...Toes? Or, fun with language.

I'm in Santa Cruz sitting at a coffee house trying to write, but an old white-haired local won't let me. He's here "doin' lap top" today with an iBook G4 that looks like it was buried in mud and then tied to the back of a truck and dragged down the road. One of these Berkeley graduates from the '60s who's lost a few screws and now blurs the line between the derelict and the tax-paying.

He just won't stop talking, and I don't even know what about. In the last 10 minutes he's mentioned, among other things, running for president, "mythic government," Bhutan, hitch-hiking, earthquakes, and smoking his pipe by the river. Luckily, he's now talking to another old man/veteran/vagrant named Jimbo and giving me a break.

I bring him up because he reminded me of how easy it is to mix up two languages when you spend all your time with a bilingual. When I sat down next to this old fellow, he smiled and said, "we'll be neighbors" and I very nearly said "wat gezellig!" Roughly translated, this means something like "how nice!" in Dutch. I caught myself, but here are a few mix-ups and mistakes that have slipped through over the last few months.

Going from English to Dutch to English to Dutch isn't always easy, after all, and especially hard for some. Take my mother, for example, who, on her visit to Amsterdam, raised her beer for a toast and accidentally said "Probst!" for cheers instead of the Dutch, "proost!" Probst, incidentally, is the name of her gynocologist. She also tried to say something was gezellig once and instead said, with great exuberance, "gefilte!" which is a Jewish fish cake.

At a dessert bar in Portland, Jordi politely asked the waitress for an "ice sandwich." Mmm! In Dutch, ijs (pronounced 'ice') is the word for ice cream (and for ice, and popsicles, and frozen yogurt), so naturally he forgot the 'cream' even though he knows ijs from ice.

Dutch prepositions give me a lot of trouble, and as Jordi and I were conversing in his native tongue one day, I was trying to say something like "I was talking to her" but I couldn't think of the word for "to" in that context. I started listing prepositions until I landed on the right one, "Naar? Met?...Tenen?" He laughed. Tenen, it turns out, means toes.

When my siblings visited Amsterdam, they asked Jordi and I how we met, so over Thai food Jordi explained to them how we were at a party and got to talking about the weather in California (what every Dutch person I met wanted to talk about), but we couldn't get very far because neither of us could convert Celsius and Fahrenheit. Some light chuckles around the table. "So then," Jordi went on, "we were talking about my length..." There were a few seconds of confused silence, everyone hoping he didn't mean what it sounded like. What the tall Dutchman meant, of course, was his height. In Dutch, lang (pronounced 'long') means tall. An honest mistake, really.

Luckily, after 6 weeks of essentially spending every waking (and sleeping) moment together, Jordi and I still haven't run out of things to talk about, so as I continue to practice my Dutch, and as Jordi continues to pick up more and more lazy idiomatic American English, we're sure to confuse ourselves and each other countless more times. Wat gefilte!