Ich Bin Ein Carrot

Will Ferguson

I woke with a vicious cramp in the bottom of my left foot. It felt like my toes were being curled back behind my heel and I jumped out of bed, screaming in agony. In the midst of this one-man pandemonium, my long-suffering wife, still groggy from sleep, called out, "Pull your thumb! Pull your thumb!"

My wife is from southern Japan and has studied Shiatsu finger-pressure massage. So, assuming it was some sort of ancient Japanese technique, I began frantically pulling on my thumb even as I continued to hop around the room in pain.

"Not your thumb," she said. "Your other thumb! Your foot-thumb."

I stopped. "Would you mean my big toe, by any chance?"

My wife is fluent in English, but every now and then she still stumbles.

I know how she feels. Learning a second language can be very tricky. Like many people trying to learn Japanese, I would often confuse the word nin-gen (human) with the word nin-jin (carrot). Unfortunately, at one point I did this during a speech I gave at a conference in Tokyo, which caused a lot of puzzled looks among my Japanese audience when I passionately declared, "I am a carrot! You are a carrot! We are all carrots! We must work together in the spirit of our common carrotness to build a brighter tomorrow!"

It was one of the most embarrassing public moments of my life, and is something my so-called friends never tire of bringing up. "Hey, Will! Remember that time you declared to the world that you were a carrot?"

I later terrified a young Japanese girl by telling her that one of my favourite bedtime snacks was raw humans and dip.

(Even now, a friend who was working in Japan at the same time, closes his letters with, "Remember, we're all just carrots.") To make matters worse, the Japanese have borrowed all kinds of "loan words" from English. Normally, this would be helpful for non-native speakers.

Unfortunately, in Japan, English words are often given an unexpected twist.

Consider the word "snack." First-time visitors to Japan often make the mistake of assuming that a place advertising snacks will be selling, well, snacks. But in Japan, the word does not mean "light repast," but rather "small, overpriced hostess bar where salarymen go to have their egos fondled and their wallets lightened." Many an English speaker has wandered into a snack bar only to stumble out, hours later, dazed and confusedÐand much poorer.

Other English words have been altered just enough to confuse you. For example, in Japan the word koppu refers not to a cup, but to a glass. And a feminist is not someone who believes in equality of opportunity between the sexes. No, in Japan a "feminist" is simply a man who is kind to women. The most antiquated, old-fashioned male can be considered a "feminist" in Japan if he thinks to open doors for ladies or give them a seat on a crowded bus. A feminist in Japan is what we would call a gentleman in the West.

I remember my excitement when, prior to my arrival in Japan, I was informed that I would be staying in "Fujiview Mansion." I expected a life of luxury only to discover that in Japan mansion does not mean "opulent abode," but rather "tiny apartment." Something always gets lost in the translation.

During my stay in the Land of the Rising Sun, I often became frustrated at the long, round-about journey I had to take to get to work. I asked a Japanese colleague of mine--an English teacher, no less--to show me a short cut. "You want a short cut?" he said, looking puzzled. When I persisted, he bustled me into his car and drove me to a barbershop. They sat me down and gave me a dorky crew cut that took me weeks to grow out of. In Japan, it turns out, short cut refers to a close-cropped hairstyle.

Not that linguistic misadventures are limited to Japan. When I was a youth volunteer in rural Quebec, I once blithely described my francophone boss as "le gros fromage." Unfortunately, this is an idiom that doesn't translate very well into French. The man was indignant. He thought I was making some sort of veiled reference to his body odour and he didn't speak to me for days.

My wife finds English phrases such as "he has a green thumb" and "when pigs can fly" equally baffling. She has mastered most English idioms, but she still makes the occasional mix-up. Once, flopping into a chair at the end of a hard day, she sighed "I just need to rewind." Rewind? Are you sure you don't mean unwind?

On another occasion, while talking about a particularly obnoxious friend of ours, she confided in me, "To be honest, I don't like his guts." I had to explain to her that in English the only thing you can do with someone's guts is hate them. You can't dislike them, feel ambivalent toward them, or have mixed feelings about them. You can only hate them.

Which is why I arched an eyebrow when my wife later cuddled up beside me and said, "Honey, I love your guts."

Who knows, maybe she does love my guts. After all, around our house I'm le gros fromage. At least, in the French sense of the word.

En Route
May 1999