Foreign Language

When I met R, his grasp of the English language was…shall we say… “limited.” I believe that it could be captured in the following two phrases:

“sings ahh mek ahh say shooom” and “No English”

The latter of these was quite obvious. The first a bit more mysterious… until I realized that it was what the Spanish-speaking crowd believed to be the chorus of a popular song at the time: “Things that make you go hmmmm.” This phrase was incredibly popular among all the young Mexican men at the time, and it was used liberally – generally with the result of bewilderment on the part of the English-speaking conversation partner.

As our relationship developed, I became R’s English instructor. It worked quite well, for the most part. He developed a mastery of the language that would later allow him to take upper education courses in his second language rather than his first. Sadly, in learning the language directly from me, and later my family, he had no way of knowing when we were using “legitimate” words, and when we were being nonsensical. This proved to be unfortunate.

Periodically, I was struck by what I had done. Take, for example, the day that I was attempting to emphasize the extreme hurry that we were in to get ready and out the door for an important engagement.

“We are,” I stated, as we walked toward the house, “in a hurry.”

“A hurry?” he repeated.

“Yes.” I said firmly, opening the sliding glass door. “We are in a BIG hurry. We NEED to get going.”

“Uh-huh.” He acknowledged, as we stepped through.

I suspected that he might not grasp the importance.

“We are,” I repeated, with much stress on each word, “talking MA-JOR hurry.”

An awareness spread across his face.

“Aaaahhhh…” he breathed, finally understanding, “We’re talking MAJOR TWUNKA.”

For a moment, I was taken aback. I paused in my tracks, then – my decision made – moved steadily forward. “Yes,” I affirmed, deciding this was no time to get into the ‘nuances’ of the language. “We are talking major twunka.”

“Major twunka” had – apparently – been incorporated into R’s vocabulary right along with all the other nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc. The tragedy of the situation was, of course, that no one outside of our family had any idea of what he could be referring to. It was actually quite clever, I realized, the way that he had worked it all out…

“Twunk,” or “Mr. Twunk,” was what we called our pet Guinea pig. My mother, brother, and I all adored the pig, and we never refrained from telling him so.

“You,” we would declare, eyeing his bulging black belly, “Are SUCH a Twunk. You are a FINE swine. What a pig.”

Another one of us would chip in. “We are talking TWUNKA.”

“Yes!” we agreed, interchangeably, “We are talking MAJOR TWUNKA!”

By listening to many variations of this conversation, R deduced that “major twunka” was essentially a handy superlative phrase. If it applied to pigs, it must apply to any situation that required particular emphasis. And so he used it…

I cannot recall if I ever remembered to clarify the roots of the “major twunka” phrase. In later years, I reflected upon this and wondered if – as he went about his life – he continued to pepper his conversation with it.

“R,” I imagined an employer saying to him. “We need that piece finished – ASAP!”

“Yep,” I heard R concur in my head. “It’s coming right up - we’re talking major twunka.”

In later years, the incidents declined but never ceased. When I began kickboxing, I would often – at home – dance around in circles around R, bobbing and weaving and calling out the names of punches as I hit at the air around him. He absorbed it all, learning…until the day that he began play-boxing around me. As he moved his arm up in an approximation of an uppercut, he yelled out what he’d heard when I punched at him.

“Apricot!” he shouted, and bounced around on his feet. “Apricot, apricot!”

I doubled over in laughter. Had I been in a real fight, I would have been a goner. Perhaps, I think now, there was some genius to his method. Forget “talking smack” – a guaranteed way to cause someone to lose their concentration is to start “talking fruit.”

I ponder this, considering…. I try to imagine an action hero – perhaps Bruce Willis – who has realized that he is outnumbered. As three men move in for the kill, he kicks one leg out abruptly to the side.

“Gooseberry!” he yells. The man to his left pauses, confused. Bruce takes immediate advantage. He grabs the man in a headlock and pulls him off his feet.

“Banana!” he shouts, swinging the man’s body in an arc toward the other men. “Apple-cherry!”
The two men are knocked to their knees, but their heads were already spinning. The words continue to pummel them.

“Fig!”
“Grape! Lemon!”

Before they can clear their heads of the fruity thoughts that have filled them, he is gone.

Yes, I think, there’s something to this. But then I pause. If I share the technique with Hollywood, it will be in every new action film for the next year. That would – essentially – ruin my genius approach, which relies heavily on the element of surprise. This will not do. I will have to, therefore, request that each and every one of you reading this blog keep this secret weapon just that – secret. After all, you never know when you may need to pull out an unexpected apricot, and you’d hate to have your opponent waiting with a vicious peach.