A word in your ear

Talking about Manchester United’s new Wunderkind Adnan Januzaj last Saturday night, England Manager Roy Hodgson said, “Down the line in five years’ time he could play for England if he becomes nationalised”. As malapropisms go, it was up there with the best of them: this kid could be the rebirth of the public sector that the Labour Left has been seeking for thirty years.

I went to a 7/7 conspiracy theory site this morning, and the author had written that the only things set in stone about the event were several explosions and 56 people dead. “Everything else,” he said, “is amiable”. This one is unique in my experience in that I don’t even know which word he had amiable confused with, although the rest of the article was pretty laughable….so perhaps it made some kind of sense.

The making of linguistic mistakes is always a rich source of humour, which is I suspect why most British people still find foreigners funny. Considering we are ourselves so hopeless on the whole at foreign languages, this does seem something of an injustice. But it doesn’t make the mistakes any less amusing.

“I didn’t tell you,” my Dutch friend Tini said a few years ago, “I have been exposing myself again”. Given she was 72 at the time, this seemed unlikely, but the “again” gave a delicious sense of her being a woman With a Past. In fact, Tini (who speaks fluent French) simply translated the French noun exposition directly into English: she had been giving an exhibition of her patchworks. In a similar vein, I am reminded of Billy Wilder telling Jack Lemmon, “You think I know f**k nothing but you are wrong – I know f**k all”.

I confess I’ve committed some terrific howlers in French. The word for a car-hire parking lot in French is location: so it was I boasted to bemused Parisian friends that I had “A lovely holiday home in rural Aquitaine, situated in a delightfully quiet parking lot”. I once told my neighbour Ange Houdusse, “I have just been for a walk up the chimney”, having got cheminée and chemin confused. In German, whether one uses the word warm or wärm can mean the difference between a declaration of minority sexuality or simply remarking upon the temperature. I made the mistake once in August 1965 outside the Zoo Bahnhof in Berlin: it was definitely the wrong place to make such an error.

The best linguistic clangers, however, are those made by marketing and branding people. It is very chique in France to put English phrases on teeshirts, the only problem being that everything gets lost in the translation. “Let’s go yatching!” suggested a naval sweater last year. In the 1980s, I bought a Chevignon beach towel purely because it used the phrase “stwarberry blondes”. The mistakes even extend to brand names trying desperately to sound Anglo-Saxon. There is a brand of lawnmower in France called Lawn Boy, which let’s face it does have rather a gay air to it. Twenty years ago the first poster for KFC in Beijing translated “finger-lickin’ good” into Chinese script as “Eat your fingers, they’ll taste good”. Similarly, “You’re in the Pepsi Generation!” became “Drink Pepsi and meet your ancestors!”. The first Datsun (Nissan as was) I ever drove had the disturbing phrase under the bonnet, ‘This engine is very dirty’. The intention was to tell me that it was positively earthed. And we mustn’t forget the famous post-war Swiss hotel misprint, “There is a French widow in every bedroom”. Not for nothing is ‘n’ the mathematical symbol for infinite.

The main subtleties in language emerge from culture, slang, word-play and sayings so old that even the nationals themselves have not a clue of the derivation. A French colleague mystified me years ago by asking why English references to sexual misbehaviour always involved asking after the health of one’s father. To this day, I do not know how “a bit of ‘ow’s yer father” became slang for “a leg-over on the sly”, but it took a Gallic chum to point out the madness of it.

And madness is what all this attempt to sell to each other is. Globalism is an idea I have opposed strenuously for 35 years. Unlike many, I put my money where my mouth was in the late 1970s and helped found a marketing agency dedicated to giving local service to clients who shared my belief that Ted Levitt’s idea was (and remains) complete tosh. The world is not so much a Global Village as a Sphere of Babel….from which, of course, the verb ‘to babble’ is derived.

I had a Chinese (Liverpool-born) girlfriend as a young man, but nobody could ever persuade me that Chinese opera is other than cacophony, or that the rigid rule of the Chinese father is anything more than just another excuse for men to be bombastic. I am by nature ecumenical, but I cannot accept the idea of second-class Islamic women suffering genital mutilation. I am a francophile, but some aspects of French holistic medicine baffle me. I’m a huge fan of German engineering, but the naivety of the average German citizen terrifies me.

We may be one species, but our wiring is tribalist. I would love to be a citizen of a place called ‘Europe’ if all the best features of each culture were universal, and the eccentric bits were tolerated by everyone. But that’s not the way Homo sapiens works.

Meanwhile, here I am spending time in Greece as part of my grand plan to win a 2013-14 tax rebate from the unforgiving HMRC by staying abroad. I shall blog further on the mysteries of Greece beyond the pharmacy in due course, but leave you for now with this one alarming discovery: on the shelves of a run-down rural supermarket early last week, I came across a Hellenic liqueur whose brand (written in the Greek alphabet) spelt Amnesia.

I was tempted.