Messing with Me

Sometimes I think foreigners are just messing with me. Although technically speaking, in the instance I am about to recount, I was the foreigner, not the other guy. 
     I was in the Zurich airport last night, waiting for the Allegra Hotel shuttle, when the Best Western shuttle driver engaged me in conversation. I was in no position to judge his grasp of the English language, as I have no grasp whatsoever of Switzerdeutsch. But there we were, standing in the Zone Three shuttle area, waiting for one thing or another, when he suddenly pipes up with something along the following lines:
     "Du mit die shuttledriver is mit die full moon! Ha, ha, ha! He says it is meaning the more money! [Here he hunched his shoulders and pointed skyward.] Back und forth, back und forth, den around und around  mit die moon, nein? Like in America? Got the candybars? Die Coca Cola? MTV? [He nodded sagely.] Shuttledriver got die seat belts. Zurich! Airport! On mit die cows!"
     He went on like that for about three minutes, which is a long time when you don't know what the hell somebody's talking about. 
     What did I do? The same thing I always do when I don't understand something; I did everything in my power to appear as though I did. I nodded. I chuckled. I sighed knowingly. I think I even murmured an occasional monosyllable. 
     It was of a piece with how I just barely got through high school: pretending to take pertinent notes, to contemplate the ingenuity of the theorem on the blackboard, to listen attentively to the teacher's exposition on the amphibian reproductive system. 
     Who knows what I was agreeing with him about. He might have just insulted my mother, for all I know. Then, with a final, "Shine mit die shoes!" delivered expectantly, like a Henny Youngman punchline, the driver finally climbed into his van and drove away. 
     I stood there for a moment trying to deconstruct his little disquisition. But it wouldn't parse. 
     Then I got to thinking. If I were a shuttle driver, ferrying people interminably back and forth across the same dreary landscape of exit ramps and flyovers, safety islands and roundabouts, what might I do to amuse myself? 
     And it occurred to me that one possible way would be to go up to foreigners and simply spout elaborate, extravagant nonsense in some broken version of their tongue and see if they, like me, were such fools as to stand and smile and nod and shrug and pretend they understood what I was saying. 
  
  

Windbags

My niece Kelly and I have been working on a project called The Redundancy Watch, the result of our family's obsession with the English language. In collecting examples of redundancies in common and sometimes not-so-common use, I found this from Herbert Hoover:

“To you who are planning ahead programs of work for earnest groups of organized women, I strongly commend study of the new data, new ideas, and methods and plans envisaged by this most exhaustive conference on housing and homes. … In this depression as never before the American people have responded with a high sense of responsibility to safeguard and protect the children...”                                

Herbert Hoover

Radio Address to the Women's Conference on Current Problems

September 29, 1932

     In 1932, things were not going well for Herbert Hoover, nor for anyone else, for that matter. Harried to distraction (and inaction) by the Depression, by Franklin Roosevelt, by the rise of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, by a world teetering on the brink, Herbert Hoover chose to talk about the family. 

     He would not be the last flailing politician to do so. Whenever actually addressing a national problem proves to be beyond a politician’s ability, ideology, or pay grade, he will bombilate in the most general terms about the American family, extolling it as the backbone of the nation, or deploring its decline. Since the family is none of his particular business, it follows that he must wheeze mightily on his bagpipes to flatter us or alarm us, as the case may be, and it is in such huffery and puffery that redundancies take over.

     In this example, planning ahead, housing and homes, and safeguard and protect are all very well, but we are especially taken by earnest groups of organized women, because God knows we have encountered some of those, and we admire the way our late president’s list of new data, new ideas, and methods, and plans hedges every bet.
     It is to politicians that we owe such redundancies as "our freedom and liberty," "our country and our nation," "justice and fairness," "avert and prevent" and on and on, but I suppose we must be grateful to those who employ them for thereby signaling to the rest of us that they don't know what the hell they're talking about.