard. That ploy has saved many of poor soldier’s life and is especially effective if you happen to look like a retard.”

This combination of insights gives me a chance to give you some of my recollections and know you will understand what I am getting at.

I discussed the fact that what one knows is what one normally finds interesting. This works both ways. You learn about things you are interested in, that obvious. But you also find something interesting if you happen to know something about it. I learned a nodding acquaintane with languages because I HAD to. I HATE having to learn one.

I have a standard reply when someon gets too inquisitive about my knowledge of languages:

“Hell, I’ve been kicked out of EVERYWHERE.”

But as Pain says, when you are forced to dabble in languages you become hypersenstitive to the difference between knowledge, “living in the language,” flency, and multilingual. Ther is a GEOMETRIC difference between these levels.

Most of us older people who traveled a lot have had the odd experience of having someone explain to us, in perfect English, that the speaker is NOT able to communicate in English. Why is someone telling us, in perfect English, that he cannot communicated with us in English?

The reason is because the one thing a person learns in a new language is how to talk about languages. Almost anybody who has ever had to deal with languages remembers “nie panyamana parusski”or “Comprendo un POCO espanol.” People dealing in languages naturally talk a lot about how little they speak, so a person can hold a complete conversation in a language he has no real knowledge of.

This is very confusing for us because we all, somewhere in our skulls, take it for granted that other people really understand OUR language. There was an old joke down where I come from that, “When all those French and Germans sit down in

front of the TV with a beer, they cut all that crap and talk American like everybody else does.”

As one English lady is uspposed to have said, “I feel that ANYONE can understand English if it is spoken loudly and clearly enough.” Older people who arenot used to different languages very often treat the person who doesn’t understand them as if they were deaf.

I still get a laugh to of case where I used this. Two middle-aged American women were in a European train station as I came up back when the signs were, in smaller stations, thoroughly monolingual. Only locals came to such small stations. One of the ladies asked me, “Do you speak English?”

I replied, “Well, I’m from South Carolina, so I guess you’d say so.” So I translated the sign for them. Then a man who was obviously one of their husbands walked up. She explained to him how this nice man had helped them out.

He turned to me and said, loudly and clearly, “THANK YOU! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!”

I couldn’t resist. I gave him an uncomprehending stare so he looked me straight in the eye, enunciated each word carefully, and shouted, “THANK YOU! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!”

I gave him the old “Sambo no get it, but Sambo good boy” look and grinned broadly and uncomprehendingly. He smiled and nodded back and they went away. I went away laughing and imagining what the conversation was like when she informed him I was an America.

I STILL laugh about that!

You can use this to enormous advantage. Most people who are in the presence of people speaking a language which is totally alien to them interrupt the flow of the talk freely. They would never do that in a language they understand, but one cannot help feeling that what these people are babbling to each other is not real speech, the stuff nice people don’t interrupt.

Maybe it’s interrogration background or just common sense — the two are inextricable — but I can tell when somebody has reached abreak, even when it’s in Urdu. The result of htis is that I have a huge string of people, from Koreans to Pakistanis and beyond, who are absolutely convinced that I speak their native tongue fluently.

To begin with, everybody has the impression that someone else probably talks the way they do. Secondly, if you know when to break intot he conversation,then you must know the language. I have forced a LOT of people to speak our common tongue in front of me because they feel I know something and they don’t want to get caught saying something in their own tongue they don’t want me to hear.

There is a lot of acting to this. But you are at a distinct disadvantage in intelligence work if two people you are talking with can freely talk to each other in their own tongue. My Rabic is gone with the wind that Mohammed breathed. I mean it’s GONE. But I was ina Moscow bar talking with two Arabs, and when I was introduced one from Egypt, I said, “Keef hallak.”

Then I looked abit embarrassed and said, “Sorry, you don’t say that in Egypt, do you?”

Every time these two guys lapsed into Arabic, their eyes cut around to me. I didn’t understand anything they were saying, but I put a real et blanket on any attempt they might have made to compare stories.

I started this reminiscence with Peter Pain’s and Dave’s comments so let me get back to them:

1) He knows five languages;

2) He is very aware of the difference in competence levels in languages;

3) I can’t say it better than Dave did:

“If you are a target of any kind ploy by someone who is attempting to hustle you, you have the option to remain silent and passive and admit to yourself that you do not know his or her objects. As BW keeps pointing out, there is great value in failing to be shrewd.”

“You can also pretend that you are a retard. That ploy has saved many of poor soldier’s life and is especially effective if you happen to look like a retard.”

If you combine these insights, you can get a practical use out of languages you don’t even KNOW.