Have You a Fire Stick, Please?

by FREDERICK PACKARD

YEARS ago, on a tour of Europe, I ran into a young German in Freiburg-im-Breisgau who asked a lot of questions about New York, which he greatly desired to visit. He spoke English quite well, but when I told him a hotel room would cost him about $3.50 a day, he inquired whether this included “flying water.” I know what happened:fliegend in German means “flying,” and fliessend means “flowing.” The phonetic similarity tripped him up and threw him. Remembering him, I have reflected on how lucky people are, when they experiment with foreign languages they don’t know too well, that they don’t stumble into worse pitfalls than they do. I have spoken French since I was a child, but I did not learn until 1944 that I had innocently and frequently used some words that do not — and never did — exist.

During the war I had a job which brought me into daily contact with hordes of French people; for the first time, I had to talk French professionally and functionally rather than socially and touristically. I was often complimented on my accent and once in a while was asked what part of France I was born in. Despite this, occasionally, and mostly with people I saw fairly regularly, I would notice a brief look of puzzlement flit across the faces of my listeners. But they were too polite to enlighten me.

This was done by my boss, a hardboiled old Parisian-American who had lived in France for thirty years. He spoke absolutely perfect French with an atrocious American accent. He told me that, long before, he had decided to stop trying to achieve a French accent and to concentrate on speaking correctly and idiomatically; and the French respected this. Anyhow, one day I was saying to a French journalist, “Mon cher Monsieur, il est bien obvieux que les Français ecoutcnt la BBC.” I got that quick puzzled look, but no remark. When the man had gone my boss said, “Packard, I know you talk French like a Frenchman, but stop using words that don’t exist. The word for ‘obvious’ is évident. I here isn’t any such word as obvieux.” To that poor Frenchman I had said what in English would sound just like “It is absolutely gufflepuffle that the French are listening to the BBC.”

Well, I had been using obvieux all my life and this was the first time I ever got called on it. I will say in self-defense that t here should be such a word, and that the French language is deficient without it.

The nearest I came to getting into trouble was with Italian, and that in New York City during Prohibition. I was in a new speak-easy, to which I had brought some customers. To show their appreciation the proprietors were instructing the bartender to buy me drinks. I have always flattered myself that I can speak Italian, but actually I guess at a lot of the words as I go along, borrowing them from French or Latin or even phonetically converting English words of Latin origin. This time I felt as though I were beginning to get tight, and I had an appointment, so I said to the bartender, “Thanks, no more drinks.” He asked me why not and I replied that I didn’t want to get intoxicato. I thought this a perfectly safe conversion. The bartender looked hurt, and rather peeved. He got over it, but later I found that I had said I was afraid of getting poisoned. Intoxicato is not a very good Italian word, but close enough to one of the words for “poisoned” so that he saw no reason to think I didn’t mean what I said, and this was a delicate matter then, since people did occasionally get poisoned in speakeasies. I should have used ubriaco.

I never tried making up any Spanish words, but in Cuba I did try to talk Spanish. Every time, before the sentence was over, I would be talking bastard Italian. This simply infuriated the Cubans (and small wonder). In fact I caused some confusion in a restaurant in Havana one time by ordering “boiled staterooms with rice.” What I wanted was shrimps. “Shrimps” is camarones, and “staterooms” is eamavotes — only one little letter subslituted.

Once in a while a makeshift will be successful. I was riding in a train in Germany, and found that. I had cigarettes but no matches. I managed to remember the words for “fire” and “stick,” so I said to the man opposite me, “Bitte, haben Sieeinen Feuerstock?” He looked astounded for a moment, but I got a match without having to resort to pantomime. The word is Streichholz.

One can get in trouble even with English. I attended a perfect ly good school, where t he English department was supposed to be excellent. Nevertheless in my freshman year at. college, when I said something uncomplimentary about the Bolsheviki and the professor giving the course remarked that I seemed to be a bit of a reactionary, I was extremely puzzled, because I thought that reactionary meant “revolutionary”—you know, people who were “reacting” against the old regime.