Lost In Translation

I was chatting with a good friend of mine this afternoon in Starbucks. She’s an international student hailing from Germany, and the sweetest, most mild-mannered, blonde-haired, blue-eyed thing you’d ever want to see.

Which is why I nearly shot iced caramel macchiato out of my nose when she dropped the mother of all nasty, horrible, not-fit-to-print words quite casually during our conversation.

“Did you just say ‘$#?!*@’?” I managed to squeak.

She laughed aloud. “Oh yes! It’s my favorite American word!” After which she proceeded to rattle it off at least a jillion times in quick succession, adding a little sing-song cadence for dramatic effect. Needless to say, it was a move that caught the attention of the boys sitting kitty-corner to us, and sent them into gales of laughter.

She finished with a smile, while I, breathlessly singing praises to the Lord God Almighty that I had gotten a venti rather than a tall, hid behind my coffee cup and the paper bag that had once contained my blueberry pound cake.

“Your favorite WORD?!”

She nodded. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. We don’t have a word like that in Germany. I just think it sounds funny.”

I said it to myself once or twice in my head, and thought to myself that yes, it did sound a little funny.

Yet the fact that a word I found so utterly repulsive was quite meaningless to her knocked my brain into left field.

Words, by nature are just symbols. They are merely inconsequential bits of sound that we, as a culture, have arbitrarily attached imagined definitions to in order to communicate.

My German friend had no concept of the American culture's imagined definition of the word, allowing her to so freely spout such a rotten thing without a moment’s thought. It was a meaningless bit of gibberish. It was just a word, a naked sound, devoid of any and all cultural implication.

It’s startling to think that to someone who speaks another language, all of our finely wrought sentences are just scribbles in the sand, curious patterns of arabesques; and each perfectly delivered line like the chatter of birds or the gabble of a small child: strange and nuanced, but utterly meaningless.