Two Many Languages

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published February 17, 2025] 2025

There are just too many foreign languages these days and I'm really having trouble keeping up.

Recently, for example, I wrote a whole column about not speaking coffee. It truly is a linguistic entity all its own and it s a huge social disadvantage to live in a place with so many good coffee houses and not be fluent. Or even be able to get by.

Of course, the main reason I haven t learned it is that I don't drink coffee so I've never frequented coffee places enough to really master spoken Coffee. When I do go, the menu scares the daylights out of me. The milk options alone are terrifying. I think that if you factored all the possible combinations and permutations of coffee drinks, the number would be in the bazillions.

But the problem with spoken Coffee is that it is a language with an unbelievable number of dialects. For example, there's the Frappuccino-Macchiato dialect from the Sucrose region of Italy. Only serious linguists and/or pre-diabetics really understand it.

But that's only the beginning.

I no longer speak light bulb either. The dialect I learned involved standard screw-in light fixtures in denominations of 15, 60, 75, or 100 watts. Now the lightbulb section at the hardware store has become so daunting that even bringing the empty box from the last bulbs doesn't help. Waaaayyy too many options in lighting levels I don t begin to understand.

I definitely do not speak remote. It's so easy to press the wrong button and mess up your TV beyond belief. The problem is: which wrong button was it? And you don't dare press any more buttons in case you mess it up even more. In my defense, remotes truly can be rendered irreparable as we learned when they were inadvertently left within the reach of our then-toddler grandchildren. Even my husband who has a degree in reactor physics from Cal Tech was unable to restore them to functionality.

And while we're on the subject of grandchildren, that's another language I'm struggling to master: grandchild. My first clue that we had a language barrier was when I showed them the phone nook in my 1947 house, a feature of the era. They wanted to know, "but where did you plug in the charger?" More recently I told them I was going to tape a show. They looked at me, puzzled. "So what do you mean, tape?"  The idea that something called a video tape would be involved in one's media viewing was too hilarious for them to contemplate. Why would one use that if you could just stream it (a term I have only recently begun to understand.)

Overall, I just don't speak technology in its many, constantly proliferating dialects. You learn one and there s an upgrade and you re back at square one. Just when you've mastered version 15.2.3, version 15.2.4 comes out and renders you illiterate, and you re thinking, OK, time for the ice floe. I think about the ice floe more than is probably healthy.

The irony is, I actually like languages. I've studied six besides English (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish) and was once fluent in one of them (Portuguese) after a year living with a non-English speaking family and going to a Brazilian high school. I love the idea of being able to communicate with someone in a different language. Understanding at least the rudiments of another language gives you a lot of insight into how the people of that culture view the world.

One of the aspects that especially fascinates me about foreign languages is what other cultures have words for. When we lived in Sweden and visited the Sami (Lapplander) area above the Arctic Circle, I was interested to learn that the Sami language, not surprisingly, has hundreds of words for ice and snow, and at least a thousand for reindeer, not only in size, color and shape of the animals but their behavior as well. We're talking serious specifics here. There's an actual word for a bull reindeer with a single whopper-sized testicle (busat). I guess if you re walking behind them for a few hundred miles on the otherwise-sceneryless tundra, you'd have plenty of opportunity to notice. And, of course, create a name for it. Entertainment is where you find it.

Our reindeer-adjacent vocabulary is pretty much confined to caribou, moose, Rudolph, Dancer, Dasher, Comet, Prancer, Vixen, Cupid, and Blitzen. The Sami would be appalled at our lack of imagination.

At one point a few years ago, however, while trolling for column material, I decided to try to look up the difference between all the baffling types of topographical depressions we have in the U.S.: vale, dale, dell, glen, glade, basin, hollow, trough, ravine, gorge, canyon, hollow, gulch, coulee, gully, arroyo, etc. etc. Maybe not as many terms as the Sami have for ice and snow, or certainly reindeer. They just don't need them. But we apparently do.

So these kinds of languages I can still embrace. But needing a whole specialized language for food stuffs and lighting fixtures and phones is more mental bandwidth than I have. Or ever want to.