Shout out to my Arabic teacher that looked at us yesterday mid-lesson and said, “I’m worried. You all look exhausted and depressed.”
Of we were all like, “Oh yeah we’re dead inside, you haven’t noticed?”
And he snapped shut the textbook, threw up his hands and said, “That’s not healthy! No more vocab! Time for dancing!”
And he taught us a dance from Iraq and we danced instead of doing vocab. We didn’t stop dancing until he saw all of us laughing and was satisfied that we were all feeling better. It was perhaps the coolest, most kind-hearted thing I’ve ever seen a college instructor do.
Make no mistake. Trans people, especially trans women, are the canary in the coal mine. If the United States government manages to pass legislation making it essentially illegal to be trans again, mark my words it WILL continue on up to sending us right back into McCarthyism and the “kill or imprison anything you disagree with or dislike” policies of the 1950s (not that that hasn’t already been happening under the radar, but it’s going to be More).
There really are people out there who are acting like suggesting genetic testing to “confirm the identity” of a group of people isn’t a wildly dangerous thing for a government to start doing. This is not a door that should be opened.
Person A: You know… the thing Person B: The “thing”? Person A: Yeah, the thing with the little-! *mutters under their breath* Como es que se llama esa mierda… THE FISHING ROD
As someone with multiple bilingual friends where English is not the first language, may I present to you a list of actual incidents I have witnessed:
Forgot a word in Spanish, while speaking Spanish to me, but remembered it in English. Became weirdly quiet as they seemed to lose their entire sense of identity.
Used a literal translation of a Russian idiomatic expression while speaking English. He actually does this quite regularly, because he somehow genuinely forgets which idioms belong to which language. It usually takes a minute of everyone staring at him in confused silence before he says “….Ah….. that must be a Russian one then….”
Had to count backwards for something. Could not count backwards in English. Counted backwards in French under her breath until she got to the number she needed, and then translated it into English.
Meant to inform her (French) parents that bread in America is baked with a lot of preservatives. Her brain was still halfway in English Mode so she used the word “préservatifes.” Ended up shocking her parents with the knowledge that apparently, bread in America is full of condoms.
Defined a slang term for me……. with another slang term. In the same language. Which I do not speak.
Was talking to both me and his mother in English when his mother had to revert to Russian to ask him a question about a word. He said “I don’t know” and turned to me and asked “Is there an English equivalent for Нумизматический?” and it took him a solid minute to realize there was no way I would be able to answer that. Meanwhile his mom quietly chuckled behind his back.
Said an expression in English but with Spanish grammar, which turned “How stressful!” into “What stressing!”
Bilingual characters are great but if you’re going to use a linguistic blunder, you have to really understand what they actually blunder over. And it’s usually 10x funnier than “Ooops it’s hard to switch back.”
Okay I will say though sometimes you do fuck up at switching back. I live in an English speaking household, but not everyone’s a native speaker, and we live in a non-English speaking country (but the country’s language is none of our first language). Sometimes the non-native-English-speaking flatmate is tired and will just say things to me in his native language and be confused why I’m just staring at him and not answering. And last time I was back in an English speaking country I immediately was out for drinks with a friend and while she got us a seat I got us drinks at the bar, and the bar workers were speaking Spanish to each other and I accidentally asked for “a carafe (pronounced cah-rah-fey, aka not how it’s pronounced in English) of vino rosado” because I’d been listening to them and not speaking to anyone. They were like w a t and I was super fucking embarrassed and couldn’t fucking figure out how to pronounce carafe normally.
So like. It does happen. But it’s often either embarrassing or happens with complex thoughts that you were thinking about in your native language and are too tired to notice you don’t have all the words to translate the thought.
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