“Never do I ever want to hear another word. (There isn’t one I haven’t heard.”)
Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady,” which came from “Pygmalion,” by George Bernard Shaw, said/sang that pronouncement when being courted by Freddie Eynsford-Hill, at a time when Eliza wanted action, not words.
To boast, honestly, that you’ve already heard all the English words would be quite a feat, even a hundred years ago, when “Pygmalion” was written.
Is it possible to have heard all of them, or most of them? With some 600,000 words in its arsenal, English tops all other languages, some by a factor of six. Because English borrows words from every other language, when it’s helpful, we can find contributions from many tongues as part of our daily fare.
Imagine, for example, the many words English has for the same object, or at least similar items.
We bought a couch a few months ago and made arrangements for delivery. When I called, I identified myself and said, “We ordered a sofa. When can we expect delivery?”
The person at the other end, cupped the phone long enough to ask the manager, “What about the davenport the Trujillos ordered?”
The answer came back: “Tell them we’ll be delivering the divan this afternoon.” And when they arrived, one of the deliverers said, “Your ottoman is here. Want us to take out your settee?”
Six terms: couch, davenport, divan, ottoman, settee and sofa, to represent something soft that I fall asleep on while watching TV.
I became more interested in this million-words-for-the-same-thing phenomenon when Sara Harris, a consummate polyglot and former colleague at Highlands, gave me a bilingual version of instructions for having school pictures taken.
Now the Santa Fe company that contracted to take the photos has a Spanish name, and with that, the assumption that a Spanish translation of English instructions would be fairly simple. Bad assumption.
But before we examine the two-page memo the kids took home to their parents, let’s emphasize that Santa Fe has huge numbers of students whose first language is Spanish, not English. And they probably read Spanish better than English. The photo company, in order to practice equal opportunity for understanding, took a stab at translating.
But wait. “Took a stab at,” we all understand, means to make an effort, the way Jack the Ripper did. But to render that idea in Spanish would be murderous, as my Spanish dictionary uses “acuchillar” for the Macbeth-type deed.
And there was a restaurant in Las Vegas that boasted “happy hour” by calling it “La hora de la contenta,” which comes out as “the hour of the contented (woman.)”
A year of teaching at the United World College revealed many insights for the English language, but not a lot of praise. For the most part, my students, from far-away climes, mastered English. That’s something too many American students apparently haven’t accomplished yet. But in the UWC students’ quest to learn English, they understandably picked up a slew of concerns.
A comment by a student from China, for example, was Americans’ use of “fix” for “prepare.” “Why do people here say they’re going to fix dinner, when it’s not broken?”
A student from the Ukraine said he had trouble deciphering repetitious patterns in locutions such as “I’ve got to go.” “If you say Œhave,’ you don’t need need Œgot’.” He’d got a point: why not just “I have to go”?
And a girl from Norway said that the English idiom in “carry out the plans” should mean literally “to remove the plans from the room, as one would a cat.” But if we use “execute” for “carry out,” we’re being murderous again.
A trip through standard dictionaries generally shows far fewer Spanish words than their English equivalents. And that’s why the flippant use of words and idioms that make perfect sense to us in English, often misfire when rendered in another language.
The Santa Fe portrait studio invited kids and their parents to “choose from an appealing selection of print sizes.” The difficult word here is “appealing,” which is confusing even in English.
For example, in the 1960s, a group of Italian hookers complained of police harassment, particularly around the Vatican. So they filed an official appeal to the then-pope, with the result that the headline in Rome’s leading newspaper the next day read, in perfect ambiguity, “Prostitutes appeal to pope.”
The portrait studio’s translation of “appealing” was “suplicante,” which implies that people ought to get on one knee and beg the studio for the right size of portrait.
It asks the students to “have your hair styled to look its best.” The studio’s equivalent of “styled” is “llamo,” which is the past tense for “is called or named.” So how does one take such a giant leap, from a hair style to being called something? Well now, my dictionary lists among several definitions, a possible explanation. When a person styles himself as an expert, for example, he identifies, or names himself as such. But the studio owners dug too far into the dictionary to find any word that would even remotely correspond to “style.”
And it asks students, on picture day, not to wear “sleeveless outfits.” “Ropa sin mangas” would suffice, but here, the translator equates “outfit” with “equipment” and even “hunting gear” and uses “equipo” for “ropa,” meaning clothes.
English dictionaries generally list a plethora of meanings, each one being more and more implausible. And between the first listed definition and the last, words undergo many permutations.
And that’s why my mommy told me never to call a girl “nice.” Why?
Because nice means “sweet”; sweet means “luscious”; luscious means “sumptuous”; sumptuous means “voluptuous”; voluptuous means “fleshy”; and fleshy means “fat.”