The curse of polygottalism

[muckefuck]

I had a very pleasant lunch today with a coworker. (At the end she said, "That was very enjoyable. We almost didn't mention work at all!") At one point I wanted to tell her what kind of novel I was reading at home. I started to say "policier" but realised I needed another word because that wasn't English. But all I could think of as an alternative was "Krimi". After struggling for a bit, I finally just confessed my confusion and she said, "Detective fiction?" (Fortunately, she's the sympathetic sort who would never accuse me of showing off.)

Comments

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

The real curse is on the children. My parents casually threw in borrowed words without signaling, I often just assumed an origin for a term based on the language of the adjacent words. For example, in Spanish class one day, upon learning "pata", I remarked to a Hebrew-speaking classmate how weird it was that it meant the same thing in Spanish and Hebrew. She was confused. I think there are a somewhat significant set of words that I know are either Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German or Spanish, but my accuracy on picking out which language would be 80% or less.

Also, until just now, I thought Krimi to describe that book genre was a Hebrew term. Thanks for the unintentional correction.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of an anecdote from an Ashkenazi author about being stumped for a word in class. His teacher held up a common household utensil and asked if anyone could name it. "I knew my mother called it a 'spatula'," he relates, "but for the life of me I couldn't remember the English name."

I trust you're doing what you can to make certain that Little S doesn't have it any easier than you did.