Putting ignorance to work

Once upon a time, I made a complete idiot of myself. Please don’t misunderstand, I’ve done it lots of times, only this one stands out in my memory; I still let out groans of embarrassment just thinking about it.

As a young under-graduate I could be arrogant and worse - occasionally over-blown with self-importance (what’s changed did I hear from the back?). I wasn’t unique, it often comes as a free extra in the kit marked “youth”, but it being a common affliction doesn’t make it any more likeable. And it’s a trap waiting to spring.

A college after-dinner-over-coffee discussion was taking place and one of my companions used the word “bathos”. I had never heard it before and didn’t hear it properly on first meeting. “Pathos” is what my brain interpreted the sound as. And I joined the argument on that basis. What I should have done, when it was clear that I was mistaken in some way, was to shut up and/or apologize and/or make a joke of my error. I did none of those but continued to dig the hole I had started until it was so big the only choice left was to jump in and hope no-one could see me down there, but the humiliating laughter followed. And I still didn’t know what “bathos” meant.

Eventually the message of the experience hit me. If you want to learn, don’t be afraid of ignorance. Embrace what you don’t know and ask it to reveal itself. There are lots of ways to do that – “I’ve never heard that before, could you tell me more?” “That sounds really interesting, I know nothing about it, please carry on” etc. Lot’s of people like showing off what they know and even those who don’t can be persuaded with a bit of flattery. And if these don’t work, you can always Google it.

For those who want an example of bathos or descending from beauty to the ridiculous, Douglas Adams' “Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” provides lots of examples. One I particularly like is approximately “the alien space ships floated gracefully in the air, exactly like bricks don’t”. Thank you Google and Wikipedia.

Do you speak Lebanese?

At first sight, “Bonjourayn, Sir” looks like a Scrabble accident: unless you live in Lebanon. It’s a collision of the three languages in use here, French (bonjour=good-day), Arabic (-ayn=two of whatever you attach this particular suffix to, it gets to be a plural when it grows up) and English (sir, addressed to a male person as a mark of respect or disdain depending on the inflection used).

It is common for an educated Lebanese to speak Arabic at home and with the family, have been to a French school or lycée and studied for business, engineering or medical degrees in English. Why French? Well Lebanon is an ex-French colony; one Charles de Gaulle used to live just up the road from where we are now. Why Arabic? Lebanon is located geographically in the Middle East and belongs to the Arab League. Why English? It’s the language of business and the Lebanese have been a trading nation since before the days of the silk route. They’re very good at both languages and business – the current head of the Forbes top 100 richest list may be claimed by Mexico, but the guy is actually Lebanese, and you’ll find a good few more on that list too. Lebanon is about as over-represented on the successful business people list as Britain’s Cambridge University is when it comes to Nobel prizes.

Trouble is, during normal daily chatter, there seems to be little attempt to stop leakage from one language to another, often in the same sentence, and sometimes in the same word, as in the example above. “Fee” - Arabic for “there is” - is also in popular and frequent use, as it’s a nice economic one syllable and not two. At first I thought I was witnessing the birth of new language, rather in the way that English must have emerged from the well stirred ingredients of French, Anglo-Saxon and Norse in the Middle Ages, but now I believe it is more likely to stem from the Lebanese respect for foreigners. They all really try to make a foreigner welcome by attempting to speak in something close to his or her native tongue; even the weather beaten and slightly Parkinson diseased beggar on the street says “thank you, sir” when I drop the local equivalent of a few bob into his hat! But when they can’t think of the right word in what they hope is your language, well, hey ho, pick one from another tongue instead, it’ll be almost as good.

This can lead to some bizarre situations. An Iranian (that’s Persian in old-speak) friend once told me he spoke European, and when I asked him what he meant he said that the words were pretty common across the Europe of the old Roman Empire, he just had to change the accent a bit! I think this was much the same attitude as that of a taxi driver who transported me recently. He’d lived in Germany and Portugal and we had a weird exchange (I was going to say conversation, but that would be an abuse of the word) with me wielding my limited kitchen Arabic and him responding and worse, asking questions, in a mixture of German and Portuguese. Not having either of these myself, you might expect the thing to have decayed rapidly into an embarrassed silence, but not a bit of it; noises were passed back and forth for a good ten minutes, with minimal comprehension on both sides, I should imagine, before arrival at my destination relieved us both from further potential ear and brain damage.

It’s time I left to go and play bridge at the local club, “fee match en une heure” as they say.