My Favorite Mistakes

My friend Mimi posted a bit on her blog about some of the challenges between crossing between languages. You can check it out on Stranger in a Strange Land. It made me start thinking of some of my favorite mistakes that I have made in both English and Hebrew.

Probably the mistake with the worst consequences was the time I made a scavenger hunt for Yuval and started it off with a note on the door of our apartment. I intended to write on the note, "I have a secret". Yuval came home for work and burst into the house panting, note in hand, "Are you alright?" he yelled. I was stunned.

"Of course. Why? What happened?"

"You wrote on this note that you had a robbery. I thought you were a genius or something. Here you were being held hostage in the apartment and you somehow managed to put a note on the front door to warn me."

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Learning to write emails in Hebrew using medical terminology was often challenging and rarely satisfying. I'd struggle to craft an email for 30 minutes and then show it to my secretary. "Hmmm," she'd say, "why don't you try telling me what it is that you wanted to say and I'll type it. Then you can tell me if it says what you want it to." And people say Israelis don't have tact!

But sometimes my secretaries weren't around. Like the time I had to send out an email outlining times when a colon cancer screening test was counter indicated. At times like these, I prayed the spell check would catch any terribly embarrassing mistake. This time I was lucky, no red underlining showed up on the screen. But, I thought, how can it be that I correctly spelled the word for hemorrhoids on the first try? I can't even spell it right in English on the first try. So I double checked the dictionary, apparently the word I typed was spelled correctly, but the word I typed meant "penis" in some obscure term I had never heard before. "The test is counter indicated if the patient has a symptomatic case of penis."

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The first time my boss handed something to me and said, "Now go type a memo," I nearly fainted. I went back to my office and was ready to cry. I had no idea how to type in Hebrew. One of my co-workers, whom I will always adore for this, looked at my white face and asked, "What's wrong?" I told him my assignment and then admitted, "I don't know how to type in Hebrew."

I was on the verge of tears. He sat down next to me and took my boss's notes from my hands and placed them so we could both see. "All right, what's this letter?" he said, pointing to the first letter of the first word." I told him the letter and then rather than typing for me, he pointed out where the letter was on the keyboard. Then we did the next letter and the next, until I finally sent him out of the room while I finished. Afterwards, he went over the memo with me to make sure I understood what I had just typed. And people say Israelis have no patience.

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There are phrases that I miss in Hebrew, even when there is a direct translation in English. Mimi mentioned, "Maximum" which in Hebrew means, "if it comes down to it", but somehow to me, it seemed more weighty than that, there was always something reassuring in it to me. The worst may happen, but we got it covered.

I miss "davka", a word with no English equivalent. Yuval's cousin Yaron once came up with a way to explain "davka" to non-Hebrew speakers. "It's like this. You would say 'I davka like potatoes.' And 'davka' in this case would mean, 'I actually really like potatoes, in spite of all the many reasons you can think of for me to NOT like potatoes.'" I had no problem living without this word for 20 years, but now I miss it.

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I miss sweet words in Hebrew too: Mami, chamuda, buba, neshema, yafa and all the little endings to turn something into a cute word -chick, -oosh, -ley.

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I guess I rambled a little off topic from my original idea of writing about mistakes. That's how language works, though. The language is so intricately wound up with my memories, both good and bad, of the people I spoke with in Hebrew and the experiences I had struggling with changing from being someone comfortable expressing myself in any format, to being unable to do the simplest of tasks, or successfully communicate the simplest of ideas and then slowly, painstakingly, becoming able to communicate once more.