Getting Awkward in the Bilingual Boudoir

They say that if you didn’t learn a given language in the cradle, the next best way to learn it is in the sack. If you really want to learn Polish, for example, date a Pole. Be this as it may, the conjugal bed should not be considered a language lab. It is first and foremost a conjugal bed, and there are much more interesting things to do in a conjugal bed than conjugate verbs.

In the bilingual boudoir it’s a good idea to maintain clear boundaries between things linguistic and things romantic. Without clear boundaries, life can get awkward. As an example, let’s say you’re engaged in a little pillow talk with your Spanish sweetheart, and you decide you’d like to compliment her in her own language, in Spanish. You’re thinking something along the lines of, In the light of the moon, my love, your face is angelic. If this sounds a bit cheesy, that’s because it is — in English. The nice thing about using a foreign language to flatter is that you can be a bit cheesy without feeling cheesy: the cheese is being filtered through another language; you don’t really process the cheese as cheese. The words just sound like, well, sounds*. The risk is that maybe you aren’t yet fluent enough to be making blandishments, cheesy or otherwise, in your sweetheart’s language. Mid-blandishment you may realize that you do not know the Spanish word for, say, angelic, and what might have been a melodious prelude to a night of delight instead becomes a linguistic trainwreck: En la luz de la luna, mi amor, tu cara es, umm—wait—I mean—espera—how—I mean—¿cómo se dice—umm—“angelic” en, umm, español?

Here one of two things will occur, neither of them exceptionally romantic:

a) Just as you don’t know the word for angelic in Spanish, your beloved does not recognize the word angelic in English, in which case she will then ask you, in Spanish, what you are trying to say about her face. You don’t know how to say what-you-are-trying-to-say-about-her-face in Spanish, that’s the whole problem, so someone will need to fetch the conjugal language dictionary from the den, which fetching will entail the finding and donning of clothes, the turning on of lights, and other practical endeavors. The result is roughly akin to a bedside iPod shuffling from Sade’s “By Your Side” to Rush’s “YYZ.”

or

b) Your sweetheart does recognize the English word angelic, and she informs you that in Spanish it’s angélica, pronounced “ahn-HAY-lee-ka.” You might now patch up your compliment, paste the mot juste in, try to salvage some semblance of a mood, but hey, why use a word when you can analyze the living hell out of it:

“Ah…angélica. Of course. Angelic, angélica. It’s a cognate.”

“Yes. Sí.”

“I suppose the masculine would be angélico, with an o.”

“Claro.”

“And the g is a soft g, not a strong, hockin’-a-loogie-here g — because it comes in the middle, not at the beginning. Right?”

At this point you’d just as well put on a pot of coffee and break out the whiteboard. Any ambience that may have been established by the light of the moon on an angelic face is surely shot beyond repair. In the future maybe you’ll remember to make sweet-talk with the language you learned back when you were still in the cradle, soiling yourself. Who knows? What sounds cheesy to you may sound exotic to her. In any case it will, presumably, cohere.

*There is a flipside to this phenomenon, a danger: it’s possible to cuss like a roofer in another language without processing the true weight of your cussing until a native knocks you upside the head for impudence.

____________________________________

Charlie Geer is the author of the novel “Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston.” His work has appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Bloomsbury Magazine, and The Southern Review.