for the Gallery

I’m definitely going to go ahead with that Gallery of… Unpleasant People project, because I think it will be fun for people to read, and as mentioned it’s also the perfect katharsis when having to deal with these things.

The one I have in mind is from years ago, and made me laugh on the bus today when I remembered it. I just need to get it out of my system before moving on with the night.

This is actually a recurrent scenario, and is most frequent in graduate school. I call it the Fremdsprache Ambush. (Fremdsprache being German for “foreign language,” incidentally.)

This is when someone drops a foreign word into a conversation, and attempts to pronounce it which such an exaggeratedly native accent that it becomes incomprenehsible even if you know the language they are trying to use. And that’s just step one. Step two is their feigned look of haughty disdain that you don’t understand what they are saying.

The incident I remembered on the bus was the most flagrant incident I have ever encountered. This person mentioned the surname of Roland Barthes, but pronounced it like a cross between the German pronunciation of “Bach,” and the sound of someone clearing their throat during an advanced case of sinusitis.

Note that this is an especially pure case of the Fremdsprache Ambush, because it’s not a name drop: every graduate student in the humanities has heard of Roland Barthes, so he wasn’t trying to trip me up on Barthes himself.

Oddly, the guy who did this happens to be European (though of course not a native French speaker: no one pulls that kind of crap in their own language). I say “oddly,” because I’m sorry to say that my fellow Americans are often the most egregious bullies when it comes to foreign languages– precisely because we don’t tend to learn them early or well in our country.