Y'all

Some of you know what I’m talking about. If you’ve done a lot of traveling, but don’t have a whole lot of language skills, your default setting is to equate ‘foreign’ with ‘Spanish’. Like you’ll want to say the right phrase to that waiter in Luxembourg, and your brain knows that you should say ‘something foreign’, but what comes out is ‘something Spanish’, like ¡muchos gracias mi amigo! And then the nod and smile; the hope is of course that that person assumes you are just an ignorant Costa Rican instead of a confused Yank. So I’ve tried to pick up a fair amount of Arabic phrases to get me by; now my default settings include shukran jazeelin’s and ma’a sala’ama’s, and I have an almost automatic reflex to bring my right hand up across my heart when I greet anybody. But returning into the embassy compound from a mission out in the redzone includes several checkpoints guarded by contracted security forces. For a while, we had the Gurkhas. Gurkhas are great security guards- relatively diminutive in stature; however they possess a certain physical presence that reads ‘competence in the use of violence’ but not ‘intimidation’- all the while projecting a sense that they are spiritually centered. That’s not an easy thing to pull off (or describe). I had to get into the habit of giving a pleasant namaste! when driving through the gate, head bowing and fingertips touching. So of course my cortex threw us all off on many occasions; I have offered sala’am aleikum’s and ¿hola, que pasa’s? at random and inopportune times to various guards of various linguistic backgrounds. And then, to make my life even more difficult (and not easier, as one would think) the Gurkhas have left and the new batch of guards is from Peru. So I drive towards the gate and my brain switches into ‘foreign’ which I know means ‘Spanish’ but I catch myself because I have broken myself of that habit and I know the phrase must be ‘not Spanish’ and I switch to ‘Arabic’ and then I remember that that’s not right either and then ‘Gurkha-talk’ kicks in and is also rejected and then more neurons fire off and I look at the guy dumbly as he checks out my badge. My brain flips through the language thesaurus wedged into my cranium and the only thing it can come up with is Howdy! Hmm, I think. So my brain really does consider ‘Southern’ a foreign language...