Monday, January 11, 2010

I Just Work Here.

Saw a girl working at a Rosetta Stone kiosk who looked so bored I thought she might tip over. Staring out at the feet of the people passing her by, she rested her head in her hand and her arm on a box of Level 1 Farsi. 

I don't know if I've ever seen a person less interested in anything. Don't you think she might want to learn one sentence in every language possible instead of falling asleep on a DVD tutorial? What sentence, though? Hmm. I don't know. Maybe she ran into the same problem. 

But as I watched her sink lower onto the counter, I was totally kicking myself for not knowing how to say "Timber!" in Farsi. 

3 comments:

MFB said...

الوار

Macnabbs said...

You should have livened up her day by enquiring about courses in fictional languages from the movies. Start with ‘that one they speak in Avatar’ and work your way through ‘speaking like Jar Jar Binks’ before coming to rest on ‘Elizabethan’. Then watch with horror as the grinning girl produces ‘how to go from no-hoper to hey-nonny-non’ in ten easy lessons’ and remarks: ‘prithee, I took this course myself fair maid.’

Or request one of those super obscure languages spoken by only three of the indigenous population on some island that consists mainly of gull poo and rock, but is also spoken (badly) by the sorts of people who get all righteous about making sure cultures don’t die out. You know, the sort of people who will show you the gull chafing dish they brought back from their last holiday on Rock Island.

This too is fraught with danger as such a language lesson pack may exist. So best stick with languages that do exist, but which there’s no formal training in yet. This includes:

Yokel
Scary Yokel
Indeterminate Eastern European
Lisp
Cockney
Instant Racial Slur (white person trying to talk like somebody from ‘the Wire’)
Whatever the hell dialect the bloke who gave you directions was talking in
Posh.

Jess said...

well that's just hilarious. seriously.